Security

Want to keep an eye on things while you’re away? Do you feel an overwhelming need to be clandestine? Surveillance cameras can be hidden in some pretty sneaky places. How sneaky? You won’t believe the all the crazy places where they can stuff a camera … the surveillance world’s shelves are crammed with Big Brother’s [...]

Given the choice, would a common thief break into a store if they knew their deed would be captured on not just one, not just two, not just three, but on seventeen surveillance cameras? Two rather uncommon thieves chose to break into The Spy Supply Store in North Richland Hills, Texas, ignoring the signs that [...]

I’m looking into home surveillance systems again. A recent string of burglaries has made folks nervous around these parts. A pair of local kids was just arrested after allegedly committing dozens of burglaries from cars and garages. These brazen young men hit house after house in a spree that went on for days until watchful [...]

Does a security system make you feel more secure? My mom called a few weeks back, out of the blue. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I just had a new security system installed.” Now I don’t have quite as many neurosis as the lead character in any given Woody Allen movie, [...]

You’d think that road side emergency signs are supposed to be used for emergencies. Especially when they’ve been purchased with funds from Homeland Security. Administrators in an Indiana county apparently thought otherwise. These good folks used $300,000 worth of emergency signs to hawk a spaghetti dinner, a fish fry, and a carnival. What, no pork [...]

Surveillance cameras catch all kinds of people doing all kinds of things … and lots of those things are stupid. Take for instance, the Florida bar cleaning crew caught on camera helping themselves to $4K in booze, and the English laptop thief (a.k.a.: Mr. Stupid). Ah, but those tales are just a start. This week’s [...]

I never thought I’d need a paper shredder … until after I read a considerable amount of information about identity theft. Alas, it took me more than a year to pick up a paper shredder of my own last week. Have you ever considered what might happen to a credit card application you’ve torn [...]

Watch out. Big brother is watching you. Employee monitoring solutions come in all shapes and sizes …

Some crooks are smart. Some are stupid. And some are really really stupid. Submitted for your disapproval, the laptop thief who snatched a notebook computer from the most unlikely (okay, lets just say it… stupid) place you might imagine…

From the surveillance cameras catch the darnedest things department …
WBBH-TV, a NBC affiliate in Fort Myers, Florida reports that a night-time cleaning crew helped themselves to over $4,000 in alcohol at a local pirate-themed sports bar.
According to the report, the management of Harpoon Harry’s in Port Charlotte thought something was up, and had let the [...]

I was flipping through the channels when I tuned into an eye-opening report on identity theft on CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown. Rather than zeroing in on online identity theft, the piece focused on what can (and does) happen in the dirt world. It began with (and was largely inspired by) an ominous commercial for [...]

There’s a right way and a wrong way to ensure electronic document security, as Baghdad-based US military command recently learned. If you want to make sure that specific information in your Acrobat PDF is effectively (and entirely) obscured, you can’t just drop a bunch of black rectangles on top of the text and hope for [...]

What do you do if you think your identity has been stolen?

I’ve been intrigued by hidden surveillance cameras since I first looked at the market last fall. At the time I planned to install a surveillance system here at ranchero indebto by late spring. Now that things have thawed and spring is officially underway, it’s time for me to kick my surveillance system research into high [...]

What’s the difference between Biotech and Biometrics?

Have you ever wanted to know when someone’s headed up your driveway? I know I do. That’s why I’m looking into a driveway alarm system. Whether it’s an invited guest or an unwanted visitor, a driveway alarm system will sound the proverbial bell long before they hit your front door …

The Register picked up on the buzz this weekend to highlight yet another Google-borne malady–the ability to snoop on unprotected surveillance cameras. The article explains that Panasonic and Axis Communications IP cameras are the usual suspects. The real culprits, however, are the system administrators who fail to password protect the devices.

How does the computer know it’s really you? Why when it uses biometric technology, of course! Just put your hands up and look HAL right in the eye. The majority of biometric identification systems use fingerprint or retina scans as authentication. Others may use iris scans, voice patterns, hand geometry, or facial characteristics as the [...]