You can’t put a price on your child’s well-being — but if you could, we’re guessing that it’d fall a little short of the €990 (roughly $1,440) that’s being charged for the Pikavu Express Locator. A child-friendly (read: gaudy) take on the
Keruve GPS tracker being used to keep track of Alzheimer’s patients, the package includes a water- and impact-resistant watch that locks to your kid’s wrist and a 4.2-inch touchscreen base station. Four positioning systems (SBAS-GPS, indoorVision, VisionCellid and T-GSM) are employed to keep track of the little guy, and the watch itself has a battery life of up to 4.5 days. Expensive? Indeed. Worth the investment? Well, we don’t know your kids — but probably not. PR after the break.
Continue reading Pikavu GPS tracker teaches kids to abandon privacy for safety
Pikavu GPS tracker teaches kids to abandon privacy for safety originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Privacy advocates and career criminals alike are in a lather over reports that between September 2008 and October 2009, Sprint Nextel ponied up customer location data to various law enforcement agencies more than 8 million times. Speaking at ISS World 2009 (a conference for law enforcement and telecom industry-types responsible for "lawful interception, electronic investigations and network Intelligence gathering"), Sprint Nextel's very own Paul Taylor, Manager of Electronic Surveillance, lamented on the sheer volume of requests the company's received in the past year for precise GPS data for Sprint customers. How did the company meet such high demand? Apparently, his team built a special "web interface" which "has just really caught on fire with law enforcement." We're glad that Sprint's plans to
streamline the customer service experience don't stop short of those who serve and protect, but as the EFF points out, plenty of nagging questions remain, including: How many individual customers have been affected? Is Sprint demanding search warrants? How secure is this web interface? Check out an excerpt from Taylor's speech after the break.
Continue reading Sprint handed customer GPS data to law enforcement over 8 million times last year
Sprint handed customer GPS data to law enforcement over 8 million times last year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Police men and women of Blighty are about to step into the 21st century, albeit a decade late, with
a new weapon in the fight against
boredom on the beat. The
BBC reports that smartphones will become standard issue throughout the Queen's realm by March 2010, as a result of successful trials carried out in 30 constabularies through this year. Improved "operational efficiency" and reduced bureaucracy are argued as the key benefits, with a solid 30 minutes less time being spent in police stations each day. And we're absolutely positive that extra half hour will go toward increased "visibility in the community" and not checking out friends' Facebook status updates. No,
really!
Read -- BBC report
Read -- Bedfordshire case study
Filed under: Cellphones
BlackBerrys for coppers: UK law enforcement to smarten up in 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We love England, especially the way they use all these adorable names for things: "lorry," for truck, or "loo" for bathroom, or "sin bin" for an
Orwellian program whereby "problem families" (currently numbering 2,000, but someday as many as 20,000) are placed under 24/7 CCTV surveillance in their own homes. Chris Grayling, something called the "Shadow Home Secretary," puts it thusly: "This Government has been in power for more than a decade during which time anti-social behavior, family breakdown and problems like alcohol abuse and truancy have just got worse and worse." Meaning, of course, that cameras must be moved from
the streets of England into people's homes, where they'll be used to make sure that kids go to school, go to bed at a decent hour, and eat proper meals. If only they'd had programs like this when we were kids -- maybe things would have turned out differently.
Filed under: Digital Cameras
England puts CCTVs in the homes of lousy parents originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Here are some of the memorable catchphrases you can expect from the retailer formerly known as
Radio Shack's rebranding, as caught on camera from an anonymous tipster: "The Shack is fluent in mobile. The Shack is a big hug for your mobile life. The Shack is music to your ears. The Shack is your path to wireless wisdom. The Shack helps you get it right. The Shack is like a GPS to your GPS. The Shack knows what you want to hear. The Shack is not camera-shy." The Shack is not at war with Eastasia. The Shack has never been at war with Eastasia.
The Shack: You have questions, we have propaganda originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you're into keeping tabs on irony, check this out.
Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels
Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia's love story aren't very happy -- and rightfully so -- the idea that we "own" the things we buy is pretty fundamental to... ownership. We're not sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the publisher of said novels, MobileReference, has changed its mind about selling content on the
Kindle, and poof! Amazon remotely deleted all previously purchased copies. It's all a bit Orwellian, is it not? Good thing we "permanently borrowed" hard copies of both from our middle school library, huh? Let Hate Week commence.
Update: According to commenters on Amazon, this message was sent out from the company's customer service department:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occurred, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.
While
that publisher's version of the book may have been removed, it appears other versions of the novels are still available.
Update 2: Drew Herdener, Amazon.com's Director of Communications, pinged us directly with the following comment, and now things are starting to make a lot more sense. Seems as if the books were added initially by an outfit that didn't even have the rights!
These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.
Filed under: Handhelds
Amazon remotely deletes Orwell e-books from Kindles, unpersons reportedly unhappy (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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While not busy being the destination of Westerners seeking spiritual growth and the birthplace of the beloved Bollywood song and dance flick, apparently India is home to some 1.2 billion people -- many of whom possess no proof of identification whatsoever. According to
The Times (UK), less than seven per cent of the population are registered for income tax, and the voting lists are terribly inaccurate. Hoping to bring the nation's census data into the 21st century, India has created the Unique Identification Authority. Under the direction of Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of
Infosys, the plan is to outfit every one of the nation's citizens with a
biometric ID card that contains personal data, fingerprint or iris scans, and possibly even criminal records and credit histories. Gathering the data is projected to cost at least $4.9 billion, a figure that's likely to soar once the ball gets rolling. While the Government expects that the first cards will be issued within 18 months, analysts say that project won't likely reach "critical mass" for at least four years.
[Via
Switched]
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
India issuing biometric IDs to all 1.2 billion citizens originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A team from the University of Ghent in Belgium is lacing the site of this year's Rock Werchter festival -- Brussel's equivalent of Woodstock '97 -- with
Bluetooth scanners (36 total, they cover a range of 30 meters each). While you're rocking out to the likes of Bloc Party and Mastodon, the researchers will be tracking your every movement, whether it be to the mosh pit, the beer tent, or the Job Johnny. As you've probably assumed, the researchers are primarily looking for ways that retailers can monitor customer flow (read: sell you more crap) although there are certainly going to be results applicable to the world of law enforcement. Of course, this is Bluetooth: you always have the option of disabling it on your phone, and if you don't they'll only be able to discern your MAC address. Besides, if you're not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to fear from the
surveillance state -- right? And if you are up to no good, well, that's why they invented the
Dazer Lazer.
Filed under: Cellphones
Researchers use Bluetooth to track festival goers, make fun of their 'hippie dancing' originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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