Courtroom: Jury Selection in USA

Psychology Today has an article on jury selection and who both sides use consultants to help decide who to excuse.

(Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily, by way of GeekPress)

Biometrics: Biometric passport with RFID is hacked remotely

A regular reader pointed me to the Daily Mail (a UK tabloid) article describing how they had a security expert "hack" one of the new biometric passports with an electronic Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) microchip to extract all of the digital data. They arranged to simulate intercepting the passport being mailed from the government to the citizen. Because the passport had this RFID chip, it could be remotely interrogated, they were able to do this without even opening the postal envelope containing the passport. Of course, the data was encrypted, so then the security expert had to break that (and he succeeded). The only apriori information he needed was the citizen's date of birth, which he obtained through searching the Internet. The entire process took four days, but in the end, he was able to recover all of the passport's digital data, which even included the citizen's digital picture.

It seems pretty obvious that they either didn't bother to do a proper independent security analysis before they developed and deployed the system or the managers discounted the results of any one that was done. Because of that lapse, now it seems that they need to rethink their encryption scheme at the very least. When they do, it might make sense to add some type of limit to the number of times a passport can be interrogated with an incorrect password, either in a certain time window or an accumulated number over the life cycle of the passport.

Computer Audio & Video: Windows Vista changes how audio and video are handled

Howstuffworks has the best summary of Windows Vista as related to audio and video rendering that I've read thus far. The highlights are:

• The graphics and audio drivers will run in user mode instead of kernal mode so that errors with either will not cause 'Blue Screens of Death.'
• Vista supports DirectX 9 but is really built around DirectX 10.
• DirectX previously did not require graphics hardware to support many DirectX capabilities; now, however, only three features are optional.
• Finally, the sound volume coming from each application can be separately controlled.

There is even more interesting information about Vista in the article for those who are interested.

Computer Forensics: The Real World of Computer Forensics

Here is the link to an account by Keith Jones of three criminal and civil cases involving computer forensics. Mr. Jones is a computer forensics expert witness (with whom I have no relationship).

(Source: Information Week's Optimize Magazine)

Forensic Photography: Retrieving color of ancient textiles

Eurekalert summarizes work by Chirstel Baldia and Kathryn Jakes (both at Ohio State University) that used forensic photography techniques to determine the original color of textiles recovered from Ohio's Seip burial mounds which are about 1600 years old.

How many megapixels do our eyes have?

BBC Focus Magazine has a regular Q&A section, which, unfortunately, they do not publish on the Internet. The March 2007 edition has a reader's question - "How many megapixels do our eyes have?"

Their answer approaches the question from multiple angles. I won't quote the entire response here, but some of the interesting "factoids" are:

• comparing the number of sensing elements - the eye has 5 million cones (the color receptors) and 100 million rods (the monochrome contrast receptors) which give a human the equivalent of two 105MP (MegaPixel) video cameras (because we have two eyes).
• comparing spatial resolution over the eye's field of view - we have the equivalent of 576MP.

(Source: BBC Focus Magazine)

Hey, someone changed my system beep!

I could have just as easily titled this post "Much Ado about Nothing", but it wouldn't have been as informative. PC Magazine does a good job dissecting the various weaknesses of the "flaw" in Microsoft Vista security which would allow an audio-based attack.

Ultrathin folded telephoto lens

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a folded lens by machining reflective surfaces into a optical crystal. this technology has the potential to shrink lens assemblies, which would be beneficial to lots of devices, such as cameras and night vision gear. However, this is still early stage research and hurdles remain - such as its inherent narrow depth of field. That being said, there are ways around that problem that might work for selected applications where thickness is more important than length (where I imagine that additional lenses with different focal lengths could be positioned on a rotating disk or similar arrangement to be employed as needs changed) or post-processing power consumption.

The work has been published in Applied Optics (February 1st, 2007)

(Hat tip and image source: PhysOrg)

Security holograms relatively easy to copy

The Daily Irrelevant has a post on the rise in counterfeiting of security holograms, which are found on everything from credit cards to whiskey bottles these days. Reportedly, the cost of the equipment to make a copy is in the range of only $2,500 USD, which, given the illegal profits to be made, is insignificant. Interesting reading.

Facial composite study results

According to a recently released study, facial composite systems used by police do not produce very good likenesses - not even good enough for people to correctly identify celebrities. The systems they studied were ones the police use to "build" (or composite) a face by having the eye witness select from a large collection of eyes, ears, noses, etc. EurekAlert reports that

According to authors, these poor results are not deficiencies in the software per se but instead a mismatch between how we remember faces and how composites are produced. "Numerous lines of evidence converge on the view that faces are generally processed, stored and retrieved at a holistic level rather than at the level of individual facial features." Ultimately the psychological process of remembering faces may include more complex representations such as multidimensional similarity to other faces or relative sizes and distances of features and so on that are not readily retrieved by memory nor utilized by facial composite software.

The authors go on to recommend whole face, or "looks like", methods instead of the existing "parts" based methods (e.g. eyes and ears) as a way to get better results. "Looks like" systems have produced good results in previous studies, as I recall, so maybe they are on to something.

The study was published in Current Directions in Psychological Science (February 2007 issue).

Noise map of Great Britain

The Telegraph (a center-right newspaper in the UK) has published a noise map of Great Britain that was compiled from traffic noise levels by Deepak Prasher, professor of audiology at University College London. I can not recall ever seeing such a map, but it is fascinating to not only note the absolute levels on particular places (especially the sites where you need ear plugs to get a good night's sleep) but also to compare different areas.

Training your mind and dyslexia

One of my favorite radio programs is the excellent Science Friday, which is broadcast on NPR (National Public Radio) in the USA. A recent edition talked about the plasticity of the human brain and included some interesting statements about research into treatments for dyslexia. I had not heard of the studies linking dyslexia to hearing difficulties - not vision processing difficulties as one might assume. You can find an MP3 download at the link above.


Clarification: I should have said "linking dyslexia to auditory processing difficulties" or something similar, not "hearing difficulties", which was too ambiguous. I should have also said "not only vision processing difficulties", as some theories of the roots of dyslexia still focus on vision processing (for instance, the so called magnocellular theory).

The root causes of dyslexia are not fully understood and serious research is ongoing. I suggest the following Nature article (Franck Ramus, 2001) for an overview.

I would also like to say "thank you" to the readers who pointed out my misstatement and the ensuing discussions in the comments. If you are just now coming across this post, I recommend reading the comments to catch up.

Military gunshot detectors

Strategy Page has a brief overview of the current state of gunshot detectors used by the US military. It talks about both all-acoustic and acoustic-infrared systems. Enjoy.

Image blurring of sensitive information

First, the attention grabbing bit - using traditional digital image blurring techniques may not be effective in all cases. The title of the article from which this post derives is "Why blurring sensitive information is a bad idea".

Why? With statistical techniques, it may be possible to extract some of the original image details were. Now for the complicating details. First, it wasn't shown with a real case - it was simulated. Second, although one could probably deduce this from the article, traditional digital blurring is in all likelihood very effective against information with high spatial frequencies (i.e. images with lots of changes, like pictures of faces not taken at a close distance). The problem MIGHT occur with blurring data with mostly low frequency content, like large sized numbers, such as on an image of the check used in the article.

Nonetheless, it is a very interesting piece of work. I look forward to someone showing this work against "real data".

Hubble is hobbled

This is widely reported, but I still think it is important enough not to pass without mentioning - the Hubble Space Telescope has been hit by another fault, this time from an electricalshort. To summarize the the most probable outcome, it will probably lose two of its three"camera channels", leaving it with only the Solar Blind Channel (which is sensitive to ultravioletwavelengths). To read more, here is the New Scientist Space article.