Vultures are often derided for being ugly and smelly, but these incredibly efficient scavengers help humanity by eating dead animals. And India has recently found just how crucial this role is to our well-being.
They are nature’s most opportunistic scavengers, soaring effortlessly in the air on the lookout for their next meal. Mankind has often treated these birds with disgust, but recently it’s been revealed how much we owe them.
Vultures feed on the carcasses of dead animals, helping lessen the chance of disease outbreaks – a fact that was starkly revealed in India over the last few decades. Widespread use of a drug to treat livestock ended up poisoning the birds. “We think we’ve lost somewhere around 40 million birds in the space of two decades, it’s probably the biggest population crash that has ever happened,” says Jemima Parry-Jones, director of the International Centre for Birds of Prey.
In this film, Parry Jones, Dr Ananya Mukherjee of the Saving Asian Vultures from Extinction (Save), Dr M Sanjayan of The Nature Conservancy and environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev reveal what happened next. Without the vultures, carcasses rotted, creating a breeding ground for diseases and leaving a terrible stench. Feral dogs thrived, bringing with them a rise in rabies; India now has the highest number of rabies cases in the world.
Now livestock are being treated with a drug that doesn’t harm vultures, in the hope that the population will recover so that they can return to their vitally important role. As Parry-Jones says: “People tend to think they’re ugly, dirty and smelly, and they’re far from it and they’re absolutely crucial to the environment. They’re the only dustmen in the world who’ve never gone on strike.”
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Reports that the ultimate crime enforcer may be on our streets soon is largely news hype, says Quentin Cooper. We’re more likely to see Robosnoop, not Robocop.
In the new reboot he’s called the “future of American justice”. In the far superior 1987 original he’s the “future of law enforcement”*. But is Robocop the future of anything?
Both versions of the movie explore how the war against crime might be turned by a man-machine cyborg, programmed to “serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law”. Even in 1987 this idea of robotically-enhanced policing wasn’t new, at least in fiction –I’m particularly fond of the late 1970s US sitcom Holmes & Yoyo, in which a cop with a habit of leaving his partners in hospital pairs up with an android specially programmed for police work. Since then other TV shows have embraced this premise including Future Cop, Mann & Machine, and most recently ongoing Fox series Almost Human, where in the year 2048 every cop is paired with an android.
Given our fondness both for police dramas and for stories where humans work alongside humanoid machines (Data in Star Trek, David in AI, David in Prometheus, plus many others not brought to you by the letter D) it’s easy to see why television and movie executives keep going back to the same premise. And they’re not the only ones.
Will we ever see Robocops roaming our streets? (MGM/Columbia)
Go a-Googling and you’ll find many, many references to “real-life Robocops” and articles about how police forces and defence agencies are already following in his clanking metal footsteps. This is largely journalistic hyperbole. To the best of my knowledge there is no current research on melding man and circuitry to create cyborg cops. And no-one even has plans to put armed robots on the beat, primed to laser anyone caught littering. What is advancing at a breathtaking pace, though, is the increasing use of automation and autonomy in policing and surveillance. Less Robocop, more Robosnoop.
Several robotics companies already offer a range of “law enforcement machines” – non-humanoid devices often deployed for surveillance in dangerous situations such as getting up close with suspected bombs. That’s the robot as merely a tool, but there are plans to give machines a greater role in policing.
In December, California startup Knightscope unveiled the prototype of their K5 Autonomous Data Machine. An R2-D2 lookalike, it’s designed to combine sensory readings – not just sound and vision but touch and smell – with known social and financial data on its surroundings in order to “predict and prevent crime in your community”. Which puts it almost in the “pre-crime” territory of Spielberg’s Minority Report. If nothing else it’s five feet tall, so that should deter some potential wrong-doers.
Getting even closer to Robocop is the work going on at Florida University International, assessing the viability of hooking up disabled police officers (and soldiers) to “telebots”, so they can control them as they go on patrol.
Again, there’s a long way to go before this kind of technology is close to being deployed. But other advances are already on the street. Or – at least – looking down on the street from above. Although unmanned aircraft have been around for almost a century, it’s only since the original Robocop came out that we’ve become very familiar with the use of drones around the world. Some are purely for remote monitoring using cameras and sensors, others are heavily armed hunter-killers. The unsubtly named Reaper (more formally the MQ-9 Reaper from General Atomics) is already a veteran of numerous combat missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.
Drones being deployed in warzones and other hotspots are still a long way from the policing-by-machine depicted in Robocop. But wait. Following considerable pressure from the multi-billion-dollar Unmanned Aerial Systems industry, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) now have aCongressionally-approved mandate to integrate civilian drones into American airspace, with the FAA themselves estimating there could be “30,000 drones operating by 2020”.
While proponents have flagged up many positive uses – from being a cheaper, quieter alternative to police helicopters right down to them helping get packages and pizza delivered – there are numerous concerns about drone proliferation. Not just the obvious ones about privacy and civil rights, but also safety and security – Reapers and other drones already have a reputation for being accident prone, and there’s also the risk of them more deliberately going out of control through hacking.
If plans go ahead, US authorities estimate there could be 30,000 drones like the MQ-9 Reaper patrolling the skies by 2020 (Getty Images)
If there’s one thing science-fiction warns us about, it’s the potential for anything more sophisticated than a calculator to malfunction with homicidal consequences. So be very wary of computers and robots that are meant to protect us, especially if you’ve given them weaponry. From Skynet in Terminator to the Agents in The Matrix to the Cylons of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, it’s always the same: smart becomes sentient, sentient becomes belligerent and the machines’ logical conclusion is to wipe out humanity. Or at least enslave us.
That doesn’t mean having ever more drones in our skies or even other more advanced autonomous system will inevitably lead to the Robocalypse. It means that before it’s too late and our skies are full of flying eyes, we need to make decisions about what we stand to lose as well as gain from all this electronic eternal vigilance.
As the original Robocop says: “Your move, creep”.
*Yes, in the original movie it is the ED-209 robot that is originally described as the “future of law enforcement”. But it was also the film’s tagline, and the trailer ended with “Robocop: the future of law enforcement”.
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This chip, manufactured in the early 2000s by a company called VeriChip, stores personal medical information. (Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty)
With a chip under your skin, you can do everything from unlocking doors to starting motorbikes, says Frank Swain, who has been trying to get his own implant.
A few years ago, I perched on the edge of my bed in a tiny flat, breathing in a cloud of acetone fumes, using a scalpel to pick at the corner of an electronic travel card. More than 10 million Londoners use these Oyster cards to ride the city’s public transport network. I had decided to dissect mine. After letting the card sit in pink nail polish remover for a week, the plastic had softened enough that I could peel apart the layers. Buried inside was a tiny microchip attached to a fine copper wire: the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip.
My goal was to bury the chip under my skin, so that the machine barriers at the entrance to the Underground would fly open with a wave of my hand, as if I was some kind of technological wizard. But although I had the chip and an ex-Royal Marines medic willing to do the surgery, I failed to get my hands on the high-grade silicone I’d need to coat the chip to prevent my body reacting against it. Since then, people have used thetechnique I helped popularise to put liberated Oyster chips in bracelets, rings, magic wands, even fruit, but the prize for first London transport cyborg is still up for grabs.
The person who does will find themselves inducted into the community of “grinders” – hobbyists who modify their own body with technological improvements. Just as you might find petrol heads poring over an engine, or hackers tinkering away at software code, grinders dream up ways to tweak their own bodies. One of the most popular upgrades is to implant a microchip under the skin, usually in the soft webbing between the thumb and forefinger.
Many people now have chips implanted in the fleshy part between thumb and index finger. (Amal Graafstra/Dangerous Things)
Take Amal Graafstra, a self-described “adventure technologist” and founder of biohacking company Dangerous Things in Seattle, Washington. He is a double implantee – he has a microchip in each hand.
In his right hand is a re-writable chip, the same kind used in Oyster travel cards, which can be used to store small amounts of data. By pressing his hand to his phone, information can be downloaded from his body or uploaded into it. The left contains a simple identity number that can be scanned to unlock his front door, log into his computer or even start a motorbike (see video, below).
This month at the Transhuman Visions conference in San Francisco, Graafstra set up an “implantation station” offering attendees the chance to be chipped at $50 a time. Using a large needle designed for microchipping pets, Graafstra injected a glass-coated RFID tag the size of a rice grain into each volunteer. By the end of the day Graafstra had created 15 new cyborgs.
For other people, though, the idea of implanting themselves with microchips may conjure up spectres of surveillance and totalitarian control. “Every Hollywood movie has told them that implants are for tracking people,” says Graafsta. “People don’t get that it's the same exact technology as the card in your wallet. When someone uses a credit card, wireless or not, they are tracked because several other corporations know who they are, when they purchased, how much they spent, and where they spent it.”
Yet if that’s true, what’s the point of implanting it? Graafstra and his fellow cyborgs could just as easily use a chip inside plastic wallet to store data, and a key to open his front door or start a motorbike. “Yes, basically you've taken an RFID access card normally stored in a pants pocket and moved it to a skin pocket,” admits Graafstra. Still, there are some advantages: one benefit is that you’ll never lose the chip, and it makes physical theft impossible – at least unless a thief is prepared for some gruesome surgery.
Graafsta also points out that embedding the chip under the skin reduces the distance that it can be read with a scanner, making it more secure. When it’s in your arm or hand, there’s less chance someone can surreptitiously scan your details, by sweeping a card reader nearby.
Sub-skin capsule with chip that can be read by scanners (Amal Graafstra/Dangerous Things)
Ultimately, implanted microchips offer a way to make your physical body machine-readable. Currently, there is no single standard of communicating with the machines that underpin society – from building access panels to ATMs – but an endless diversity of identification systems: magnetic strips, passwords, PIN numbers, security questions, and dongles. All of these are attempts to bridge the divide between your digital and physical identity, and if you forget or lose them, you are suddenly cut off from your bank account, your gym, your ride home, your proof of ID, and more. An implanted chip, by contrast, could act as our universal identity token for navigating the machine-regulated world.
Yet to work, such a chip would need to be truly universal and account for potential obsolescence. My own flirtation with implanted technology came to an end when I moved away from London, making an Oyster-equipped hand pointless. Even with a return to London on the cards, I’m thinking twice about returning to my project, since Oyster cards are being phased out.
Such a development may actually be a cause for optimism for implant enthusiasts, however, because instead of Oyster cards, London's transport authority is allowing people to ride the subways and buses using bank cards. It marks the beginnings of a slow move toward a world where everything will be accessed from a single RFID microchip. If that day comes, I can’t think of a safer place to keep it than inside my own body.
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Cyber-thieves are increasingly grabbing video of how victims use their computer, to better steal from online bank accounts, a security firm reveals.
The report, from Dell Secureworks, details the activities of the top eight bank crime networks.
Five out of the top eight bank botnets can constantly grab images to build movies of user activity.
They also manipulate data passing between users and banks to grab logins and hide thefts.
Cashing out
"We see continuous evolution of the code and continued sophistication," said Dr Brett Stone-Gross, a senior researcher at Dell who helped write the report.
One trick getting more popular was the use of video capture to help criminals build up a portrait of the way a particular person used their computer, he said.
Thieves slipped past checks that looked for unusual behaviour by snooping on how users started their browser, found a bank website and entered data or by spying on use of screen-based security tools, he said.
The videos could also show thieves how to negotiate through the various steps required to move money around commercial banking networks that aid the biggest thefts, he said.
"They can measure where the mouse is and how long it takes to enter data that goes into the banks' automated transfer systems," he said
Cheap storage and higher-bandwidth net links helped the thieves' attempts to extract image streams, added Dr Stone-Gross.
Some of the networks detailed in the report first emerged in 2006-07 and have survived regular repeated attempts to shut them down.
"Their longevity is a testament to how much money is involved and how lucrative they are," said Dr Stone-Gross. Tens of millions of dollars had been stolen by the gangs behind these networks, he added.
Customers of more than 900 banks and other financial institutions in more than 65 nations had been targeted by the largest banking botnets,said the report.
Primarily the thieves sought credentials for online bank websites, said Dr Stone-Gross, but they were increasingly seeking out people who had access to commercial banking and payroll systems.
People fell victim by either clicking on a booby-trapped email attachment, visiting a site that had been compromised or was displaying adverts seeded with malicious code, he said, adding that each network had managed to ensnare tens of thousands of victims.
An "arms race" was under way as bank security teams sought to thwart thieves and the criminals tried to find ways around novel defences, he said.
"They are always monitoring and seeing what the banks are doing," said Dr Stone-Gross.
When thieves were ready to steal cash, they used other tactics, such as bombarding a bank web server with data, to cover their tracks, he said.
"They create a diversion so the security staff are all worried about the availability of the website and at the same time the victim whose account is being compromised cannot login and check their balance," he said. "They do whatever is necessary to succeed."
