The Feds mum on cell phone tracking of Americans

In a letter to two Senators, the Obama administration has refused to publicly disclose the extent of government tracking of American citizens—or even to describe the legal basis on which it is conducting such tracking. "We will get back to you," the letter says.

Will Li-Fi be the new Wi-Fi or another bust?

FLICKERING lights are annoying but they may have an upside. Visible light communication (VLC) uses rapid pulses of light to transmit information wirelessly. Now it may be ready to compete with conventional Wi-Fi.

"At the heart of this technology is a new generation of high-brightness light-emitting diodes," says Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, UK. "Very simply, if the LED is on, you transmit a digital 1, if it's off you transmit a 0," Haas says. "They can be switched on and off very quickly, which gives nice opportunities for transmitting data."

It is possible to encode data in the light by varying the rate at which the LEDs flicker on and off to give different strings of 1s and 0s. The LED intensity is modulated so rapidly that human eyes cannot notice, so the output appears constant.

New Eyeball-Scanning iPhone Used by Cops to ID Suspects and perps

An iPhone-based device will soon let police forces identify within seconds a suspect based on facial features, fingerprints, or now the unique features of the human eye.

The blocky device, dubbed MORIS, attaches to the back of an Apple iPhone. To use the iris scan, a police officer holds the phone's camera about 6 inches from the suspect's face and snaps a close-up of the eye. The software analyzes over 200 unique features and, if the suspect's scan is already in a database, an algorithm matches them, and identifies the suspect.

The database is maintained by the vendor, B12 Technologies, Plymouth, Mass. To use facial recognition, the officer snaps a photo from 2 to 5 feet away. Using software from Animetrics, MORIS analyzes over 100 unique features, and compares them to similar scans in the database. There's also an integrated fingerprint scanner.

And you thought 24 was just a sci-fi dream :)