The Boston Calling Music Festival in May 2013 had a great lineup: Fun., Dirty Projectors, and Of Monsters and Men, to name a few. The event also included ten cameras that recorded over 50 hours of video surveillance footage on the thousands of concert goers at Boston's City Hall Plaza. An investigative series by the Boston area free weekly DigBoston recently unearthed this surveillance, which was done on behalf of the city.
Finland-based company Uniqul is preparing to release a payment system that uses facial recognition software to link a customer with his or her bank account. Instead of swiping a credit card to purchase goods (which is so painfully last-century), now you can just gaze into a camera.
Riots are a tough nut for law enforcement in part because of the sheer number of people involved - it's impossible to stop and arrest every person involved in a skirmish. That's why cops have some pretty high-tech methods for catching suspects, from facial recognition software to debilitating sonic cannons. But none is as bizarre as this new DNA gun from a UK security firm.
It's not enough for the US military to be able to monitor you from afar. The US Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognise you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporise you with a hellfire missile.
Last time we looked at the UK's teeming video surveillance technology sector we were writing about facial recognition software that Scotland Yard was trialling during the recent London riots. But facial recognition is both fraught with privacy concerns and difficult to make reliable. So researches at Kingston University are building a CCTV system that uses AI to recognise specific types of criminal behaviours--like someone brandishing a firearm--and use that to alert authorities and build a video profile of the way a crime unfolded.
