Posts by gdfsquiq

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

James Bond is the ideas factory here ?

This feels like I am back in the 80s watching christmas movies. An arm is a lot lower tech than the "devouring rocket"

Snooping passwords from literally hot keys, China's AK-47 laser, malware, and more

Reading key presses by heat

The main use case will be cash machines (again). It defeats the "cover your pin" defense.

Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners

So far people are objecting to the police knowing who you are, wait until criminals get hold of this. Any tech like this will leak out over time. Muggings already include a mandatory chip and pin check, add a fingerprint check too and life can become miserable very fast. Easy to change a pin, hard to change biometrics. A marketplace for fingerprint scanners, fingerprints and facial scans is likely to arise from the wide adoption of these technologies.

Pushing the domain of scanning into unregulated space (ie: the wide world) makes it a lot harder to check a scan is legitimate. Once facial scans and fingerprint scanning is in the public space then targeted criminal activity becomes a lot more feasible, especially if the police maintain their current approach to data retention: ie - too long. They are too focussed on legitimate use rather than the ways criminals will abuse their own tools. I am sure there is some irony in there :)

Witness protection just became a whole lot more complicated too.