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(page 011) Modern technology is not what it seems.
... much more than it seems. Digital wheels that most people do not even know exist are turning in the background. ...

So much is happening that is out of our view and beyond our control. Like a network of mushroom spores sending out subterranean tendrils to silently exchange genetic material, our technological systems are increasingly passing information back and forth without bothering to tell us. ...

You use your smartphone to take a photo, and it auto-uploads it to Facebook. Without your knowledge, metadata such as the type of camera you use and the precise location where you took the photo is also being uploaded. ... photos, many of them conveniently labeled with your real name. ...

(page 016) Every new technology eventually attracts calls to restrict or regulate it, and often to find a way to turn it into a revenue stream and make it taxable. ...

We will always have new innovations, and people will find ways to misuse some, and to combine them in unanticipated ways. ...

"To be one of the good horror movies," (Culture blogger Sarah Dobbs) writes, "A film needs to establish a certain atmosphere: it needs to draw you in and make you care. It needs to give you something to think about when you're trying to drop off to sleep at night; to make you wonder whether that creaking noise down the hallway was just the house settling, or something lurking in the shadows. Creepy stays with you. ...

(page 020) The abundance and variety of Internet pornography illustrates a concept that Cullen Jennings, one of my former students and now a Cisco Fellow, expressed very well. "No matter how liberal or broad-minded you are," .. "I guarantee I can find something on the Internet that will instantly offend you."

(page 021) In studies of mother-daughter dyads, Leslie Seltzer found that hearing Mom's voice raised girls' oxytocin levels, calming them down. Email and SMS messaging did not have the same effect. ...

Although (Joseph) Weizenbaum intended ELIZA ( ) to be a parody with a point (1966), many people enjoyed pouring out their personal problems to the (artificial identity) program. Some even said they preferred it to a human therapist (whose replies its own were modeled after). ...

(page 023) In the mid-1800s, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, studied the work of Charles Babbage, who designed a precursor to modern computers. Because she wrote down the steps to compute the Bernoulli numbers on Babbage's never constructed Analytical Engine, Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer. ... she wrote in 1842 "It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

(page 025) Japanese robotics professor Mashiro Mori coined the term "uncanny valley effect" to explain why we become uneasy when non-human things exhibit human-like behavior.

(page 028) According to a report in Forbes (August 30, 2012), "In the United States, it is estimated that there are 30 million surveillance cameras, which create more than 4 billion hours of footage every week.

(page 035) The company (Photon-X) is also promoting something they call the Spatial Phase Imaging Technique (... SPIT), which purports to read your fingerprints at a distance of up to 10 feet with "longer distances being developed." They also claim they can "passively capture 3D geometry for skin, hair, eyes, teeth, clothing, and anything else that is within the frame, with no special preparation of the subject."

(page 037) (Seungjin "Beist") Lee can activate the camera remotely because a Smart TV is not just a TV. It is really a computer, microphone, and digital video camera wolf hiding in the sheep's clothing of a familiar household appliance (TV).

(page 039) According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, "when Detective Mode was activated (on a leased or rented computer), the software could log key strokes, capture screen shots and take photographs using a computer's web cam. " The software also contained a "kill switch" which could disable the computer if it were stolen, or, more commonly, if the renter fell behind on the payments.

The FTC noted that using "Detective Mode revealed private and confidential details about computer users, such as user names and passwords for email accounts, social media websites, and financial institutions; Social Security numbers; medical records; private emails to doctors; bank and credit card statements; and web cam pictures of children, partially undressed individuals, and intimate activities at home."

(page 041) Many police forces are equipping their members with body-worn cameras to document arrests and other interactions with civilians. A year-long study in Rialto, CA found that the cameras resulted in ?\"more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control conditions." The authors suggest that the behavior of citizens may also have been modified: "Members of the public with whom the officers communicated were also aware of being videotaped and therefore were more likely to be cognizant that they ought to act cooperatively."

(page 044) Dozens of innocent bystanders, some of them children, appear in that (arrest) video, and many are facing the camera. Coupled with massive facial image databanks, and advances in facial recognition software, they could probably be identified. A bizarre new social rule is emerging: if you are really trying to protect your privacy, you should stay away from arrests, car accidents, riots, and landmarks -- anything people are likely to photograph.

(page 045) Internet Rule 34 ("If it exists, there's porn of it") ... There seems to be no limits to human stupidity when it comes to posting inappropriate images online. ..

A 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy asked teens aged 13 to 19 and young people aged 20 to 26 if they had ever posted or sent nude or semi-nude photos of themselves. Overall, 20% of the teens and 33% of the young adults answered in the affirmative, with more females than males admitting to this activity in both age groups.

(page 047) Increasingly, your face is becoming a key that unlocks a vast amount of personal information about you. ... Dating site users ... compared against Facebook profile photos ... used a facial recognition program called PittPatt. ... comparing 500 million pairs of faces ... a computer can do that in a flash ....

(page 050) Deep Web ... (perhaps) 99% of online content is out of reach of the search engine spiders and the casual user. This includes huge databases that are accessed by entering specific queries, proprietary content behind paywalls, and data on corporate and university Intranets.

There is a whole array of deliberately hidden information, much of it illegal, which is where some of the most disturbing Internet images are hidden. In a report on the Deep Web, CNN noted that many of these sites use Tor (The Onion Router) to further obfuscate what they are doing. (many) websites that end in .onion offer "stolen credit cards, illegal pornography, pirated media and more. You can even hire assassins. ... The Silk Road, was shut down by law enforcement on October 2, 2013, new versions are popping up.

(page 052) Mugshots.com .. This website states that its mission is "to inform the public of arrests and hold government accountable," ... On their homepage the company offers to "unpublish" your photo for a fee. .. they also offer to "permanently publish" a particular photo if you really dislike somebody or are proud of your own crime.

(page 055) In 2010, Facebook introduced a new feature to automatically tag people in photos through facial recognition. This "tag suggestion" feature was turned on by default, a situation that did not sit well with data protection authorities, especially in Europe. ... When data protection commissioners in both Ireland and Hamburg objected to automated facial recognition, Facebook removed tag suggestions from customers in those countries (only). ... Facebook .. did say in an SEC filing that "on average, more than 250 million photos per day were uploaded to Facebook in the 3 months ended December 31, 2011. So, Facebook gets to build the world's largest, self-validated photo database on the planet, a project which has mind-boggling value for everyone from marketers to dictators to law enforcement agencies.

(page 056) ... Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Group, in Menlo Park, CA has been hard at work on "DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification." In a 2014 academic paper they reported that their method "reaches an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. LFW, maintained at the University of Massachusetts, is a popular collection of more than 13,000 faces with names attached ... human (facial recognition accuracy is) 97.53%

(page 057) MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle explains why we have such a burning desire to share our lives with the online world, including total strangers, in her book Alone Together. Turkle tells us that interacting with machines "may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. ... writing about robots .. (also) applies to Facebook ..

Blogger Margie Clayman .. suggesting that "perhaps people share pictures of them(selves) with their children because they feel a need to prove that they spend enough time with their children. Perhaps people post pictures of new purchases or great meals because they want to prove that their lives are really good."

(page 058) Privacy experts disparagingly called folks (who willingly provide identification details online) "sheeple." They are the ones who give up their e-mail addresses for a free magazine subscription or answer a detailed online survey, hoping to win a $500 gift card. They make a Faustian bargain with online companies, allowing total access to their lives in exchange for services that appear to be completely free.

(page 060) "people are also connected and motivated by things they dislike.
Alliances are created, conversations are generated, friendships are stressed, stretched, and/or enhanced. ... EnemyGraph runs what we call dissonance queries. ... If you point out something you like ... we point out a difference you have with a friend ...

(page 066) "Nissan is experimenting with an array of technology that detects drunk driving.
A sensor in the transmission shift knob can measure the level of alcohol in a driver's sweat, while the car's navigation system can sound an alarm if it detects erratic driving, such as weaving across lanes."

(page 070) Most rental cars have a hidden tracking device so the company can find their vehicle if some deadbeat leaves it abandoned in a ditch. ... some agencies even have a remote kill switch on their vehicles. ... restricted to a state ... uses his tracking system to set up a virtual perimeter (or 'geofence') that alerts him when the state line is crossed ... remotely disables the vehicle, and usually receives a phone call from the renter. ... (can result in) a dollar a mile surcharge ... speeding surcharges ... where the driver has stopped ... where they buy their gas ... selling data on customer behavior ... (some municipal) drivers are "afraid they'll get into trouble if they take a break to warm up and grab a coffee."

(page 073) "... cameras in the eyes of the mannequins at The Bay ... That's how my sister got busted for shoplifting."

(page 079) .. Burberry's "Customer 360 plan" which will allow the company to record the "buying history, shopping preferences and fashion phobias" of customers "in a digital profile, which can be accessed by sales staff using hand-held tablets."

(page 081) in June, 2013, Marketing firm Renew London planted sensors in trash cans that tracked the unique signature of every smartphone that passed by ... to the 50th of a second ... capturing the phone's MAC (Media Access Control) address, is a fingerprint that is specific to that device. In just one week, they grabbed over 4 million MAC addresses ...

(page 082) Speaking at Black Hat Asia 2014 in Singapore, Glenn Wilkinson of SensePost's U.K. office ... warned the audience that "we are all carrying around the most perfect surveillance device ever invented, completely voluntarily, right in our pockets." [smartphone] To dramatize the vulnerabilities, he deployed "Snoopy", a drone helicopter that can fly around taking pictures and intercepting wireless signals. Using data collected at the conference, he was able to tell an audience member what part of Singapore he lived in and even show him a Google Maps photo of his street.

(page 083) In .. Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move, Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre point out that even after you toss RFID tags in the trash they can still be analysed. .. Albrecht also suggested .. that stores with RFID readers might be able to read the chip in your passport or your enhanced driver's license, .. (and that) shoppers will be tracked "like rats in a maze" and she even suggests that as you approach a store display, the prices might change based on the neighborhood where you reside. ... in the fall of 2012, the Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom, Inc. "started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers' movements by following the WiFi signals from their smartphones." ... United States patent filed in 2006 and assigned to IBM Corporation .. "The RFID tag information collected from the person is correlated with transaction records stored in the transaction database according to known correlation algorithms. Based on the results of the correlation, the exact identity of the person or certain characteristics about the person can be determined. This information is used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.

(page 084) ... RFID chip inside medical products such as silicone breast implants.
The Florida-based company Establishment Laboratories has introduced Motiva Implant Matrix Ergonomix which will allow suitably equipped doctors (or others) to read the name, rank, and serial number of the breast implants, in vivo. ... merchants can sort customers into gender and approximate age group, and track what they have picked up and put down. A Saint Petersburg, Russia company called Synquera even offers facial recognition and mood detection capabilities on its in-store terminals.

(page 085) Techniques with exotic names like predictive analytics, k-means clustering, and cross-platform tracking provide deep insights into our thoughts and behavior. While human relationships may come and go, your online presence is forever.

(page 086) Google's Gmail serves up ads targeted to your interests, which it can determine by having programs scan the content of your email for certain keywords. Google notes that you gave them permission to do this when you signed up for Gmail. But what if a non-Gmail user sends an email to somebody on Gmail? The sender never agreed to those terms of service. A lawsuit against Google ... lawyers asserted that they have the right to scan those emails anyway. ... "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient's ECS provider in the course of delivery."

(page 087) According to its April 13, 2012 Privacy Policy, Amazon collects the following automatically from each web visitor: "The Internet protocol address (IP) used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting, browser plug-in type and versions, operating system, and platform; purchase history, which are sometimes aggregate with similar information from other customers to create features like Top Sellers; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time, cookie number; products you viewed or searched for; and the phone number you used to call our 800 number." Amazon also collects your "length of visits to certain pages" ... Then there is all the information you provided voluntarily. Did you write a review of the product? Put something on a Wish List? Ask to be reminded of a special occasion? It's all in your personal file at Amazon.

(page 089) Tokyo-based KDDI Corporation has .. software .. (that) uses an employee's smartphone to figure out what the person is doing on company time, on a second-by-second basis. ... The system becomes more accurate as time goes on, recognizing each individual's movements.

(page 092) In Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, Medea Benjamin notes that the infrared camera on a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) "can even identify the heat signature of a human body from 10,000 feet in the air." You can pretty well assume that if someone has one of these aircraft in your vicinity and wants to find you, they can do it. ..

A Calgary, Alberta-based energy project called HEAT (Heat Energy Assessment Technologies) has been flying a thermal infrared camera over homes in the area and posting the results online at www.saveheat.co. Anyone can look up their address, or anyone else's home, to see how they stack up in terms of wasting heat. ... a gold mine for contractors .. for police .. for nosey neighbors. ... environmental organizations ... citizen vigilantes ...

(page 100) Information that you provide in one context, even in jest, can be used to form judgements about you in totally different and unanticipated situations .. (to deny school admission, remove offers of free items for webinar attendance, lower your credit score, ...) (Profile services may start a page attached to your name, with erroneous info on it, and the invitation that if you pay to own and update the page, you can correct and extend the content.) .. Zoominfo, LinkedIn, ....

(page 104) Australian researchers have discovered that at least one odor, freshly mown grass, can act directly on the hippocampus and the amygdyla to lower stress levels and improve memory. .. founded a company, Neuro Aroma Laboratories ...

(page 113) Even with the U.S. Genetic Information Privacy Act in force, letting anyone have your DNA linked to your real identity is like handing them the keys to your body, as well as information about all your close relatives. ... Genetic testing companies are subject to court orders to disclose information, hacker attacks, physical break-ins, and the misuse of information by their own employees.

(page 122) Our incomplete understanding of science and technology, coupled with our human desire to "do something", can lead us down some very dangerous pathways. ... an insulin pump .. could be hacked ... cardiac pacemakers ....

(page 124) Devices like these (Mindwave, Myndplay, Necomini Brainwave Controlled cat ears, ..) can certainly provide insights into what is going on inside our heads (an can manipulate those events) ... we generally assume that what got into our minds is the result of real things we have experienced and real thought we have had. .. fear (was generated in test animals for an experience they had NOT had) ... memories (stored in engram-bearing neuron groups/cells) can be tampered with. "Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means."

(page 125) .. "almost 3/4's of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. were victims of faulty eyewitness testimony." ... "narrative networks" ... "Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise." ... studies to understand what makes a story compelling (and might encourage persons to become terrorists).

(page 139) Google's "chat" feature can easily be set up to capture both sides of your conversation and send it to Gmail. Any informal online exchange you had with somebody might be hauled out a few years from now to your detriment. Even taking your chat "off the record" is not enough, warns Google, since "if you're talking to someone who is connected to the network with a desktop chat client, it's possible that his or her software is keeping a separate copy of the chat history."

(page 145) Many people, such as victims of domestic violence, have good and valid reasons to avoid having their address posted online for all to see. ...

(page 147) Calgary now has a system which allows anyone to view anyone's tax assessment, at any time, 24/7, 365 days a year. Though a great improvement from the consumer's point of view, ... Newspaper reporters (publicized houses) with the highest property valuations ... kooks and burglars ... everyone who cared and bothered knew the tax value .. of their ex-wife's home, their boss's mansion, ... Companies who specialized in the business of tax appeals (started to taunt prospects) ... (Now) you need to create an account with a password (for more detail), and, (there are limits to numbers of inquiries per day) ... digitized online court records .. divorce settlement details ... you may get "screened out" (from some offers, applications).

(page 150) One of the creepiest aspects of technology is that you never really know who or what to believe anymore.
Maybe it's a hoax ... Even credible news sources get hacked ... online pranksters ... proliferation of images ...

(page 151) Nowhere is consumer lying more blatant than in polls and on surveys.

(page 154) Even hardware is no longer safe.
At the 2012 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Jonathan Brossard ... hardware back doors ... a diddled BIOS chip, the software that controls how a computer starts up. This was enough to disable security features of Microsoft's latest Windows 7 operating system. In fact, it could have disabled any operating system ... built on top of free software ... done with easy-to-obtain tools and some brainpower. It is also safely beyond the reach of antivirus software: even erasing the hard disk and reloading the operating system won't do a thing to it. ... if someone can obtain physical access to a computer, especially at the manufacturer or distributor level, they can "own" it forever, making it take instructions from them over the Internet at will. ... the Stuxnet worm ... System designers often fail to "expect the unexpected."

(page 156) Even the savviest users can get fooled by a type of online trickery called Dark Patterns.
... a type of user interface that appears to have been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills. (Legitimate online retailers may allow ads for such scam services on their own webpages .. which after-the-fact decrease the trust of the customer in them, increase the likelihood of negative publicity, and discount the possibility of future sales). ... If you don't opt out of certain services .. which may be very difficult to find the option of.

(page 157) ... "free software from a reputable site" .. whose automatic installation often brings ... PUP (potentially unwanted program) along ... (which alters your operating system and requires a paid fix to remove it).

(page 165) Criminals have already figured out that they can 3D print the keys to many cars, homes, and offices. A German lockpicking enthusiast apparently ran off a set of keys to unlock handcuffs from a photograph of the key hanging on a police officer's belt.

(page 170) According to BabyCenter.com, "one in 3 children born in the United States already have an online presence before they are born. That number grows to 92% by the time they are 2. In 2012 the average digital birth of children occurs at approximately 6 months."

(page 174) With a good enough network and smart enough tracking software, (Disneyworld) park vendors, characters, hackers, and identity thieves will literally be able to "see you coming."

(page 175) ... "Black Widow" phone chargers that not only charge your (smart)phone, but also install rogue software to track you, read all your messages, perhaps even plan a good time to rob your house.

(page 186) The military has long been interested in using bugs for surveillance and as weapons.
In a 2009 book called Six-Legged Soldiers: Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffery A. Lockwood examines the insect created 1343 pandemic in Kaffa which helped Janiberg, the last Mogul khan. Napoleon's 1799 and 1812 defeats were caused by plague-bearing fleas. ... The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has experimented with weaponized flying insects.

(page 190) MIT Professor Sherry Turkle ... suggests that we all crave attention, which explains the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, social outlets that provide us with "so many automatic listeners." She claims that our interaction with sociable robots will change us, causing us to rethink the meaning of the words like "caring," "friend," "companionship," and "conversation." Anyone who has ever delivered a longish soliloquy to a dog or cat will probably empathize.

(page 191) ... the regular use of search engines appears to actually "rewire our brains."
Like any change, it undoubtedly has both positive and negative aspects. Researchers at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior ... found that "for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning."

Compared to people reading a book, Internet searchers showed increased activity in the dorosolateral prefrontal cortex area of the brain. ... (other) people who were not experienced with Internet search ... after 5 days of searching for 1 hour per day, "the subjects had already rewired their brains."

(page 192) Programmer John Matherly built a tool called Shodan ... (which) traverses the Internet, looking not only for cameras but also for power plants, industrial sites with weak passwords, and just about anything ... that is available to the public. ... looks in places that Google doesn't go for things that people don't want you to see ... finding systems that monitor industrial processes, and in some cases, allowing a user to control them remotely. ... even for nuclear power plants ...

(page 197)

Dimensions of Creepiness, applied
1. Known vs. Mysterious: The target may be unaware of the existence of the technology involving him/her.
2. Random vs. Certain : The active technology may or may not influence the subjects.
3. High vs. Low Control: The technology user likely has more control over interaction with the target, than they do.
4. High vs. Low Impact : The aggressor and the target each have choices which can control the result.
5. Human vs. Mechanical: Is either playing a stereotypical Role rather than open honesty of self?
6. Good vs. Bad Reputation : Depends upon interpretations of the observation by the tech user.
7. Surprise vs. Predictable: Is the "approach" novel, unknown, or, alerting to the target?

(page 199)

Dimensions, considerations.
1. Known vs. Mysterious : We are told by "authorities" that for "good reasons" we are not informed of the technology.
2. Random vs. Certain : New exposures suggest novelty; routine can become annoying: Associations develop expectations.
3. High vs. Low Control : Technology control is more illusory than real; choice difficulties may encourage denial.
4. Human vs. Mechanical : Controlling access to, judgement of, and misuse of mechanically mined data is poor.
5. Good vs. Bad Reputation: Names given technology that reveal disrespect intentions are likely to be rejected.
6. Surprise vs. Predictable: Education can prepare, except, where secrecy is maintained for manipulation.

(page 204) Just because you are innocent does not mean you are going to appear that way to authorities.
A criminal neighbor does not make you one; a decades ol mistake does not mean you have not learned anything and not changed; an appearance in court does not mean that you were found guilty; giving to a cause does not mean that you are a member.

(page 211)

(Protection) Measures:
• Install Ghostery to track the trackers.
• Block pop-ups, ads, invisible websites .. Adblock Plus, Disconnect ..
• Check who is viewing your social media profile, or, unfriending you.
• Clear your browser history, cache (cookies), defragment files, empty Trash bin.
• Password protect all devices, and, lock when possible and not in use.
• Encrypt laptops and other devices traveling with you, or, store your files externally.
• Never put passwords, credit card details, or any other private data in any e-mails.
• Keep backups of files and software and remove unused programs and files.
• Use a second computer for Internet access with readiness to "Wipe" the storage.
• Use credit cards (more secure) in place of debit cards (less secure).
• Pay with cash for some purchases and assume tracking of loyalty card use.
• Check your online account entries and balances regularly for errors.
• Set up a Google Alert on your name, http://www.google.com/alerts
• Use a non-tracking Search Engine, such as http://www.duckduckgo.com
• Check for unusual device presence in your environment re WiFi and surveillance cameras.
• Use name spelling variations and other postal codes to uncover tracking sources.
• Don't give out your phone number, or, give out the number of someone else, an official, ...
• Add your name to "Do not call" lists.
• Disguise your Caller ID.
• Adjust your age.
• Don't get tattoos.
• Restrict the sharing of your face photos.
• Turn OFF automated connections (Bluetooth, WiFi) to your devices.
• Turn OFF your devices when you particularly don't want to be tracked.
• Use Prepaid Credit Cards and cellphones.
• Segregate your purchases between Personal and Business accounts/cards.
• Set your camera, cellphone, TV, etc to GPS OFF setting.
• Clear the history from GPS devices, phones, watches, etc.
• Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for Internet access.
• Add info after a "+" after your name in e-mails, to track back.
• Use Dash Cameras in cars to protect against fraud accidents.
• Use antitheft software, such as Prey, http://www.preyproject.com/
• E-mail your complaints to a company executive.
• Check SEARCH entries for "scam" + "the subject of your interest".
• Become familiar with at least one hacker site, resource, club, group, ....

http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/27/darpa-gps-replacement/

by Mat Smith | @thatmatsmith | March 27th 2015

When your location marker on Google Maps is pinging all over the place, it's usually due to temperamental GPS signal. DARPA thinks this isn't cutting it anymore, and is developing a "radically" new tech that will offer real-time position tracking -- something that'll work despite blind spots or jamming efforts. DARPA expects this will offer a huge boon to the US Military over, well, everyone else. Beyond war, the new location tech will be good for some much more, and will be far more flexible than GPS. Just like how we now use that once-military network for navigation and location services, new tech is very likely drip down to muggles like us too.

As DARPA puts it in its paper:
"The need to be able to operate effectively in areas where GPS is inaccessible, unreliable or potentially denied by adversaries has created a demand for alternative precision timing and navigation capabilities." It's also working on self-calibrating gyroscopes and accelerometers and clocks that that will be able to track your position without relying on a wireless signal or other external sources: if your smart watch of the future knows where you start, and you move 350 meters north-west, for example, it'll know where you are without having to double-check with the internet, or a satellite.

Perhaps even cooler, researchers are crafting sensors that pick up "signals of opportunity" such as television, radio and apparently even lightning, to assist in location tracking. It's called ASPN (All Source Positioning and Navigation) and will particularly help in dense jungles (concrete or tropical) where GPS signals can often be obfuscated. This would also reduce power consumption for navi devices -- apparently one of DARPA's broad aims for the technology.

EXIF is short for Exchangeable Image File, a format that is a standard for storing interchange information in digital photography image files using JPEG compression. Almost all new digital cameras use the EXIF annotation, storing information on the image such as shutter speed, exposure compensation, F number, what metering system was used, if a flash was used, ISO number, date and time the image was taken, whitebalance, auxiliary lenses that were used and resolution. Some images may even store GPS information so you can easily see where the images were taken!
EXIFdata.com is an online applicatation that lets you take a deeper look at your favorite images!

File size limit: 10 mb
Valid file types: JPG/JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, PSD, BMP, RAW, CR2, CRW, PICT, XMP, DNG