• U.K. to set up massive national drivers' surveillance scheme

    Hundreds of monitoring stations would be used to track cars every five seconds — with daily itemized accounts of all trips made by Britain’s thirty million drivers; move is part of a national pay-as-you-drive road pricing plan; government says plan will reduce congestion and pollution

  • Lockheed Martin in £100 million U.K. situational awareness contract

    Lockheed Martin will merge several technologies — its own and other companies’ — in a £100 million MoD contract to increase soldiers’ situational awareness

  • Orsus Situator to be deployed at water supplier facilities

    The new approach to critical infrastructure security is “holistic”: Planning, training, positioning information gathering equipment, imposing intelligence on video streams and other information coming in, presenting all information in accessible fashion, offering a menu of responses when an incident occurs; Orsus offers a situation management solution to critical infrastructure operators

  • Anti-NAIS arguments smack of neo-Luddism

    Yes, perhaps NAIS does go too far in requiring people to tag their four of five egg hens in the backyard — but quibbles aside, NAIS is essential: In an industrialized, centralized food production system disease in one place can easily and rapidly spread; we should, therefore, avail ourselves of modern technology to keep track of animals

  • U.S. intensifies anti-al Qaeda UAV campaign inside Pakistan

    Pakistan’s inability — perhaps unwillingness — to confront al-Qaeda terrorists in the country’s Northwest Territories led the U.S. intelligence community to say that al-Qaeda now enjoys in areas of Pakistan the same freedom the organization enjoyed in pre-9/11 Afghanistan; in July 2007 we wrote that the day of U.S. unilateral UAV attacks on terrorists inside Pakistan was near — signaled by the deployment to Iraq of a UAV squadron; that day is here

  • Landscape of business intelligence market changes in six months

    A campaign of acquisitions by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP has changed the look of the business intelligence market in the last six months; The Big Four’s market moves were driven by the growing BI hype, the need for self-preservation, and even some fear

  • Cargill to promote food safety training in China

    Cargill will partner with AQSIQ to provide Chinese government officials, academics, and business leaders with food safety training to expand their knowledge in food safety management

  • Miami police applie for FAA approval for UAV

    Bad guys in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan worry about U.S.-operated UAVs; the Miami Dade police wants to use Honeywell’s “hover and stare” drone to track bad guys in South Florida

  • Company profile: Aralia Systems

    In a recent demonstration, utilizing standard IT servers, the company’s Aster video analytics software performed an automated forensic retrospective search of twenty years’ worth of recorded video data in twenty minutes

  • ICx in contract for specialty radar system for robots

    General Dynamics gives ICx Technologies a follow-on contract for the Mobile Detection Assessment and Response System (MDARS) Intruder Detection Radar Sensor

  • Ambient blue light resets tired workers' body clocks

    Tedious work during the “wrong” hours of the body’s biological clock — think truckers who drive through the night, or security officers monitoring CCTV screens during the graveyard shift — often leads to drowsiness; falling asleep behind the wheel or in front of a security monitoring screen can lead to catastrophes; researchers develop a way to “fool” the brain to think it is morning

  • Six-inch, bat-like UAV to assist in urban combat

    U.S. Army awards $10 million to Wolverines researchers to develop a six inch, bat-like UAV to be used in urban combat; UAV would gather data from sights, sounds, and smells in urban combat zones

  • Space arms race a step closer

    Growing worries about Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities lead Pentagon to field the first system explicitly designed to help counter anti-satellite missiles and other threats

  • Serious RFID vulnerability discovered

    A group of a Dutch university’s digital security researchers discovers a major security flaw in a popular RFID tag; discovery can have serious commercial and national security implications; as important as the discovery itself was how the researchers handled the situation

  • MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

    As part of the Brown government’s new counterterrorism strategy, which places emphasis on thwarting a cyber-attack on the United Kingdom, MI5 seeks total access to commuters’ travel records to help them meet the threat