• Using a GPS database in law enforcement

    A GPS database can be used for a variety of different purposes and is an important part of law enforcement software; primarily, database-driven GPS devices are used for navigation and tracking in the civilian world; other data, however, can be included in devices designed for police officers, detectives, parole officers, and 911 operators

  • Iranian man who blinded love rival sentenced to suffer same fate

    Iranian justice is harsh; a man who blinded his lover’s husband by throwing acid in his face was sentenced to be blinded himself by having acid poured into his own eyes; a woman is hanged for allegedly killing her lover’s wife — she has denied the allegations — and the brother of the killed woman carried out the final stage of the execution by kicking away the stool on which Jahed was standing with the noose around her neck

  • U.S. Army envisions an XM-25 smart gunner in every squad from 2014

    U.S. military unveils XM-25 portable airburst artillery piece plans; the XM-25 shoots special, fat 25 mm projectiles which are more or less a cross between ordinary rifle bullets and 40 mm launched grenades; the XM-25 rounds have an added special feature: an extremely accurate time fuse which is set electronically by the gun’s systems at the moment of firing, permitting them to explode in midair at a precise distance from the muzzle

  • Fully robotic, remotely controlled bomb-disposal hand nears

    Engineers have developed a robotic hand that offers remotely controlled, highly dexterous movements that could lead to a breakthrough in areas such as bomb disposal; the robotic hand can be remotely controlled by a glove worn by an operator connected to a computer; this can then communicate via a wireless connection with the hand offering real time comparable movements

  • Ray gun runs at full power for six hours

    Laser weapons are potentially very powerful, but until now they had one major drawback: All the earlier versions of the weapon were essentially giant rocket engines that burned chemical fuels and reached impressive powers; some even shot down test missiles; all of them, however, only ran for seconds at a time, and needed special fuels that would have created nightmares for battlefield logistics; a new Northrop Grumman ray gun has now run at full power for more than six hours

  • Computational forensics determines the rarity of a finger print

    Crime scene forensic analysis has long functioned on the premise that a person’s unique identity is hidden in the tiny loops and swirls of their fingerprints, but teasing that information out of the incomplete prints left at crime scenes is still an inexact science, at best; a University at Buffalo researcher has developed a way computationally to determine the rarity of a particular fingerprint and, thus, how likely it is to belong to a particular crime suspect

  • Cash-sniffing dog comes through at Philadelphia airport

    The U.S. Customs and Border Protection employs a small number of currency-sniffing dogs; Nina, the currency-sniffing canine working at the Philadelphia International Airport, last Friday sniffed out a woman heading to Jamaica with $41,500 in her checked luggage

  • USAF looking to emulate fruit-flies for killer insect swarm drones

    The U.S. Air Force is studying how fruit flies maneuver within a heavily instrumented “simulation tunnel” in order to develop tiny, potentially lethal insect-sized flying robots; tiny military swarm droids could scatter across towns or cities to locate or spy on persons of interest to the U.S. military; they might even be able to land on the back of someone’s neck and blow his head off using some kind of tiny warhead

  • Accused 14-year old Mexico hit boy an American

    The 14-year old hit-man, who confessed to beheading four people on behalf of the Cartel of the South Pacific, a branch of the splintered Beltran Leyva gang, is an American citizen; the boy was born in San Diego but grew up in the city of Cuernavaca; a Mexican federal judge said the boy would be tried as a juvenile, meaning that, if convicted, he cannot be sentenced for more than three years in prison; the U.S. State Department says the United States has not yet decided what do in the matter

  • Feds attribute surging seizure stats to more manpower, technology

    Increased monitoring and interdiction efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border have resulted in what the administration describes as “unprecedented” seizures of illegal drugs, currency, and firearms; CBP intercepted $282 million in illegal currency, a 35 percent increase over the prior two years; authorities seized in excess of 7 million pounds of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs, up 16.5 percent; agents confiscated 6,800 weapons heading for Mexico, a 22 percent increase over the previous two-year period

  • Car immobilizers no longer a problem for car thieves

    For sixteen years, car immobilizers have kept car thieves at bay — but that may now be changing; most cars still use either a 40 or 48-bit key, even though the 128-bit AES — which would take too long to crack for car thieves to bother trying — is now considered by security professionals to be a minimum standard

  • U.S. Air Force creates powerful supercomputer out of PS3s

    The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has connected 1,760 PlayStation 3 systems together to create the fastest interactive computer in the entire Defense Department; the Condor Cluster, as the group of systems is known, is capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (500 TFLOPS)

  • Florida follows Arizona in cracking down on illegal immigrants

    Florida has joined Arizona on the front lines of battling illegal immigration with a new bill released last week that seeks to crack down on the estimated 800,000 undocumented workers in the state; a new bill allows law enforcement officers to check the residency status of anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant and would punish some legal immigrants who are not carrying proper documentation; immigrants who are caught not carrying their documents face a fine of up to $100 and up to twenty days in jail; state Attorney General-elect Pam Bondi said she is still reviewing the details of the bill but expressed support for such a law

  • Mexican army nabs a teen sibling cartel assassination team

    The war among Mexico’s seven drug cartels — and between the cartels and the Mexican government — is intensifying and becoming more gruesome; the preferred form of cruelty by drug cartel assassins is to capture enemies and behead them; decapitations emerged alongside another gruesome tactic — dumping the bodies of rivals in vats of acid; cartel goons have moved away from that method, however; the latest move by the cartels is to employ kids as young as 14-year old as assassins; Mexico police last night has captured one such youngster and his 16-year old sister; the two are implicated in four assassinations

  • Spain busts terrorist passport-stealing ring

    Spanish police have arrested seven men suspected of having links to a Pakistani militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks; the six Pakistanis and one north African are believed to be part of European network based in Barcelona that stole passports to order for the “World Islamic Front” a group connected to al Qaeda; members of the theft ring were tasked with stealing 40 passports a month, and they stole the passports from those whose age and nationality would best enable terrorists to use the falsified documents to travel freely across borders; the group sent the passports to be forged in Thailand from where they were distributed to criminal groups around the world including radical Islamic cells