Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
Futurismic readers in or near Toronto, take note: Sarah is going to be at Speakeasy’s one-night Comics Show at the Gladstone on November 6th.
Here’s a neat but nasty little criminal hack that some smart folks at UC San Diego just released as a proof-of-concept: it’s possible for someone to clone your house keys from a photograph taken up to 200 feet away.
The keys used in the most common residential locks in the United States have a series of 5 or 6 cuts, spaced out at regular intervals. The computer scientists created a program in MatLab that can process photos of keys from nearly any angle and measure the depth of each cut. String together the depth of each cut and you have a key’s bitting code, which together with basic information on the brand and type of key you have, is what you need to make a duplicate key.
Crafty stuff, so much so that they suggest that blurring your key teeth on public photographs is probably as wise as blurring your credit card numbers – though it’s hard to imagine a criminal bothering to do this if they could just get their hands on the right sort of bump key.
But it’s a great example of the sort of minor science fiction plot point that would have sounded ridiculously futuristic just ten years ago… I guess maybe tagging yourself with an RFID chip to open your door has merits after all. [picture by Bohman]
A Romanian computer scientist has come up with a new way to generate secure communications pairing between devices like PDAs: get their owners to take photos of one another, and use the biometrics of their faces to generate the password. [image by James Jordan]
The PDA compares the two photos and generates a security code for making a safe connection. The users can then use this connection to exchange confidential information. The photos are stored as a template that contains the essential features for recognition.
I haven’t read the full paper, but it strikes me that there’s an obvious flaw here – in that anyone stealing one of the two devices can use the pre-generated connection key, meaning it’s still only as secure as whatever password or locking system its owner has installed on it (clever crypto types, please feel free to explain why I’m wrong about that). But even so, an interesting proof-of-concept.
Finding photos in old books and not having any clue as to the locations they depict could become yet 
another mild annoyance thrown into the furnace of perpetual progress.
Comp-sci boffins at Carnegie-Mellon University have developed a system called IM2GPS that can identify the probable geographic location of a given image. From the abstract of the paper:
In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet. We represent the estimated image location as a probability distribution over the Earth’s surface. We quantitatively evaluate our approach in several geolocation tasks and demonstrate encouraging performance (up to 30 times better than chance). We show that geolocation estimates can provide the basis for numerous other image understanding tasks such as population density estimation, land cover estimation or urban/rural classification.
The trend is towards every piece of data being tagged with a location: here we see a way of legacy
information (old photos) being given a “probable geographic location” without having originally being created with a time/GPS location stamp. It would still only be a general guess as to a geographic area, but it is better than nothing.
This is part of a more general trend towards what Bruce Sterling calls Spimes. From the Man himself:
The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.
In the case of IM2GPS it is the data itself that is being recorded and tracked, and potentially the objects the data describes (the objects in the photos) which connects with another loosely related concept: the panopticon. Imagine if you combined IM2GPS technology with facial recognition software and put CCTV archives through this kind of process. You could essentially Spimify the population retrospectively!
Hysterically delusional paranoia aside this is a fascinating development. Read the paper in full (pdf), it’s well worth it.
[story via PhysOrg][images by Reto Stockli and QR-Code Generator]
Artist Hasan Elahi was wrongly arrested by the FBI in 2002. He found if he called and told them before each of his many flights, he wasn’t troubled again. So he decided to beat Big Brother in the most brilliantly counter-intuitive way – by photographing everything about his life.
Elahi uploads hundreds of photos a day and a tracking bracelet on his ankle gives a constant update of his wherabouts. So it seems the way to stop overzealous intelligence agencies falsely accusing you is to give them all the information about everything you do, all of the time.