No need for the old sock trick, the Georgia Institute of Technology has a news release (in handy pdf format) that they have just started working on a method to block surveillance cameras.

The current prototype uses visible light and two cameras to find CCDs, but a future commercial system might use invisible infrared lasers and photodetecting
transistors to scan for contraband cameras. Once such a system found a suspicious spot, it would feed information on the reflection’s properties to a computer for a
determination.

“The biggest problem is making sure we don’t get false positives from, say, a large shiny earring,â€? said Summet. “We need to make our system work well enough so that it can find a dot, then test to see if it’s reflective, then see if it’s retroreflective, and then test to see if it’s the right shape.â€?

Once a scanning laser and photodetector located a video camera, the system would flash a thin beam of visible white light directly at the CCD. This beam – possibly a laser in a commercial version – would overwhelm the target camera with light, rendering recorded video unusable. Researchers say that energy levels used to neutralize cameras would be low enough to preclude any health risks to the operator.

Nice that they worry about our health, even though they use rather absolute terms (“any health risks”). They also suggest a few markets, including silver screen digital rights management:

Stephen Fleming, Georgia Tech’s chief commercialization officer, said motion-picture groups are actively looking for technology to foil piracy. Movie distributors might even promote cameraneutralizing systems by refusing to send films to theaters that don’t install anti-piracy systems.

I can see a hot new fashion trend in movie-going circles: retroreflective lens-shaped earrings.

Here’s a sad story:

Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger did not have a valid motorcycle license when he crashed into a woman’s car last week….

Roethlisberger will be issued $388 in fines and fees for riding without a license and not wearing a helmet, police Collision Investigator Dan Connolly said today. Only licensed motorcyclists are allowed to ride bareheaded in Pennsylvania, with certain restrictions.

I wonder if he would play football helmet-less if the team allowed it? Odd that a professional football player of all people would not wear a helmet, but even more odd that he had no license. You might say this is the football uniform of the motorcyclist. It’s called the “Roadcrafter”. No big numbers, no flashy logos, just protection. It comes without a coach, as well, who can tell you how to play smart. And maybe that’s the problem with motorcycle protective rider gear these days. Who really promotes it?

I’ve heard many people question why his contract did not have an exclusion for helmet-less riding, or to exclude motorcycles altogether. Fair points to consider. And here are a couple more risk factors:

1. His Suzuki Hayabusa is an extremely powerful race-bike with a 1300cc engine that can put out nearly 700hp
2. Both drivers had green lights, but the police say the car driver should have yielded way to oncoming traffic

Well, maybe in the future the gear will become cool enough for people to think of it as desireable as well as mandatory for a quick survivability boost. Take a look at the new BMW concept helmet to see what I mean. It’s like security meets the marketing and sci-fi department. Paint a Steeler logo on the side and you’re ready to roll. Or maybe the motorcycle helmets should look exactly like a football helmet…

The New Scientist reports the details of how spooks are adapting to online personalities:

Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

But how will they filter the noise (fake social networking) and plants (digital wall-flowers)?

No surprise, really. Private investigators use information sources readily available to them…heck, profit and even non-profit orgs do investigations with data from sites like MySpace. Public investigators are just following suit. I wouldn’t expect anything different. However, even if you say the public investigators should not be allowed to behave like this or that, the bigger/new question is whether they will exploit the loophole of using private or foreign orgs as a proxy.