Police in the U.S. are using an iPhone app to take photos of suspects and instantly compares them with a criminal database.

The app employs biometric information such as facial recognition software to help police identify suspects within seconds.
Known as MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System), the system lets police officers take a photo of a suspect, upload it into a secure network where it is then analysed.

Brockton police in Massachusetts is the first police force in the U.S. to use the device – other departments are expected to receive them shortly.
The iPhone being used in Brockton equipped with the facial recognition application but iris and fingerprint identification applications are expected to be added in time.

‘We are not going to just randomly stop people,’ Conlon said. ‘It will be used when someone has done something.’

How many reading believe that this will be mis-used? Don’t forget that ‘Tasers’ are safe to use on suspects according to ‘Law Enforcement’. They don’t account for the idiots wearing a badge, using them on kids, senior citizens, and numerous  reports of people dying at the hands of an taser.

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NASA unveiled a new satellite-based system recently that space agency officials say should reduce the time needed to locate lost boaters and hikers to just seconds.

“Our mission is to take the “search” out of search-and-rescue technology,” said Dave Affens, the search and rescue mission manager at NASA, an agency sometimes criticized for not focusing enough on Earth-bound problems.
“Our ultimate goal here is to save lives,” Affens said.

Designed and developed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, DASS — the Distress Alerting Satellite System — will be able to locate emergency beacons carried by aircraft, boats and hikers almost instantaneously, officials said.

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Customers eager to buy Apple’s new iPhone 4 experienced massive and widespread difficulties when attempting to pre-order the smart phone on Tuesday, the day it went on sale.

Users trying to order the iPhone on Apple’s website received an error message: “Your request couldn’t be processed. We’re sorry, but there was an error processing your request. Please try again later.” Attempts to preorder from AT&T’s website yielded similar error messages.

Calls to AT&T’s customer service line returned a pre-recorded message saying that the company was facing extremely heavy call volumes. A new Apple app, launched Tuesday morning, that allows existing Apple customers to use their iPhone or iPod to pre-order the iPhone 4 was offline by mid-afternoon. Twitter, recovering from its own crashes earlier in the day, lit up with accounts from frustrated iPhone shoppers.

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Stealth Metamaterials A B-2 Spirit bomber flying over Guam. A team of researchers from Purdue University and Norfolk State University in Virginia designed a new metamaterial that absorbs almost all the light that hits it, heralding a new wave of stealth technology. Wikimedia commons/US Air Force

A new blacker-than-black metamaterial absorbs almost all the light that hits it, heralding a new breed of stealth technology.

The material’s internal structure absorbs almost all the electromagnetic radiation in a particular range, New Scientist reports. Ordinary black objects, by contrast, always reflect a bit of light. The material could be applied to all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning it could be used to make materials invisible to radar.

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Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the wireless-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.

Gawker Daily reports:

According to the data we were given by the web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network, we believe 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it’s possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed.

The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers’ email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T’s network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber.

AT&T closed the security hole in recent days, but the victims have been unaware, until now. For a device that has been shipping for barely two months, and in its cellular configuration for barely one, the compromise is a rattling development. The slip up appears to be AT&T’s fault at the moment, and it will complicate the company’s already fraught relationship with Apple.

Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads.

Gawker Daily

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