UK: Targeting Before Offense
Experts from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Prevention Unit are creating psychological profiles of likely offenders to predict patterns of criminal behaviour. Statements from former partners, information from mental health workers and details of past complaints are being combined to identify the men considered most likely to commit serious violent crimes.
Short term: This kind of thing can be overseen and regulated and prevented from turning into a Minority Report type fiasco.
Long term: Every added layer of complexity adds potential for delay, opaqueness, and inertia to corrupt the core process. The additional layers that are guaranteed to be put in place stem from the cyclical changes in political leadership.
More Autonomous UAVs
Engadget –
Creating a robot that can manage to fly around a room on its own without hitting a wall is a mean feat to pull off, but that’s exactly what a team of professors at MIT have managed to do. Their multiple-UAV test platform is capable of complex tasks like following moving ground-based objects with little or no direct control from a human
Currently this kind of tech only allows for one user to control more than one UAV. This control level will likely grow exponentially to a point where the user becomes more of an overseer than a controller.
Mobile Security Flaw
All mobile phones may be open to a simple but devastating attack that enables a third-party to eavesdrop on any phone conversation, receive any and all SMS messages, and download the phone’s address book.
Binary SMS allows remote users (usually network operators) full access. The vulnerability lays in the lack of authentication when using this feature.
Theoretically:
When this kind of knowledge breaks into the open it often sparks a race, in this case between malicious users and the mobile industry, to find and implement a patch.
One seeks to shut out the black industry, the other the white.
Strategyunit.net
Looks like StrategyUnit is coming back online with a new look and the same quality analysis as before.
Ender’s Game
Reread the great book during my week off. Someday I’ll get the time to read all of the many sequels.
Two things would like to see redone given recent developments in warfare :
1) The Manhattan project style approach to finding someone to do the job Ender was chosen for.
2) The fact that the bugs had a centralized command and control. (I would rather see the bugs without a single schwerpunkt able to cause utter and immediate failure.)