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Eavesdropping on Printers

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

First, we develop a novel feature design that borrows from commonly used techniques for feature extraction in speech recognition and music processing. These techniques are geared towards the human ear, which is limited to approx. 20 kHz and whose sensitivity is logarithmic in the frequency; for printers, our experiments show that most interesting features occur above 20 kHz, and a logarithmic scale cannot be assumed. Our feature design reflects these observations by employing a sub-band decomposition that places emphasis on the high frequencies, and spreading filter frequencies linearly over the frequency range. We further add suitable smoothing to make the recognition robust against measurement variations and environmental noise.Second, we deal with the decay time and the induced blurring by resorting to a word-based approach instead of decoding individual letters. A word-based approach requires additional upfront effort such as an extended training phase as the dictionary grows larger, and it does not permit us to increase recognition rates by using, e.g., spell-checking. Recognition of words based on training the sound of individual letters (or pairs/triples of letters), however, is infeasible because the sound emitted by printers blurs so strongly over adjacent letters.

Third, we employ speech recognition techniques to increase the recognition rate: we use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that rely on the statistical frequency of sequences of words in text in order to rule out incorrect word combinations. The presence of strong blurring, however, requires to use at least 3-grams on the words of the dictionary to be effective, causing existing implementations for this task to fail because of memory exhaustion. To tame memory consumption, we implemented a delayed computation of the transition matrix that underlies HMMs, and in each step of the search procedure, we adaptively removed the words with only weakly matching features from the search space.

We built a prototypical implementation that can bootstrap the recognition routine from a database of featured words that have been trained using supervised learning. Afterwards, the prototype automatically recognizes text with recognition rates of up to 72 %.

Researchers have done lots of work on eavesdropping on remote devices. (One example.) And we know the various intelligence organizations of the world have been doing this sort of thing for decades.

Interesting research.

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700 doctors demand the removal of WMA president for involvement in torture

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

700 doctors from 43 countries sent a letter of protest to the Word Medical Association (WMA), which is considered the WMA’s governing body, demanding the removal of the newly appointed president, an Israeli doctor, for ignoring the participation of medical staff in the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the Guardian reported.

The Israeli doctor, Yoram Blachar, has been the head of the Israeli Medical Association since 1995, and became the head of the WMA of November of last year.

The physicians, who signed the protest letter, are senior professors and physicians from England, Europe and the United States.

They stated that Blachar had failed to respond to charges that a number of Israeli doctors are involved in the torture of Palestinian detainees during interrogation in Israeli prisons.

In 1996, the Amnesty International reported that doctors, working with the Israeli security services, are taking part in torturing Palestinian detainees, mistreating and humiliating them in a manner that violates medical ethics.

Pediatrician Alan Meyers, from Boston University School of Medicine, in the United States, said that the presidency of Blachar to the WMA mocks the principles of the association which was founded in 1947.

A 1975 declaration in Japan states all Physicians in all situations should not participate of help in torture or any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures, including in armed conflicts and civil unrest.

In its annual meeting two years ago, the institution decided that all doctors are obliged to document cases of torture they are aware of, and that the lack of documenting such cases would be considered tolerance to torture, and lack of assistance to the victims.

The Guardian said that Blachar sent an email to it promising to respond to the allegations, and described the news as baseless imaginary allegations.

In 1997, Blachar sent a letter to the Lancet medical Journal defending the participation of physicians in torturing Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.

In his letter, Blachar claimed that ‘moderate physical pressure’, similar to the torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration against Guantanamo Bay prisoners, and other CIA black sites in several countries, ‘does not violate the international law’.

This so-called ‘moderate’ torture used by the CIA includes beating the detainees, depriving them from sleeping, isolating them, subjecting them to extreme hot and cold, humiliating them in addition to various illegal methods.

Meyers, who is also Jewish and well known for his stances for human rights in Israel since many years, stated that physicians who are involved in torture should not be allowed to practice medicine, and should be held accountable for their participation in torture.

In June 26 of 2008, the Israeli Physicians For Human Rights published a report accusing Israeli doctors of ignoring the human rights of the Palestinian detainees.

It is worth mentioning that dozens of Palestinian detainees died due to torture, dozens more died due to medical negligence, while hundreds of detainees are currently in urgent need for medical care, including cancer patients, and detainees who suffer chronic illnesses and disabilities, but are not receiving the needed medical treatment.

Saed Bannoura - IMEMC

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Challenge to BNP’s whites-only rule

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has challenged the fascist British National Party to address its membership criteria, on the basis that they contravene the Race Relations Act.

The commission, which is headed by Trevor Phillips, believes that the constitution and membership policy of the BNP discriminate on the grounds of race and colour - which stands in direct contradiction to the Act.

The BNP could face a legal injunction if the allegations are proven true.

The party’s membership criteria appear to restrict membership to those within what the BNP regards as particular “ethnic groups” and those whose skin colour is white, according to the commission.

Among the other concerns raised by the commission was the belief that elected representatives of the BNP would not provide equal service to all their constituents on the basis of race or colour, contravening the local authority model code of conduct.

The commission’s legal director John Wadham said: “The commission’s statutory role includes a duty to investigate possible breaches of discrimination law and take action where appropriate.

“The legal advice we have received indicates that the British National Party’s constitution and membership criteria, employment practices and provision of services to constituents and the public may breach discrimination laws which all political parties are legally obliged to uphold.

“We await a response from the BNP to our letter before deciding what further action we may take. Litigation or enforcement action can be avoided by the BNP giving a satisfactory response to our letter,” he added.

The commission has a statutory remit and regularly monitors political parties to assess whether their activities breach equality law or incite racial hatred.

BNP leader Nick Griffin, who was elected MEP for the North West on June 4, defended the party’s rules as “entirely legal” under sections 25 and 26 of the Race Relations Act.

He claimed that the clauses meant “ethnic groups who need special protection such as the English in their own country, who are now second-class citizens” were “entitled to discriminate on that basis and not on the grounds of colour.”

The BNP in its constitution asserts that it represents those of “collective national, environmental, political, racial, folkish, social, cultural, religious and economic interests of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse folk communities of Britain.”

John Millington

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 4:12 am and is filed under Contributions & Guests, Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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