Tag Archives: police

In theory, facial recognition technology offers an incredible boon to the capture of criminals, but the reality is far different. In its current state without regulation, it’s incredibly flawed and poses a number of threats to privacy. These human rights concerns are what have prevented Microsoft from liaising with law …

Last year, a creepy image began circulating the internet dubbed Momo, making headlines when publications tried to establish a cause-and-effect relationship to the suicide of a 12-year-old girl in Argentina. While these sensationalist articles were short lived, police in Northern Ireland have now issued a warning that Momo is actually …

While it might seem like a simple prank on the surface, the act of swatting wastes the valuable time of the law enforcement and can end in tragedy more often than not. It has always been a punishable crime, however the Seattle Police Department is taking proactive measures to alleviate …

The roll out of body cameras for the Metropolitan Police force is finally getting under way, despite original plans to begin it in March this year. In total 22,000 of the cameras will be attached to officers, especially those also equipped with firearms, with the adoption expected to be complete by …

A new report from the Centre for Public Safety (CPS) has found that only a quarter of all police websites utilise secure connections, meaning much of the information they receive and transmit is sent in clear text. But it turns out that's just the tip of the iceberg, as many …

Forget Amazon deliveries, drug deliveries to jail are one of the hottest uses for drone technology right now and the British police are trying their utmost to stop it. To do so, they've launched “Operation Airborne,” a special task force to tackle drone deliveries into jails around the UK. This …

In a tongue-in-cheek attempt to draw persons of interest to a New Hampshire police department, officers at the U.S. precinct posted on the station's Facebook page that a rare Charizard had appeared at the headquarters. The hope was that slow-thinking Pokémon Go playing criminals would stop by, at which point …

As surveillance increases across the world for civilians, perhaps it's a good thing that those enforcing the laws are also being scrutinised. 3,000 Police in Manchester are set to be fitted with body cameras, though much of when and how they are used, will be left up to the officers …

The law firm, Mossack Fonseca, that was the source of all of the recent information leaked during the Panama Papers reveal, has been raided by Panamanian police. The raid was said to have gone smoothly, “without incident or interference,” though since the original leak, Mossack Fonseca executives have denied any …

Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com are services designed to help you trace your relatives or ancestors.  Customer data is sometimes requested by police to test it against crime scene evidence. Although this is par for the course with technology firms, these are two of only a few companies which store large collections …

In an effort to combat the problem of drones flying into airspace that they shouldn't, Metropolitan police may be set to use a tactic from the Netherlands, where eagles have been trained to target the quad-copters. It's thought that such birds could be used to help protect landmarks or major events …

Despite an UN ruling that declared Assange's confinement to the Ecuadorian embassy in London “arbitrary detention,” the British government has said it still plans to arrest the Swedish national if it can get its hands on him. It rejects the ruling and has said that it changes nothing, according to …

The person allegedly behind the recent hack of several million children's accounts on the VTech Innotab tablet has been arrested. The 21 year old from the UK was said to have exposed information, pictures and audio recordings of as many as 6.4 million children and their parents after cracking the …

A Czech man found guilty of pirating various pieces of software faced upwards of half a million dollars in fines from the court, after Microsoft, 20th Century Fox and Sony Music demanded compensation for his sharing. However since he couldn't pay it, the courts came up with a novel solution: …

Getting automated vehicles to operate safely on the roads is one of the key concerns of those working on the various technologies that they use, but going too fast doesn't seem like one of them. In-fact the opposite is true in some cases, as a Google automated pod-car was recently …

Police in the UK are lobbying the government to give them the powers to look at what they describe as the “where, when and what,” of online activities, essentially letting them view the browsing history of every single internet user in the UK, without being issued a warrant. The reasoning they …

Although most lobby groups seem to have decided against the idea of prosecuting individual downloaders, if for no other reason that the costly lawsuits don't really perturb other pirates, they do still go after uploaders. One man in the UK has found that out all to well, after the 38 …

Mayor of the small town of Bom Jardin in Brazil, Lidian Leite, has gone on the run after police uncovered she had not only siphoned off more than four million dollars from school funds – leaving teachers unpaid for weeks – but had not even been taking part in the governance …

The phrase, “if you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” has been bandied around by terrorism fear mongers, politicians and their supporters for years now. However there are always incidents that prove this way of thinking to be short sighted, like the fact that just last year, …

Last year, JPMorgan Chase, one of the world's largest banking institutions, was made to look foolish when over 83 million email addresses, phone numbers and business addresses of its customers were stolen by hackers. However, while many other large firms experiencing big data breaches have come up empty when it …

£10,500 (or US$16,000) is a lot of money, especially if that much is spent every single day for the last 960 days, to prevent WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy. The money has been spent on police to guard the embassy 24/7, not in case of an attack or any terrorist threat, but incase …

Amazon's headquarters in Japan is currently said to be “cooperating” with a police investigation into child pornography, after two men were arrested late last year for attempting to sell books containing illegal images of children on the retail website. As part of the investigation, Amazon's offices were raided yesterday, though in what …

Britain's favourite hate figure and Sun columnist, Katie Hopkins, is once again under fire for comments made on Twitter. This time around though she's garnered police attention after over 7,000 people signed a petition demanding that the authorities take action for her “racist” and “offensive” tweets. Hopkins is a semi-regular …

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, where we learned that the NSA and GCHQ were spying on just about everyone, some responded with trust, believing that those in charge were doing so to protect our safety. Others doubted that people in those sorts of positions would abuse their …

The City of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a government funded organisation dedicated to clamping down on intellectual property and copyright infringements, most notably online piracy. It's been in operation for a few years now and clearly the government is pleased with its progress, as it's now …

The UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has decided to drop charges made against a man who had his home raided and was subsequently arrested for running an “industrial scale” pirate sports streaming operation. The original arrest was made back in early September, the raid took place in Greater Manchester. …

Chances are if you're over a certain age, the concept of texting the police in the event of an emergency is an odd one, but according to the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), people between the ages of 12 and 15, are more likely to get in touch with …

Some of the most worrying stories when it comes to social networking over the past few years, have been when the police has seen it necessary to target individuals that have said certain things online, be they jokes or opinions, as it's sometimes led to arrests, interrogations and in some …

The man that wrote the biography, The Secret Life of Kim Dotcom, has been receiving threats from the New Zealand authorities demanding that he reveal key sources from his book's research, as they believe the communications referenced in the book's writing have relevance to Dotcom's current lawsuit against the GSCB …

While the Netherlands is known for a lot of things: waterways, windmills, clogs and some sort of plant material, it's not often that it makes a splash in the realm of internet security. However the Dutch government is keen to rectify that, with the potential implementation of a law that …