Personal Black Box?
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam. Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri? Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
Cell networks make sense due to first hop bandwidth efficiency. However they will never provide this service in the way you might want, ie: both fully encrypted, and accessible / deletable anywhere anytime, only by "you" anonymously via only key material if desired such as with prepaids. They are stupid legacy, and deep in the surveillance and court / legal games, and just won't do it in a way that benefits only you by your design. Any current android should be able to stream / upload to any shell or other storage service, even some p2p. Kickstarter would probably be a win too. Better to just move away from the thugs beforehand than try to mop up after your ass gets broken. search also: wearable lifecam
On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 06:15:14AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
I think ultimately the hope for "perfect individual security" systems is doomed to failure. We will never live in isolated boxen. So, we need a network of actual, physical trust - in the case of this idea Jim, I'd say to simply stream (encrypted) your log (audio, GPS, video, whatever you choose), to a trusted family member or friend. That friend has contractual bind to you to offer up, or delete, or etc, your data stream, per your will and only your will. For that, you need someone you can trust, who is also willing to support you personally in this way, and perhaps vice versa (although each person must choose who they trust, of course). Could we ever get around the fundamental "network requirement" for meatspace trust network, for properly effective (personally protective) systems?
Jm Bell:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS...
That explains alot... Just sayin' ... the popofeds are really keystone kops, but everyone attributes them superhuman capabilities, b/c TV, the most insidious indoctrination device ever created. How many times has the FBI been reamed in the last decade alone for shoddy lab work and conditions? They have to literally create terrorist orgs using people who can only be described as mentally insufficient to do that. http://tremblethedevil.com/?p=732 Rr and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam. Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri? Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 06:15:14 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary.
Has Jim Bell's account been hacked and hijacked?
the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data.
Is it aprils fools day or something? Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something?
On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote: > Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something? Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk. I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.) But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that. I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define. The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor) That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type, but it was not a part of any "surveillance state". Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues. But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense. Jim Bell
On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 19:40:25 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something?
Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk. I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.) But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that. I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define.
So I have to define "surveillance state" because nobody here is aware of the existence of the surveillance state, especially because this is a (the) crypto anarchist mailing list. Are you trying to troll me Jim? =)
The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor) That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type, but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".
but the police and the phone companies and the 'smart' phone manufacturers are - parts of the surveillance state.
Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues. But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.
"a quick 911-call if necessary." <--- isn't that the magical number to call the pigs? And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies.
Jim Bell
On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 08:32:25PM -0300, Juan wrote:
On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 19:40:25 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something?
Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk. I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.) But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that. I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define.
So I have to define "surveillance state" because nobody here is aware of the existence of the surveillance state, especially because this is a (the) crypto anarchist mailing list.
Are you trying to troll me Jim? =)
The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor) That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type, but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".
but the police and the phone companies and the 'smart' phone manufacturers are - parts of the surveillance state.
It's likely a fair assertion "all current mobile phone hardware must be considered compromised by the deep state". An initial (though likely as yet, requiring quite a few more steps) step in the right direction may be found here: https://puri.sm/posts/2018-09-librem5-hardware-roadmap-announcement/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-17/ (Still on old Galaxy S2 here, waiting for these guys ... supporting those who make such steps is #1 goal!)
Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues. But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.
"a quick 911-call if necessary." <--- isn't that the magical number to call the pigs?
And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies.
Jim Bell
It's hard to imagine there are NO circumstances where "call the cops" is an appropriate call to make. Here's a point: problems on the one hand, do not invalidate all possible solutions which happen to overlap on the other hand - that's an absolutist position which is likely to be a bucket of cold water on potentially useful discussion. On the third hand, many have used the "dichotomy dialectic" to frequent, and useful, effect - and Jim seems like a pretty solid guy who can stand his ground, so the black and white dichotomy is probably usually useful when jousting with him =D Good luck all,
On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 10:34:26 +1000 Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:
It's hard to imagine there are NO circumstances where "call the cops" is an appropriate call to make.
Oh of course it can be appropriate. For instance call the pigs, get them to go to place X and blow place X up.
On Monday, October 1, 2018, 4:30:38 PM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote: On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 19:40:25 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote:
Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk. I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.) But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that. I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define.
So I have to define "surveillance state" because nobody here is aware of the existence of the surveillance state, especially because this is a (the) crypto anarchist mailing list. No. The "surveillance state" arguably exists, although what actually makes it up is debateable.
The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor) That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type, but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".
> but the police and the phone companies and the 'smart' phone manufacturers are - parts of the surveillance state. Again, you need to define what you believe. None of this is black-and-white.
Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues. But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.
> "a quick 911-call if necessary." <--- isn't that the magical number to call the pigs? I think you are merely playing with the argument. I didn't exclude the possibility that this couldn't also (or alternately) amount to some sort of privatized system. "the phone companies" are the people who purport to, and do, accept cell-phone data in people's neighborhoods. We cannot instantly change that fact. (some communities have WiFi clouds; even better.) Who else would this system transmit data to, with current technology and installations? Don't insert your head up your ass. I DIDN'T say that this "realtime surveillance data" would be completely UNENCRYPTED. Anyone who pays attention to the CP list should recognize that there are some rather simple protections which can be inserted (given the specific situation) to deter or prevent misuse, or by delay make such immediate use impossible, yet allow the intended uses to be implemented. A weak form of encryption that could be cracked within minutes (not milliseconds) would prohibit real-time misuse. Or perhaps a trusted third-party could issue "keys" which were automatically unlocked a specific time period later. (seconds, minutes, whatever) Or If a trigger (an attack, for instance) occurs, the user's phone could transmit the current unlock-key to those holding the data, to ensure that it is available. Also, the technology known as "EPIRB" or "ELT" could be used, with additional hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_radiobeacon_stat... Don't make discussions like this a pain. Don't automatically accuse people of doing something, merely because they haven't provided all the details.
And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies. See why you're a jerk? You COULD have said, "wouldn't the phone company be able to use all this information for malicious purposes, or give it to the government so it could misuse it? And I would have said, "Are you REALLY suggesting that these OBVIOUS countermeasures WOULDN'T be added in any real system?!?!" And then the rest of us could have had a good laugh, realizing that yet again, Juan was trolling yet again. Jim Bell
On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 23:28:41 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies.
See why you're a jerk? You COULD have said, "wouldn't the phone company be able to use all this information for malicious purposes, or give it to the government so it could misuse it? And I would have said, "Are you REALLY suggesting that these OBVIOUS countermeasures WOULDN'T be added in any real system?!?!"
Ok, fair enough. Actually you can and should send the data not to any phone company but to some personal computer you control or some people close to you control (as TDS Zenaan already mentioned) And the whole system is just some rather simple program running on the phone. You probably can already get such an 'app' in the nsa-google-store? ;) Make sure your backdoored phone doesn't detect your trigger signal and shuts down =)
And then the rest of us could have had a good laugh, realizing that yet again, Juan was trolling yet again.
I think a good dosis of skepticism regarding technical solutions is warranted, but meh...
Jim Bell
On Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 7:39:37 PM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote: On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 23:28:41 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: Ok, fair enough. Actually you can and should send the data not to any phone company but to some personal computer you control or some people close to you control (as TDS Zenaan already mentioned) And the whole system is just some rather simple program running on the phone. You probably can already get such an 'app' in the nsa-google-store? ;) > Make sure your backdoored phone doesn't detect your trigger signal and shuts down =)
I think a good dosis of skepticism regarding technical solutions is warranted, but meh... Ideally, you'd like to have a minute or two of full-motion video prior to an attack, and maybe many minutes (an hour?) of full audio, and something like 1-frame/second prior to thatBut 1 megabyte per second is 3.6 gigabytes/hour, and 3 hours of that, per day on average, is nearly 11 gigabytes/day, or 330 gigabytes/month. What's the solution? Don't say, "buy one of those unlimited-data plans!". Those plans are provided, and priced, based on the idea that everybody uses a now-reasonable amount of data, like 5-10 gigabytes/month. Not 330 gigabytes. If everybody starts using anywhere near that, the cell company will have to install 10-100x as much transmission ability, and that costs money. And, they will charge for that service. How do we do that? Take advantage of:1. Most people rarely get attacked.2. A phone co cell site probably has 10-100x more receive capacity than it on average needs. Such is necessary for peak moments, which will occasionally exist. Ordinarily, unused capacity is lost, and isn't used for anything valuable. Suppose a PBB (personal black box) transmits full-motion video, at maybe 1 megabyte/second, all the time. But by pre-arrangement, the phone co merely "parks" the data, near the cell site, and does not attempt to transmit it to "your" computer. (So, it doesn't need to use its own network to transmit this data.) Most of the time, you don't get attacked, so your PBB eventually tells the cell company, "We aren't going to need 99% of that data, so dump it and send maybe 1% on to my computer". The material actually sent might be 1 frame/second, maybe 1/30th of 1 megabyte per second, and all of the audio. This process will be done continuously. If you DO get attacked, your PBB may get triggered, and maybe it's be able to tell the phone co to "send all the data onwards to my computer". But if, instead, your phone gets instantly smashed, or sealed in aluminum foil, or shot with a bullet, etc, the cell phone company never gets the "we don't need that data", message: So the entire amount of data your PBB has collected and sent to the phone co gets transmitted and then stored on your own computer, including material that was collected from minutes ago, in full-motion video. So if somebody is attacked and possibly killed, much of the last hour of his life is available in great detail, including full-motion video for the last few minutes, and an hour of good audio, and 1-frame/second video for an hour. I suspect that there would be very few murders that would not be solved with this data. To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life. But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB. Jim Bell
On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life. But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.
But you can flip that around. Cops and soldiers are using such a system. So how would libertarians get rid of cops and soldiers? Or politicians. You are presenting it as a way for innocent people to be protected. But it is also a way for the worst enemies of freedom to be protected. So libertarians should be thinking how to neutralize that sort of system =)
Jim Bell
On Wednesday, October 3, 2018, 10:09:29 AM PDT, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote: On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life. But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.
> But you can flip that around. Cops and soldiers are using such a system. So how would libertarians get rid of cops and soldiers? Or politicians. Absolutely true!!! Technology changes things, possibly a great deal.
You are presenting it as a way for innocent people to be protected. But it is also a way for the worst enemies of freedom to be protected. So libertarians should be thinking how to neutralize that sort of system =)
True, quite true. Or avoid it. Etc. That's one thing Cypherpunks should be doing, right now. Jim Bell
On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life. But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.
About 1 3/4 years ago, I proposed that cell phones be programmed as "personal black-boxes" (PBB), a device to record events. The hardware was already there: A person would wear a cell phone to collect video and audio data, more or less continuously, ultimately to protect the wearer from attack by others. Not that they couldn't attack, but that the presence of the PBB would provide evidence of actions by others. Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers. Consider the Rodney King incident from 1992 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY , where a large crowd of cops surrounded Rodney King, who was being beaten by a cop. Because someone in a balcony nearby happened to have a camcorder, the evidence was taken and King was exonerated, and at least some of the cops who were doing (or allowing) the beatings to continue. And THAT was long before the advent of the Smartphone, which has the ability to record such assaults easily. In the last few weeks, and really for the last few years, we have seen what the proliferation of portable video-taking devices can do. Clearly, where video exists, justice can occur. Where video DOESN'T exist, injustice can flourish. So, I'd say that it's important to get the maximum number of people the easiest method to record incidents. And that will need making it easy, cheap, and effective. Just about every smartphone out there has two, or three, or even four tiny component cameras. Those cameras must be extremely cheap to manufacture, since there are VERY cheap smartphones, some costing $50 or less. (So, I suspect that the cost of the camera would have to be $2 or less, in large volume. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/sensors-transducers/image-sensors-camera... ) A single smartphone camera is good, but its camera 'looks', more or less, in only one direction in a time, And if you're not aiming in the right direction, you won't record the incident you want. I suggest that a tiny, omnidirectional camera system be built, perhaps containing 4 or 6 component cameras, airming in the horizontal plane, able to record everything in a horizontal plane, mounted on your head just like a 'propellor beanie', famous from the early 1960's. A cable will go down to a smart phone in your pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxhzahiQshQ Maybe something like this already exists? It certainly ought to. The main question I have is whether a smartphone has the capability to digitize (or at least record?) the output from as many as six HD cameras at a single time. According to this:https://www.techspot.com/guides/1591-microsd-buying-guide/ "Additionally, SD specification 7.0 and 7.1 introduces two new card types: an SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) classification which will bring support for cards with up to 128TB of storage, and SD Express, a joint effort with PCI-SIG to create SD cards that are compatible with PCIe 3.0/NVMe v1.3 protocols and will offer peak theoretical speeds of 985MB/s." and later in the cite: The SD Association approved the final microSD specification in July 2005 and those early cards only supported up to 128MB of storage -- a limitation that was expanded later by the SDHC and SDXC specs. - microSD: Max storage of 2GB, transfer rate of 25MB/s -- uses FAT12, FAT16 or FAT16B file systems - microSDHC: 4GB to 32GB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- typically uses FAT32 - microSDXC: 64GB to 2TB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- uses exFAT - microSDUC: 2TB to 128TB of storage, transfer rates from 50MB/s -- uses exFAT [end of cite] A data rate of 50 MB/sec (if that really means 50 megaBYTES per second) is good, at least if the video is compressed. But see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video Jim Bell
On 6/6/20, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.
And how exactly you proposing to stop this "progress" JuanG? How you going to call them wrong state fuckers out? Stop them wrong fucks? You know how many times people here everywhere been harassed wronged infringed upon by ridiculous "authority" "policy" with no recorded evidence to even fight it or embarass them, share them to world of sheep help wake them, etc. What the fuck you gonna do JuanG? What your magical proposal JuanG? Yeah, unless you JuanG come up with some total solution that whoever likes, they and Jim is always free to see about make and sell crypted recording devices, publish that stream in realtime to RTL-SDR airwaves for local archiving activists just like ADS-B, Ham, etc, so when pigs smash devices, and YouFaceOogleInstaReddSnap delete, it still there when owner or their lawyer d/l and decrypt it. At least then, regardless what people think about tools, power not have all the gadget tools for themselves. Alternately... Who loses arms races? How long races last? Who gets smashed along the way? Even smashing everything still leaves relative problem of authoritarial thoughts over others. Unless you smash all sentient life to dust. Or educate and retrain it away. Then tech does not matter.
On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 20:52:05 -0400 grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/6/20, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.
And how exactly you proposing to stop this "progress" JuanG? How you going to call them wrong state fuckers out? Stop them wrong fucks?
you need a 'critical mass' to be able to fight back. I think I mentioned it a few times by now.
You know how many times people here everywhere been harassed wronged infringed upon by ridiculous "authority" "policy" with no recorded evidence to even fight it or embarass them, share them to world of sheep help wake them, etc.
Let me explain the basics for you : the job of the police is to beat people to death when they don't obey their masters. That's something that ordinary, grown-up fucktards approve of. you want to broadcast it as some kind of 'public' entertainment?
Yeah, unless you JuanG come up with some total solution that whoever likes, they and Jim is always free to see about make and sell crypted recording devices,
he's of course free to keep preaching the infintely idiotic view that 'technology' will magically make people free. An infinitely idiotic view which you share to a fair degree, I believe. And I'm free to comment on it. Now, if you technocrats were able to actually deliver on your 'promises' then I would certainly shut up. But unless you're completely delusional, you have to admit you're getting nowhere and will be microchipped soon.
Alternately... Who loses arms races?
one of the points is, do you remotely think you're in a position to 'win' the arms race or even keep up with it somehow? or is your objective to sell more retardphones because you can record cops...while they dutifully protect the retardphone manufacturers? you have to be pretty arrogant to believe that you're going to beat them at their own game using their own weapons.
How long races last? Who gets smashed along the way?
Even smashing everything still leaves relative problem of authoritarial thoughts over others. Unless you smash all sentient life to dust.
easier to smash politicians first. Before they smash you to dust...while you broadcast it on the arpanet.
Or educate and retrain it away. Then tech does not matter.
Contrariwise, if you mix a fascist 'culture' with 'technology' you get a disaster.
you need a 'critical mass' to be able to fight back.
That is almost too slowly building, if at all.
the job of the police is to beat people to death when they don't obey their masters.
They don't allow that story on YouTube anymore. Officially nowhere else soon with all the proposed "laws".
you want to broadcast it
If user can't trust FaceTube to livestream and not delete the user's feed, and if the cops delete and smash the device copy of it, and takedown whatever private VPS user sent it to, then it's gone. So yes broadcasting the encrypted stream for all receivers in antenna range to pick up and store is another option beyond trying to insert it live into some distributed filestore that probably can't handle the bandwidth anyway, or costs to much coin, etc. Some areal density of people running receivers and 100GiB storage each is almost free donation to community with drive and antenna costs these days. Probably harder to jam local USB SDR GnuRadio modules / backpack relays than shutdown cellular data internet needed to reach distributed filestores. Only the user can see/retrive it, or their lawyer or M of N personally trusted keyholders... over anonymous internet overlay or radio in the area. Use offline private key, streamcrypt to public key, nothing usable left on device unless user wants to.
'technology' will magically make people free.
their own weapons
Tech itself, sitting in a box, on the shelf, doing nothing, like an unused cannon, no. The rest may depend on if cypherpunks tech was to be deployed as partially equalizing force leverage rapide, in time to assist effect change before being crushed out by opposing forces. Or if it was just a bunch of gov goons and state apologists tripping on acid while typing shit into C compiler in 1990's and dotbomb. Or on other combinations of things. "Liberation tech" is mostly all certainly not interested in any kind of real freedom... seeming to prefer to liberate people into slavery of democracy... under liberators boot.
Now, if you technocrats were able to actually deliver on your 'promises'
Tech is one thing, sometimes easily coded and delivered. Teaching and getting people use it for freedom apparently harder. All they used it to make Facebook so far. They are letting cryptocurrency get fucked and behind advantage too, Because no one is teaching freedom fundamentals. Only dropping tech on them, so they use it by old wrong teaching.
will be microchipped soon.
They want it like sheep. All the first world in lead to that hell world.
their own game using their own weapons.
GovCorp won the database weapon bigtime, huge sheeple spygame advantage.
arms race easier to smash politicians first. Before they smash you to dust...
They almost had tiny bit of idea to try smashing in the corona and floyd "revolts", but stopped like sheep when BossGov said stop. They did try some simple old brick and flame tech, and did have some digital new tech in the mix, and so held advantage for a while. But now the Boss Monster is going to get another 10-20 year turn at fucking them even harder. They will have to find more new advantage.
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 02:52:13 -0400 grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
you need a 'critical mass' to be able to fight back.
That is almost too slowly building, if at all.
Exactly right. And that's the sad situation we find ourselves in.
the job of the police is to beat people to death when they don't obey their masters.
They don't allow that story on YouTube anymore.
what else would you expect from a mosad-nsa propaganda outlet
Officially nowhere else soon with all the proposed "laws".
you want to broadcast it
If user can't trust FaceTube to livestream and not delete the user's feed, and if the cops delete and smash the device copy of it, and takedown whatever private VPS user sent it to, then it's gone. So yes broadcasting the encrypted stream for all receivers in antenna range to pick up and store is another option
yes, that's a nice trick - which prolly won't work "out of the box" with the majority of retardphones even if the hardware was capable of doing it...if the radios supported ad-hoc networks. then you can of course build your own pair of devices one being a camera with a radio, the other just a receiver. And your own device should be easier to conceal, unlike the typical retardphone. And now you started an electronic warfare war with the 'masters' of war. Good luck.
'technology' will magically make people free.
their own weapons
Tech itself, sitting in a box, on the shelf, doing nothing, like an unused cannon, no.
The rest may depend on if cypherpunks tech was to be deployed as partially equalizing force leverage rapide, in time to assist effect change before being crushed out by opposing forces.
Or if it was just a bunch of gov goons and state apologists tripping on acid while typing shit into C compiler in 1990's and dotbomb.
One has to ask, why wasn't cpunk 'tech' more widely deployed in the 1990s? Things like PGP notwithstanding...
Now, if you technocrats were able to actually deliver on your 'promises'
Tech is one thing, sometimes easily coded and delivered. Teaching and getting people use it for freedom apparently harder. All they used it to make Facebook so far.
Yep. But if you look a bit harder, you'll see that 'tech' is developed only when it leads to outcomes like facebook...and the rest of industrial 'civilization'. Technical developments have never caused political change, contrary to what marxists and other positivists might like to imagine.
They are letting cryptocurrency get fucked and behind advantage too,
well, cryptocurrency exists in the highly toxic enviroment of finance. It's no wonder that a lot of it is controlled by government criminals like coinbase's armstrong.
Because no one is teaching freedom fundamentals.
yep - what people are taught in govcorp schools and 'universities' is the exact opposite.
Only dropping tech on them, so they use it by old wrong teaching.
will be microchipped soon.
They want it like sheep. All the first world in lead to that hell world.
no doubt a lot of people uncritically accep it. But, it's not 'informed consent'. The people who accept it are grownups 'educated' by govcorp.
arms race easier to smash politicians first. Before they smash you to dust...
They almost had tiny bit of idea to try smashing in the corona and floyd "revolts", but stopped like sheep when BossGov said stop.
at this point, any 'revolt' should be seen as govcorp wargames "Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-n... so unless the revolt manages to beat to death bezos and the google jews, and post the video on jewtube, it should be regarded as a Fake News Revolt.
They did try some simple old brick and flame tech, and did have some digital new tech in the mix, and so held advantage for a while. But now the Boss Monster is going to get another 10-20 year turn at fucking them even harder. They will have to find more new advantage.
yes, that's a nice trick - which prolly won't work "out of the box" with the majority of retardphones even if the hardware was capable of doing it ...if the radios supported ad-hoc networks.
Use the phone's USB port to attach the RTL-SDR GnuRadio etc transmitter dongle, or use the phone's Wi-Fi to speak IP to such a backpack or pocket carried radio device. That radio device then does broadcast like satellite, it does not associate ad-hoc with any network. The receivers in the neighborhood just record all the transmissions, like anyone recording TV, FM, Ham, ATS-B, GPS, etc and NSA does.
And now you started an electronic warfare war with the 'masters' of war.
SDR can probably compete well enough to make a bit of leverage. To move beyond teams of specialized backpack guerrilla radio units into being commodity consumer/protester/etc friendly tool is a larger step.
critical mass ... freedom education 'tech' is developed only when it leads to outcomes like facebook
Outcomes follow in way of proportion of mass that uses it. Reorient mass, tech will be used different, different outcomes.
facebook youtube
Those central services, and various parts of the internet, will be all turned off or at least entirely scrubbed during any good uprising, this is why cypherpunks hardwarepunks etc really need to be developing commodity distributed SDR guerilla radio networks. Even if all you want to do with them is watch the independant news streams coming off all the BeanieCam's Jim sold around the world. I hereby assert worldwide intellectual property trademark and copyright over "BeanieCam", "FannyBox", and all combinations of "Crypto/Cypher Cam/Vest/Jacket/Coat/Trenchoat/Shoes/Belt/Hat/Glasses/Backpack/Briefcase", none ever licensed for Govt end use, Jim gets it for $0.50 each in qty 1M when priced under $50, all nonexcluded parties may negotiate within for private terms ;)
On Saturday, June 6, 2020, 05:19:03 PM PDT, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote: On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job. It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed. Let's consider Milwaukee, and George Floyd. About 9 minutes of video, probably taken by a smartphone costing a few hundred dollars, indirectly led to hundreds of thousands of people protesting, and even rioting, around the world. Probably even millions, if you include the foreign events. Now, I'd be the first to say that's not an entirely unalloyed benefit (if you include the rioting and looting), but the public clearly needed to see that incident. And they did so, because of the invention of the smarphone. (The public saw the Rodney King incident in 1992, but only because somebody who was on a balcony at just the right time happened to have a camcorder, with a charged battery, and findable-in-time casette of videotape.) But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time. However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed. I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology. Jim Bell
Also, consider this: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/31/21276044/police-violence-protest-george-f... Caught on camera, police explode in rage and violence across the US America’s occupation by militarized police is in full view By T.C. Sottek May 31, 2020, 11:46am EDT Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Over the past 72 hours, people across the US have captured what may be the most comprehensive live picture of police brutality ever. Any one of the videos we’ve seen could have sparked a national discussion, with people picking apart their elements, searching for context to argue about, and digging through the pasts of everyone involved. But it’s not just one act of violence. It’s everywhere. Here is just a short list of scenes from the past few days: - A New York City police officer tore a protective mask off of a young black man and assaulted him with pepper spray while the victim peacefully stood with his hands up - New York City police officers, in two separate vehicles, rammed a crowd in a street. Separately, an officer in a moving police vehicle slammed someone with a car door and drove away - Security forces in Minneapolis marched down a quiet residential street and shot paint canisters at residents who were watching from their private porch - Police in Louisville raided a public square, confiscating and destroying water and milk, which is used to counter irritants like pepper spray - Atlanta police stopped two black people, inexplicably shooting them with tasers and tearing them out of their car - - A New York City officer used two hands to throw a woman to the ground, reportedly calling her a “stupid fucking bitch”San Antonio Police used tear gas against people. So did Dallas police. So did Los Angeles police. So did DC police. The list goes on. - Many people reported being shot by rubber bullets. MSNBC host Ali Velshi says he was shot after state police fired unprovoked into a peaceful rally. A freelance photographer in Minneapolis says she went permanently blind in her left eye after being shot by police. - Police have brutalized lawmakers participating in demonstrations, including New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie On Saturday, the names of several police officers allegedly seen perpetrating violence in different cities began trending on Twitter as people worked to cross-reference faces from videos with personal information on the web. The violence appears so widespread and consistent that you could be mistaken for thinking it’s coordinated at a national level. To some extent, it is: President Trump has cheered on police violence like a fan at a sports event, and police departments across the country have styled themselves as military forces after receiving two decades of hand-me-downs from the War on Terror.US cities face toll of violent protests,” says a headline at the top of Fox News. “Fury in the streets as protests spread across the US,” says The New York Times. “Fire and fury spread across the US,” says The Washington Post. “Wave of rage and anguish sweeps dozens of US cities,” says CNN. But whose rage? Whose fury? Whose violence? [end of partial quote] On Saturday, June 6, 2020, 11:29:18 PM PDT, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: On Saturday, June 6, 2020, 05:19:03 PM PDT, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote: On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job. It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed. Let's consider Milwaukee, and George Floyd. About 9 minutes of video, probably taken by a smartphone costing a few hundred dollars, indirectly led to hundreds of thousands of people protesting, and even rioting, around the world. Probably even millions, if you include the foreign events. Now, I'd be the first to say that's not an entirely unalloyed benefit (if you include the rioting and looting), but the public clearly needed to see that incident. And they did so, because of the invention of the smarphone. (The public saw the Rodney King incident in 1992, but only because somebody who was on a balcony at just the right time happened to have a camcorder, with a charged battery, and findable-in-time casette of videotape.) But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time. However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed. I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology. Jim Bell
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.
It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed.
But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time. However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed.
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources. marcos
On Sunday, June 7, 2020, 05:23:46 AM PDT, \0xDynamite <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:
LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.
It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed.
But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time. However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed.
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources. marcos
I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue. Further, the benefits of the cameras depends on who controls the recordings. If all cops wore body cameras, but the cops could simply press a 'reset' button to eliminate incriminating evidence, that camera wouldn't be of any benefit to ordinary citizens. The data would survive only if the evidentiary value of the material could be used by the cop against the citizen. A camera and recording system, run by an ordinary person, and in his continuing control, would be one that the cops could not erase. Jim Bell
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources.
I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue.
Yes, but there's always a loophole, just like Godel said. And the same technology that is used against one side can be used to infiltrate and surveil them. The size of who uses it doesn't matter that much with regard to infotech, because infotech amplifies the BRAIN of the wielder, whereas miltech amplifies the WILL. And we all know who has the bigger brain. \0xD
Oh, and you know what else? If you can't make the technology you're using, you can't control it. This is how the world is awash with automatic weapons and fighter jets. \0xD On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 4:28 PM \0xDynamite <dreamingforward@gmail.com> wrote:
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources.
I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue.
Yes, but there's always a loophole, just like Godel said. And the same technology that is used against one side can be used to infiltrate and surveil them. The size of who uses it doesn't matter that much with regard to infotech, because infotech amplifies the BRAIN of the wielder, whereas miltech amplifies the WILL. And we all know who has the bigger brain.
\0xD
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 04:28:00PM -0500, \0xDynamite wrote:
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources.
I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue.
Yes, but there's always a loophole, just like Godel said. And the same technology that is used against one side can be used to infiltrate and surveil them. The size of who uses it doesn't matter that much with regard to infotech, because infotech amplifies the BRAIN of the wielder, whereas miltech amplifies the WILL.
Dang - dat be true ya mangey muffaluggerah :) Tanks for tha thought,
And we all know who has the bigger brain.
\0xD
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 06:27:51 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed.
Indeed, in 'quantitative' terms the situation is a disaster as well. The number of people who have technical knowledge is pretty small and virtually all of them work for the government. The number of hackers who are not govcorp sellouts is tiny. So, 'quantitatively' the machines are mostly controlled by the goverment-private oligarchy.
Let's consider Milwaukee, and George Floyd. About 9 minutes of video, probably taken by a smartphone costing a few hundred dollars, indirectly led to hundreds of thousands of people protesting, and even rioting, around the world. Probably even millions, if you include the foreign events.
What are you talking about. You think people outside the US are 'protesting' police brutality in the US?? For starters, vast majority of people IN the US are big supporters of police brutality, and it's obviously a non-issue for people outside the US.
Now, I'd be the first to say that's not an entirely unalloyed benefit (if you include the rioting and looting),
I have no objection to the rioting and looting.
but the public clearly needed to see that incident.
Oh yes, because people in the US don't know what sort of fascist cesspool they live in. The same white supremacists who voted for trump don't know that the police routinely murders blacks for fun. But wait. That's exactly what trumpo voters voted for.
And they did so, because of the invention of the smarphone.
It's pretty hard to take you seriously...
(The public saw the Rodney King incident in 1992, but only because somebody who was on a balcony at just the right time happened to have a camcorder, with a charged battery, and findable-in-time casette of videotape.)
lawl... Now, there's something called 'journalism', and journos have been using 'technology' for a while...to serve and proptect the private-government mafia. The sort of propaganda you're trying to peddle here is infinitely ridiculous. You pick ONE event that suits your 'narrative' while IGNORING A MILLION that prove that your 'narrative' is bullshit.
But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time.
there are cameras pointing everywhere, all the time. They are all controlled by the government and ayn rand's 'libertarian heroes' like bezos, google and the rest of the 'private' nsa mafia.
However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed.
yeah, because there never were riots before and because photography never existed (like jesus)
I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.
right, same protestors who don't know what photography is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_photography_technology
Jim Bell
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp... I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available. In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to: 1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3. To a battery pack.4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough. The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup. The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them. Jim Bell On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam. Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri? Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html
http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this
data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to
journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible. On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com>
wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service. You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely. I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras. PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient. "Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores, an Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU), a Snapdragon wireless modem, a Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP), a Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition and AI acceleration. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android, Windows Phone and netbooks.[1] They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi , WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them. Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/ I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get. Jim Bell On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: "I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine. I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software. Single-board computer | | | | | | | | | | | Single-board computer Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f... | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers | | | | | | | | | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin.... | | | I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available. | | | | | | | | | | | MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A. | | | In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | | | | | | | | | the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History | | | | | | | | | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History S100 Computers | | | You are very experienced with electronics. In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". That sounds awesome. HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to: 1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3. To a battery pack.4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough. The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD. Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup. Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform. Sounds good for journalists working with a team. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them. Jim Bell Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible. On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam. Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri? Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.
Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list. On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion? Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon
Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.
PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.
*"Snapdragon* is a suite of system on a chip <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip> (SoC) semiconductor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor> products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm> Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit> (CPU) uses the ARM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture> RISC instruction set <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set>. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core>, an Adreno <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno> graphics processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit> (GPU), a Snapdragon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem> wireless modem <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem>, a Hexagon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon> Digital signal processor (DSP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor>, a Qualcomm Spectra <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra> Image Signal Processor (ISP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor> and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system> (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition> and AI acceleration <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator>. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)>, Windows Phone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone> and netbooks <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook>.[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1> They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi , WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring. I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd
also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this. Karl
Jim Bell
On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.
Single-board computer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer>
Single-board computer
Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f... <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer>
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers <http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Computers>
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers
This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....
<http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Computers>
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com <https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html> In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com
MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A. <https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html>
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com <http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html>
the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com
<http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html>
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History <http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm>
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History
S100 Computers
<http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm>
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur. I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together? My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!! Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?". Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see. (A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.) When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'. Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4 The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography. I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity. In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old! http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual.... "During its demonstration, Qualcomm showed that the Snapdragon 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote] I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list. I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st... I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one. I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this. The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.
>On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion? If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio "2000s[edit] "The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 CMOS digital signal processor (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal system-on-a-chip, which Broadcom demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G mobile phones.[9][10] "
Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras. PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient. "Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores, an Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU), a Snapdragon wireless modem, a Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP), a Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition and AI acceleration. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android, Windows Phone and netbooks.[1] They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote] It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, Wi-Fi
| | | | | | | | | | | Wi-Fi Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh... | | | , WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable. The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this? What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them. Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.
I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it. I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this. Karl An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done".Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.
Jim Bell On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: "I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine. I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software. Single-board computer | | | | | | | | | | | Single-board computer Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f... | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers | | | | | | | | | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin.... | | | I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available. | | | | | | | | | | | MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A. | | | In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | | | | | | | | | the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History | | | | | | | | | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History S100 Computers | | | You are very experienced with electronics. In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". That sounds awesome. HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to: 1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3. To a battery pack.4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough. The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD. Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup. Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform. Sounds good for journalists working with a team. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them. Jim Bell Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible. On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam. Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea. https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri? Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment. Jim Bell
I've been very busy and there's a log going on here that i missed, but in general I am very interested in this project as well (together with the tor-replacement one), Isn't it like those google-maps cars that are using a rotating camera to capture 360deg pics while in motion? Which brings the idea of using a single rotating minicamera instead of 8 or so. . Since I am doing this USPS thing which consists on basically a personal negociator-box/electronic-you siting at home managing all of your private data I cannot avoid to think about using it as the final storage of the data coming from the portable device. best, OA Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.
Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.
I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?
My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!
Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".
Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.
(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)
When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.
Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4
The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.
I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.
In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM
If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!
http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....
"During its demonstration, Qualcomm showed that the Snapdragon 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]
I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.
I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...
I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.
I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.
The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.
On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?
If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
"2000s[[edit](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7)]
"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a [Texas Instruments TMS320C30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320) [CMOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS) [digital signal processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor) (DSP), along with several hundred [integrated circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit) chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of [RF CMOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS) technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single [mixed-signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal) [system-on-a-chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip), which [Broadcom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom) demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in [3G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G) [mobile phones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones).[9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9)[10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10) "
Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon
Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.
PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.
"Snapdragon is a suite of [system on a chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip) (SoC) [semiconductor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor) products for mobile devices designed and marketed by [Qualcomm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm) Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon [central processing unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit) (CPU) uses the [ARM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture)[RISC instruction set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set). A single SoC may include multiple [CPU cores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core), an [Adreno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno)[graphics processing unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit) (GPU), a [Snapdragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem)[wireless modem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem), a [Hexagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon)[Digital signal processor (DSP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor), a [Qualcomm Spectra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra)[Image Signal Processor (ISP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's [global positioning system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system) (GPS), camera, video, audio, [gesture recognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition) and [AI acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator). As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including [Android](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)), [Windows Phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone) and [netbooks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook).[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1) They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, [Wi-Fi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi)
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...
, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? [https://datproject.org](https://datproject.org/) [https://gnunet.org](https://gnunet.org/) . I've also found [https://git-annex.branchable.com](https://git-annex.branchable.com/) which uses git of course [https://scuttlebutt.nz](https://scuttlebutt.nz/) which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?
What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.
I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.
I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.
Karl
An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.
[Single-board computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer)
Single-board computer
Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...
[Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers](http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...)
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers
This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. [MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com](https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html) In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com
MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. [the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com](http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html)
the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com
[S100 Computers - SemiDisk History](http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm)
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History
S100 Computers
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 8:20 AM other.arkitech <other.arkitech@protonmail.com> wrote:
I've been very busy and there's a log going on here that i missed, but in general I am very interested in this project as well (together with the tor-replacement one),
Isn't it like those google-maps cars that are using a rotating camera to capture 360deg pics while in motion? Which brings the idea of using a single rotating minicamera instead of 8 or so. .
Since I am doing this USPS thing which consists on basically a personal negociator-box/electronic-you siting at home managing all of your private data I cannot avoid to think about using it as the final storage of the data coming from the portable device.
Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage? Open source is pretty import, and so is using existing work like USPS, so I'm imagining a pluggable backend.
best, OA
Sent with ProtonMail <https://protonmail.com> Secure Email.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.
Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.
I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?
My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!
Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".
Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.
(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)
When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.
Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4
The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.
I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.
In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM
If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!
http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....
"During its demonstration, *Qualcomm* showed that the *Snapdragon* 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]
I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.
I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...
I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.
I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.
The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.
On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?
If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
"2000s[edit <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7> ]
"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320> CMOS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS> digital signal processor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor> (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit> chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS> technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal> system-on-a-chip <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip>, which Broadcom <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom> demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G> mobile phones <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones>.[9] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9>[10] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10> "
Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon
Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.
PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.
*"Snapdragon* is a suite of system on a chip <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip> (SoC) semiconductor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor> products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm> Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit> (CPU) uses the ARM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture> RISC instruction set <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set>. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core>, an Adreno <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno> graphics processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit> (GPU), a Snapdragon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem> wireless modem <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem>, a Hexagon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon> Digital signal processor (DSP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor>, a Qualcomm Spectra <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra> Image Signal Processor (ISP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor> and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system> (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition> and AI acceleration <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator>. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)>, Windows Phone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone> and netbooks <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook>.[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1> They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, Wi-Fi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi>
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...
, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?
What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.
I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.
I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.
Karl
An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.
Single-board computer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer>
Single-board computer
Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers <http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Computers>
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers
This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com <https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html> In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com
MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com <http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html>
the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History <http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm>
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History
S100 Computers
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Sunday, June 14, 2020 4:16 PM, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 8:20 AM other.arkitech <other.arkitech@protonmail.com> wrote:
I've been very busy and there's a log going on here that i missed, but in general I am very interested in this project as well (together with the tor-replacement one),
Isn't it like those google-maps cars that are using a rotating camera to capture 360deg pics while in motion? Which brings the idea of using a single rotating minicamera instead of 8 or so. .
Since I am doing this USPS thing which consists on basically a personal negociator-box/electronic-you siting at home managing all of your private data I cannot avoid to think about using it as the final storage of the data coming from the portable device.
Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage?
Open source is pretty import, and so is using existing work like USPS, so I'm imagining a pluggable backend.
Yes, indeed Karl, it is only about when I am ready to unleash it, I am getting good investment leads for USPS, as soon as one of them materializes in the right terms (one of the terms is that the codebase they invest in MUST be GPL, and other is that the Governance of the system must be anonymous, skilled with proof and distributed) Until that happens I must stick with the terms of my current investor, which requires not to opensource it yet. In my idea the node would not only be a nmere storage, but instead it would behave as a negociator of your private data, so that one would be able to control the distribution, monetization, or whatever trade you'd like to do with it, including obviously not doing any trade at all with depending which data. The same system can serve as the anonymization overlay we talked about in another thread. All the aspects of a sybil controlled mesh arrangement of nodes are already working fine. With the inclusion of chaff traffic, which fits seamlessly in the design, and introducing a technque to hide originators and receptors (e.g. onion routing) it would be sorted out. In general, any features related to personal privacy, the empowering of the individual, and this line of philosophy are welcome in the USPS codebase, like this black box project. I look fwd to all these things happen. KR OA
best, OA
Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.
Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.
I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?
My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!
Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".
Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.
(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)
When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.
Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4
The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.
I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.
In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM
If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!
http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....
"During its demonstration, Qualcomm showed that the Snapdragon 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]
I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.
I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...
I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.
I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.
The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.
On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?
If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
"2000s[[edit](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7)]
"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a [Texas Instruments TMS320C30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320) [CMOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS) [digital signal processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor) (DSP), along with several hundred [integrated circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit) chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of [RF CMOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS) technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single [mixed-signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal) [system-on-a-chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip), which [Broadcom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom) demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in [3G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G) [mobile phones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones).[9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9)[10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10) "
Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon
Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.
PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.
"Snapdragon is a suite of [system on a chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip) (SoC) [semiconductor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor) products for mobile devices designed and marketed by [Qualcomm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm) Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon [central processing unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit) (CPU) uses the [ARM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture)[RISC instruction set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set). A single SoC may include multiple [CPU cores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core), an [Adreno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno)[graphics processing unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit) (GPU), a [Snapdragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem)[wireless modem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem), a [Hexagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon)[Digital signal processor (DSP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor), a [Qualcomm Spectra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra)[Image Signal Processor (ISP)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's [global positioning system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system) (GPS), camera, video, audio, [gesture recognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition) and [AI acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator). As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including [Android](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)), [Windows Phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone) and [netbooks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook).[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1) They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, [Wi-Fi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi)
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...
, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? [https://datproject.org](https://datproject.org/) [https://gnunet.org](https://gnunet.org/) . I've also found [https://git-annex.branchable.com](https://git-annex.branchable.com/) which uses git of course [https://scuttlebutt.nz](https://scuttlebutt.nz/) which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?
What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.
I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.
I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.
Karl
An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.
[Single-board computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer)
Single-board computer
Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...
[Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers](http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...)
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers
This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. [MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com](https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html) In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com
MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. [the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com](http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html)
the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com
[S100 Computers - SemiDisk History](http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm)
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History
S100 Computers
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own... https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 12:36 PM other.arkitech <other.arkitech@protonmail.com> wrote:
Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage?
Open source is pretty import, and so is using existing work like USPS, so I'm imagining a pluggable backend.
Yes, indeed Karl, it is only about when I am ready to unleash it, I am getting good investment leads for USPS, as soon as one of them materializes in the right terms (one of the terms is that the codebase they invest in MUST be GPL, and other is that the Governance of the system must be anonymous, skilled with proof and distributed) Until that happens I must stick with the terms of my current investor, which requires not to opensource it yet. In my idea the node would not only be a nmere storage, but instead it would behave as a negociator of your private data, so that one would be able to control the distribution, monetization, or whatever trade you'd like to do with it, including obviously not doing any trade at all with depending which data.
Sure, regarding the public project PBB, I'm personally interested in discussing solutions that are open source now. We need to work on design and code to meet any raised concerns, and if you are the only person who can do that for now it makes the process look incredibly inefficient. It also offers poor trust and verifiability. There are also a lot of existing systems out there that may be more suited for different parts, but could likely be integrated with USPS to get the best of both goals. Once USPS is open source it could be easily integrated if somebody already built a pluggable interface in an open source system that it would fit into. This is why I say it could be to your benefit to contribute even if you cannot open source your older work yet: you could influence the codebase to facilitate that later. But of course I am simply looking to start software design alongside others early.
Sent with ProtonMail <https://protonmail.com> Secure Email.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.
Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.
For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.
I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.
I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?
My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!
Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".
Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.
(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)
When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.
Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4
The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.
I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.
In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM
If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.
Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.
My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.
Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!
http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....
"During its demonstration, *Qualcomm* showed that the *Snapdragon* 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]
I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.
I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.
I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...
I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.
I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.
The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.
On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?
If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
"2000s[edit <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7> ]
"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320> CMOS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS> digital signal processor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor> (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit> chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS> technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal> system-on-a-chip <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip>, which Broadcom <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom> demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G> mobile phones <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones>.[9] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9>[10] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10> "
Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon
Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.
PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.
*"Snapdragon* is a suite of system on a chip <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip> (SoC) semiconductor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor> products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm> Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit> (CPU) uses the ARM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture> RISC instruction set <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set>. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core>, an Adreno <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno> graphics processing unit <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit> (GPU), a Snapdragon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem> wireless modem <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem>, a Hexagon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon> Digital signal processor (DSP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor>, a Qualcomm Spectra <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra> Image Signal Processor (ISP) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor> and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system> (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition> and AI acceleration <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator>. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)>, Windows Phone <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone> and netbooks <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook>.[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1> They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, Wi-Fi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi>
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...
, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.
The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.
Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?
What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/
Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.
I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.
I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.
It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.
Karl
An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.
Jim Bell
On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"
I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.
I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.
I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.
Single-board computer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer>
Single-board computer
Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers <http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Computers>
Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers
This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....
I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!
Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com <https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html> In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.
MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com
MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.
In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com <http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html>
the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History <http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm>
S100 Computers - SemiDisk History
S100 Computers
You are very experienced with electronics.
In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".
That sounds awesome.
HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:
I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:
1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.
The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.
Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?
You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.
It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.
You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.
The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.
Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.
The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.
Sounds good for journalists working with a team.
This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.
Jim Bell
Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.
I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.
Have you started any projects?
I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.
I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .
I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.
Am I on the same page as you?
On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.
Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/
However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?
Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.
Jim Bell
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 03:41:33PM -0400, Karl wrote:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 12:36 PM other.arkitech <other.arkitech@protonmail.com> wrote:
Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage? ...
Sure, regarding the public project PBB, I'm personally interested in discussing solutions that are open source now. We need to work on design ...
Guys if you at all can, please follow standard email etiquette and bottom post not top post, snip the remainder of long emails, and send ONLY as text and not HTML. This would drastically reduce the size of the previous email. Thanks, Your resident email etiquette nazi :)
On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:35:50 +0000 "other.arkitech" <other.arkitech@protonmail.com> wrote:
The same system can serve as the anonymization overlay we talked about in another thread. All the aspects of a sybil controlled mesh arrangement of nodes are already working fine. With the inclusion of chaff traffic, which fits seamlessly in the design, and introducing a technque to hide originators and receptors (e.g. onion routing) it would be sorted out.
I don't think those two 'features' are exactly easy to implement. If your network is an actual mesh, then routing, even the ordinary kind, isn't exactly easy either?
desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen
Cams with fisheye lenses that do 180+ are available, mount two back to back for spherical coverage, software flattens the fisheye for playback. Or do 4x90's. Since you're not talking custom #OpenFab #OpenHW here, all HW so far mentioned is available China OEM sources design integrator services and assembly in pallet quantities, if going the route most other black box sellers have gone, all they typically do is software builds and support. Even high end guerrilla backpack SDR crypto comms capable of defeating garden variety Cell, WiFi, and RF jamming vans are a click away, limitless cypherpunk applications, easily explored starting well under 1BTC... https://wiki.gnuradio.org/ https://www.pervices.com/ https://www.ettus.com/ https://thinkrf.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radios
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Sunday, June 21, 2020 3:10 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote: ...
the Cyan is more than 1BTC, but still worth every Satoshi! :P~ https://www.pervices.com/documentation-cyan - 1GHz and 3GHz instantaneous bandwidth options - 4x 40Gbps QSFP+ - Intel Stratix 10 FPGA SoC - 10MHz, 10ppb, reference OCXO - Direct conversion quadrature transceiver - Deterministic phase coherency and latency [read: beam forming / steering :) ] - Over 16GHz RF bandwidth* - 16 bit, 1 GSPS DAC on each transmit chain** - 16 bit, 1 GSPS ADC on each receive chain** best regards,
On Saturday, June 20, 2020, 08:11:48 PM PDT, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen
Cams with fisheye lenses that do 180+ are available, mount two back to back for spherical coverage, software flattens the fisheye for playback. Or do 4x90's. Since you're not talking custom #OpenFab #OpenHW here, all HW so far mentioned is available China OEM sources design integrator services and assembly in pallet quantities, if going the route most other black box sellers have gone, all they typically do is software builds and support.
Originally, I figured I'd have to use bare cameras and do the compression myself. See the fact that I subsequently discovered the Vuze+ camera system: 4 pairs of 4K cameras, each with fisheye lenses, to see the entire sphere, in stereoscopic view! And 3-axis gyroscopes to stabilize the view. Way more "oomph!" than I started out wanting to have. The main "drawback" is that it produces 80-120 megabytes/second full-bore. So, it's going to be wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.
"Even high end guerrilla backpack SDR crypto comms capable of defeating garden variety Cell, WiFi, and RF jamming vans are a click away, limitless cypherpunk applications, easily explored starting well under 1BTC..."
I also found out that recent WiFi's seem to be far more capable than I previously understood. Maybe WiFi 4 would transfer nearly 80 megabytes/second. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi Wi-Fi generations| Generation/IEEE Standard | Maximum Linkrate | Adopted | Frequency | | Wi‑Fi 6 (802.11ax) | 600–9608 Mbit/s | 2019 | 2.4/5 GHz 1–6 GHz ISM | | Wi‑Fi 5 (802.11ac) | 433–6933 Mbit/s | 2014 | 5 GHz | | Wi‑Fi 4 (802.11n) | 72–600 Mbit/s | 2009 | 2.4/5 GHz | | Wi‑Fi 3 (802.11g) | 3–54 Mbit/s | 2003 | 2.4 GHz | | Wi‑Fi 2 (802.11a) | 1.5 to 54 Mbit/s | 1999 | 5 GHz | | Wi‑Fi 1 (802.11b) | 1 to 11 Mbit/s | 1999 | 2.4 GHz | | (Wi-Fi 1, Wi-Fi 2, Wi-Fi 3 are unbranded[41] but have unofficial assignments[42 | So, any smartphone designed since 2014, using WiFi 5, would probably work wellIt would be nice to have a pair of 360-degree-cameramen acting as mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A sending 80 megabytes per second to Cameraman B, and vice versa. WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 look like they are quite capable of this, if "full-duplex" operation is allowed. The Vuze+ camera does its own compression, although it appears to be mild compression. The limited literature I've seen doesn't mention anything about encryption, above and beyond the WiFi's password system. How much overhead would a single-key encryption algorithm take? "Catching" this WiFi-transmitted data, 80 megabytes/second, probably only will require a WiFi 5 smartphone and a 256 or 512-gigabyte SD Card, the latter to store about 6000 seconds of video. https://wiki.gnuradio.org/ https://www.pervices.com/ Ettus Research - The leader in Software Defined Radio (SDR) https://thinkrf.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radios
wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.
Rental video tapes were acceptable quality too, under 200k pixels. Today 4K (8.3M pix) at 10-bit per pixel color does not mean people need it. Maybe people trade color for good optic resolution or bandwidth reduction, etc. At least where such knobs can be made. In a situation, you don't get a timeout to swapout full cards, find better wifi hotspot peers, etc.
WiFi has some specs on the tin, but speeds in real deployed practice is going to be less. Another example of available camera modules are inside security cameras... alibaba, ebay... many have numerous embedded compression levels, some TLS, ONVIF standard, ethernet power, WiFi/Cellular etc. All from China OEMs that can custom whatever people want for the right price. Backdoors free with all ClosedSource.
mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A B
Two person teams are fairly common in the journo/activism space. Any project would want to interview some wide ranges of potential customers to determine / propose what might actually be useful in a new product.
Jim Bell's comments inline: On Sunday, June 21, 2020, 12:51:29 AM PDT, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.
Rental video tapes were acceptable quality too, under 200k pixels. Today 4K (8.3M pix) at 10-bit per pixel color does not mean people need it. Maybe people trade color for good optic resolution or bandwidth reduction, etc. At least where such knobs can be made. I'm not advocating using (solely) the highest resolutions, but having noticed that the hardware exists (4K 360-degree, stereoscopic cameras) I want to see if the rest of the components and data transmission rates can support that hardware. So far, it appears that data transfer rate will do this quite well. My initial idea for a "personal black box", about 2 years ago, merely anticipated a smartphone, saving enough data over cell data to ensure that it survives in case of an attack. The Vuze+ is on the other extreme in terms of video performance. There are probably a number of middle-grounds: A camera in front, and behind.
In a situation, you don't get a timeout to swapout full cards, find better wifi hotspot peers, etc. That's true. I hope that the camera hardware can be set, by software, to have a variable resolution. Maybe HD resolution (rather than 4K), for example. I think there are SD-cards up to 1 terabytes. (Many of which, on Amazon, are fake...)
WiFi has some specs on the tin, but speeds in real deployed practice is going to be less.
Yes, I know that the bands are going to be shared among all those present. But there might not be much competition for WiFi during a demonstration, compared to the competition for 3G, 4G, or 5G data. Are there apps/utilities which can measure useage/non-useage of WiFi at any given location?
Another example of available camera modules are inside security cameras... alibaba, ebay... many have numerous embedded compression levels, some TLS, ONVIF standard, ethernet power, WiFi/Cellular etc. All from China OEMs that can custom whatever people want for the right price. Backdoors free with all ClosedSource.
resolutions could be adjusted dynamically, I suppose. My understanding is that a 4K video can be compressed to 'about' 3 gigabytes/hour of data, but that doesn't tell us how much CPU time is needed to do that in real-time. I am doing a google search for: '4k video compression real-time' but I haven't read more than a few results yet. One result: https://www.ntt-review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=ntr201807sr2.htm... A system which was new in 2015. And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding
mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A B
Two person teams are fairly common in the journo/activism space.
Any project would want to interview some wide ranges of potential customers to determine / propose what might actually be useful in a new product. There will be plenty of variability when the various kinds of camera systems are considered.
Jim Bell
Are there apps/utilities which can measure useage/non-useage of WiFi at any given location?
Netstumbler or whatever other wifi tool is in fdroid repo.
that a 4K video can be compressed to 'about' 3 gigabytes/hour of data
People can compress any video source down to whatever, but they can no longer call it the first thing anymore, only what they compressed it down do. Lossless video compression exists, but isn't generally worth it. Youtube is a waste at 4k for stupid vlogs. But if you want to read a book at 100m, you need glass, aperture, resolution, stability. See customer needs.
that doesn't tell us how much CPU time is needed to do that in real-time. I am doing a google search for: '4k video compression real-time' but I haven't read more than a few results yet.
In software, the defacto opensource tool is ffmpeg.org. People can download a 4K test stream and chart different CPU's ability to handle different levels in realtime.
https://www.thedailyfodder.com/2020/06/breaking-video-cops-caught-on-video.h... BREAKING: [VIDEO] Cop CAUGHT ON VIDEO Planting Drugs On Black Suspect, Cop ANGRILY CHARGES AT People Filming Him Daily Fodder Team-June 22, 2020 By John Paluska, Founder of The Daily Fodder Recently, a video surfaced by Roland Martin of a Florida Cop who was PLANTING DRUGS on a handcuffed black man. The Cop simply begins nonchalantly placing the drugs next to the man: Sadly, this isn't the first time police have been found planting drugs on innocent citizens. NowThis reported on a Florida Cop who would simply plant drugs on people he pulled over for various traffic violations. USA Today reported that the cop, Zach Wester, planted drugs on 120 suspects. Prosecutors backed him up all 120 times until bodycam footage revealed his dastardly deed. You can watch the bodycam footage for yourself: Police nationwide need to reform themselves and stop giving cops the benefit of the doubt in most cases. If you are arrested, you must film. You must begin preparing your case for innocence. Because, without proof, cops will be believed, not you. For many more examples of documented proof that cops plant evidence, The Marshall Project has a whole page devoted to the latest examples. HELP STOP THE SPREAD OF FAKE NEWS! [end of quote]Jim Bell's comments follow:I don't want people to get the impression that my _only_ interest here is "keeping the cops honest", although that is certainly a big issue. See this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2S2nmmuMq8 in which a left-leaning person visits CHAZ (CHOP) that currently-occupied area in Seattle. He's assaulted at 8:44, by masked thugs, presumably people acting as "security" for the event. Note that his political sympathies don't save him from abuse. I've previously mentioned the incident in Portland Oregon where rioters assaulted Andy Ngo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k About a year ago. "Conservative writer Andy Ngo roughed up at Portland antifa/right wing protests"And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFgBAkedDug "Live Streamer's Camera Stolen During 2nd Night of Shooting at 'CHAZ' ". No doubt there are plenty of examples available on YouTube and Facebook of this kind of thuggery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfp0HhKBtIo "Antifa ‘harass’ elderly couple outside US event".Videos such as this are common, simply because these days just about everybody has a video recording studio in his pocket: His smartphone. But these kinds of videos would likely be far more common if people felt confident enough to do this recording everywhere and anywhere, and at anytime. As you can see from some of these videos, the thugs (both police thugs, as well as non-police thugs) frequently see someone with a cell-phone camera as a "threat", which is in a sense what they are, TO THEM! But not an illegitimate threat: Simply a risk that someone will record the bad guy. Jim Bell On Sunday, June 21, 2020, 11:17:28 PM PDT, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote: Jim Bell's comments inline: On Sunday, June 21, 2020, 12:51:29 AM PDT, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.
Rental video tapes were acceptable quality too, under 200k pixels. Today 4K (8.3M pix) at 10-bit per pixel color does not mean people need it. Maybe people trade color for good optic resolution or bandwidth reduction, etc. At least where such knobs can be made. I'm not advocating using (solely) the highest resolutions, but having noticed that the hardware exists (4K 360-degree, stereoscopic cameras) I want to see if the rest of the components and data transmission rates can support that hardware. So far, it appears that data transfer rate will do this quite well. My initial idea for a "personal black box", about 2 years ago, merely anticipated a smartphone, saving enough data over cell data to ensure that it survives in case of an attack. The Vuze+ is on the other extreme in terms of video performance. There are probably a number of middle-grounds: A camera in front, and behind.
In a situation, you don't get a timeout to swapout full cards, find better wifi hotspot peers, etc. That's true. I hope that the camera hardware can be set, by software, to have a variable resolution. Maybe HD resolution (rather than 4K), for example. I think there are SD-cards up to 1 terabytes. (Many of which, on Amazon, are fake...)
WiFi has some specs on the tin, but speeds in real deployed practice is going to be less.
Yes, I know that the bands are going to be shared among all those present. But there might not be much competition for WiFi during a demonstration, compared to the competition for 3G, 4G, or 5G data. Are there apps/utilities which can measure useage/non-useage of WiFi at any given location?
Another example of available camera modules are inside security cameras... alibaba, ebay... many have numerous embedded compression levels, some TLS, ONVIF standard, ethernet power, WiFi/Cellular etc. All from China OEMs that can custom whatever people want for the right price. Backdoors free with all ClosedSource.
resolutions could be adjusted dynamically, I suppose. My understanding is that a 4K video can be compressed to 'about' 3 gigabytes/hour of data, but that doesn't tell us how much CPU time is needed to do that in real-time. I am doing a google search for: '4k video compression real-time' but I haven't read more than a few results yet. One result: https://www.ntt-review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=ntr201807sr2.htm... A system which was new in 2015. And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding
mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A B
Two person teams are fairly common in the journo/activism space.
Any project would want to interview some wide ranges of potential customers to determine / propose what might actually be useful in a new product. There will be plenty of variability when the various kinds of camera systems are considered.
Jim Bell
On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 23:50:47 +0000 (UTC) jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
https://www.thedailyfodder.com/2020/06/breaking-video-cops-caught-on-video.h...
Zach Wester, planted drugs on 120 su spects. Prosecutors backed him up all 120 times until bodycam footage revealed his dastardly deed.
so the cop was caught by a police camera? What kind of retard can believe that? Wait. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/10/former-jackson-county-d... "He also allegedly circumvented the Jackson County Sheriff's Office body camera policy and "tailored" his recordings to conceal his crimes," So, the cameras didn't prevent the turd from doing whatever the fuck he wanted. He got caught only because, being clearly insane, he didn't know when to stop. "The allegations prompted prosecutors in the town of Marianna to review nearly 300 cases in which Wester was involved. They ultimately dropped charges in nearly 120 cases" meaning, 180 people are still falsely charged.
participants (11)
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\0xDynamite -
coderman -
grarpamp -
jim bell -
juan -
Karl -
other.arkitech -
Punk-Stasi 2.0 -
Razer -
Zenaan Harkness -
Zig the N.g