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A man stands (L) next to a tiny black and white panel to have his picture taken and displayed including the animated image of a girl through an iPhone application at the famous spot of Kanichi and Omiya in Atami, southwest of Tokyo and the resulting image is showed (R) on the screen of an iPhone.

Japan resort draws men with virtual girlfriends
August 30, 2010 by Harumi Ozawa of PHYSORG

Long a favourite of lovers and honeymooners, a Japanese beach town with fading sparkle has found a new tourism niche in the wired age by drawing young men and their virtual girlfriends. 

One recent sweltering summer's day, a tour bus from Tokyo pulled up at a sun-kissed beach at Atami, a Pacific coast resort southwest of the metropolis, and disgorged more than a dozen excited, iPhone-clutching young men.

The determined youngsters, paying scant attention to the bikini-clad girls frolicking on the sand, instead headed straight for a bronze statue that depicts Kanichi and Omiya, a couple from an old love story set in Atami.

The focus of the men's attention -- and of their smartphone cameras -- was a tiny black and white square, a two-dimensional barcode that, thanks to "augmented reality" (AR) software, brought to life the object of their desire.

"Look, it's like I'm in a snapshot with her," said Shu Watanabe, 23, as he showed off his iPhone display, featuring himself next to the image of a doe-eyed cartoon character named Rinko, a smiling high school girl.

Rinko may only be digital, but try telling that to Watanabe or the legions of other fans of "Love Plus", a dating sim or simulation game that is played on handheld Nintendo DS consoles and also boasts AR applications for iPhones.

Its creators, Konami Digital Entertainment, have long thrilled young men obsessed with high-tech, manga and anime, known as "otaku", by letting them chase virtual girls in the alternative universe of their digital dreams.

The hit videogame made headlines when a 27-year-old Japanese man known only as "Sal 9000" staged a tuxedo wedding late last year, which was watched by thousands online, with his favourite cartoon girl, Nene Anegasaki.

But in the latest edition, game makers have gone a step further and teamed up with the very real city of Atami, an onsen or hot spring town 100 kilometres (60 miles) southwest of the Japanese capital.

They have selected 13 romantic locations which can be overlaid with images of Rinko or her teenage friends Manaka and Nene, who have all swapped their usual sailor-style school uniforms for casual summer wear. 


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Local souvenir shops in the resort town have caught on and capitalised on the love-struck new clientele, selling Love Plus-themed souvenirs, from good-luck charms to steamed buns and fish sausages.

The local Ohnoya hotel even offers traditional rooms to the unusual couples, which feature two sets of futon beds and another barcode panel that allows the men to visualise their girlfriends in a flattering summer kimono.

Love Plus, released only on the Japanese market, has become the country's most popular dating game since its release last September, selling nearly 430,000 copies, according to research firm Enterbrain.

The secret is that the dating game goes a step beyond the genre's usual boy-meets-girl script and asks players to build long-term relationships.

"In conventional love games, you went up stages to make a virtual girl fall in love with you, so that she would accept you as a boyfriend or express her love for you," said Konami spokesman Kunio Ishihara.

"But players of Love Plus are in a scenario where they are a high school boy who is already dating one of the virtual girls. The goal is to see how good you can be to her and to build a relationship."


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STOP!!!! 

This will without a doubt be the nail in the coffin for you (me) and the bullshit internet. This is what that movie Avatar was truly preparing people for: Being to able to be identified by your environment and vice versa aka "smartdust", aka ubiquitous computing. But sure enough things will be so fucking complicated in a few months, that you will beg to have your life simplified and as swiftly as possible so to minimize any trivial discomfort you might otherwise incur. Be well my hopelessly enslaved homosapien sapiens brothers and sisters. Be well. Die well. Waste well. Fall down a well. It cant be worse then doing fuck all.
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From Crunch Gear

Don’t you feel secure? Don’t you love the amazing level of security provided by all that sophisticated machinery at the airport, watched over as it is, admittedly, by sleepy TSA agents on power trips? But don’t you wish inwardly that they wouldn’t stop at looking through your bag and removing your clothes with radiation, and just get straight to x-raying you? Well good news, friends. A system is on its way that will add your unique skeletal structure to a database and will (if it works) be able to identify you at a distance.

Trying to get terrorists to look into retina scanners is hard! And facial recognition software can be fooled with trivial alterations like shaving or smiling. Fingerprints — come on! I could remove mine right now! “But they can’t disguise their bones,” says Phani Kidambi, one of the researchers in charge of a project intended to ID people from 150 feet away based on bone structure. The project is at Wright State Research Institute.

Okay, seriously. Not only is this a creepy idea, but it appears they haven’t actually thought it through. First, they have to get detailed bone structure scans of every known criminal and terrorist (their idea, not mine). Then they have to prove that they can detect that bone structure through clothing and flesh — and then they have to design something that can do it from a distance.

Are you kidding me? This system will be as easy to fool as the next one. Unless they’re developing some kind of high-powered X-ray they’re planning on constantly blasting airport crowds with, they’ll have to rely on extended spectrum imagery. And that can be fooled by a HUGE number of factors. They talk about the potential of seeing someone “where the face doesn’t match, but the bones match…That definitely is a person of extreme interest because it appears he’s tried to change his face.” Great, so this technology also reliably detects faces in high fidelity as well! And I’m sure there’s no chance of a false positive!

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FROM FORBES
Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans


As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins tosimmer, it’s worth noting thatcourthouses andairport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.



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From the TELEGRAPH 
Computers that read minds are being developed by Intel

New technology could allow people to dictate letters and search the internet simply by thinking, according to researchers at Intel who are behind the project.

 By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Published: 7:50AM BST 22 Aug 2010

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Scientists are developing computers that can read minds Photo: ALAMYUnlike current brain-controlled computers, which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen, the new technology will be capable of directly interpreting words as they are thought.

Intel's scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking.

Preliminary tests of the system have shown that the computer can work out words by looking at similar brain patterns and looking for key differences that suggest what the word might be.

Dean Pomerleau, a senior researcher at Intel Laboratories, said that currently, the devices required to get sufficient detail of brain activity were bulky, expensive magnetic resonance scanners, like those used in hospitals.

But he said work was under way to produce smaller pieces of equipment that can be worn as headsets and that can produce the same level of detail.

He said: "The computer uses a form of 20 questions to narrow down what the word is.

"So a noun with a physical property such as spade, which you dig with, produces activity in the motor cortex of the brain, as this is the area that controls physical movements.

"A food related word like apple, however, produces activity in those parts of the brain related to hunger. So the computer can infer attributes to each word being thought about and this lets the computer zero down on what the word is pretty quickly.

"We are currently mapping out the activity that an average brain produces when thinking about different words. It means you'll be able to write letters, open emails or do Google searches just by thinking".

Intel already have a working prototype that can detect words such as "screwdriver", "house" and "barn", by measuring around 20,000 points in the brain.

But as brain scanning technology becomes more sophisticated the computer's ability to distinguish thoughts will improve.



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From the Telegraph Facial recognition software to go public
Computer software which can identify unnamed faces and then collate photographs of that person is to be released to the public amid concern among privacy campaigners. 

By Andy Bloxham
Published: 3:55PM BST 22 Aug 2010

The programme works by scanning the relative positions of the eyes, nose and mouth and claims to be accurate in nine out of 10 cases.

It can then search the internet for further images of the same individual and, in tests, unearthed untagged photos which had not previously been seen by some of the people in them.

The managers of Face.com, which created the software, told the Sunday Times that 5,000 developers were already using it.

Gil Hirsch, its chief executive officer, said: "You can basically search for people in any photo. You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube."

Such software has previously been the domain of Governmental organisations such as the UK Border Agency or inside social networking platforms.

Proponents of the technology said it could enable families to unlock their history or trace those lost in humanitarian disasters such as the floods in Pakistan.

The Information Commissioner's Office said there were no legal restrictions on the use of facial recognition software.

However, Simon Davies, of Privacy International, said: "The regulators have been hugely behind the curve on protecting people's privacy on the internet. We need to push for much tighter international rules."



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From Engadget 
Just about every mobile operating system manufacturer can remotely delete apps from the smartphones they help provide, but if a recent patent application is any indication, Apple's looking to lock down the whole enchilada on future devices. The basic concept is as simple as the diagram above -- certain activities trigger the phone to think it's in the wrong hands -- but the particular activities and particular remedies Apple suggests extend to audiovisual spying (to detect if a user has a different face or voice than the owner), and complete remote shutdown. While the patent mostly sounds targeted at opt-in security software and would simply send you an alertor perform a remote wipe if your phone were stolen or hacked, jailbreaking and unlocking are also explicitly mentioned as the marks of an unauthorized user, and one line mentions that cellular carrierscould shut down or cripple a device when such a user is detected. Sounds great for securing phones at retail, sure, but personally we'd rather devices don't determine our authority by monitoring our heartbeat (seriously, that's an option) and we're plenty happy with the existing Find My iPhone app.


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The following story may seems but whats it really mean? It means they no longer need mercenaries because the automated mechanisms to coerce the population are approaching maturation. The more cameras, microchips, scanners and fuck you robots the less hominass required to pimp the streets.
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100 police stations facing the axe

Up to 100 police stations face closure under cost-cutting plans, and scores more will have their opening hours further reduced,

By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent
Published: 11:28PM BST 22 Aug 2010

All forces across the country are carrying out a review of their building "estates" ahead of funding being cut by up to 25 per cent.

Fears about the impact of the cuts have focused on a decrease in the number of officers, but police chiefs say that buildings and stations will be the first to go. An investigation of all constabularies has uncovered that one in 15 stations has been earmarked to be shut potentially, or replaced by counters and kiosks in supermarkets, cafés, libraries and schools.
Senior police sources have said that the closure of stations is "inevitable" in the current economic climate, but admitted that it was an "emotive and difficult" issue to square with the public.

The disclosures will reignite debates about police presence in communities, especially amid fears that front-line numbers will decrease and neighbourhood police will be axed. The Daily Telegraph disclosed on Saturday that 90 per cent of police stations are not open 24 hours – and more than twice as many Tesco stores are now operating round-the-clock than stations.

More than 400 have closed since 2000, and the total number has dropped to its lowest level of 1,556 in England and Wales.

Tim Brain, who retired earlier this year as chief constable of Gloucestershire, said: "Closing police stations is always a difficult issue and I am sure chief constables, together with police authorities will approach it with careful consideration. However, with 25 per cent cuts in prospect forces will have to consider all their options and station closures are bound to be among them."

The Metropolitan Police, whose authority oversees an estate of 900 buildings, is seeking to dispose of property to the value of £20 million.

It has identified 10 police stations for disposal in the next financial year, although many of those had already been shut to the public and replaced with front counters in shops and offices.

In a Freedom of Information request, Greater Manchester Police said that three stations were to close. In Surrey, where police have been consulting with the public about shutting 22 "underused" stations, officers said the public had welcomed options such as moving police counters into shopping and leisure centres, cafés and libraries.

The potential closures, combined with cuts in senior officers, are an attempt to put an extra 200 officers on the beat despite the looming cuts.

A leaked document signalled that up to 25 older police stations have been earmarked for closure in Gwent as part of ongoing "efficiency" savings.



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