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Aviation Security Debate: Bruce Schneier V. Kip Hawley (Former TSA Boss)
Fluffeh writes "A nice summary at TechDirt brings word that Bruce Schneier has been debating Kip Hawley, former boss of the TSA, over at the Economist. Bruce has been providing facts, analysis and some amazing statistics throughout the debate, and it makes for very educational reading. Because of the format, the former TSA administrator is compelled to respond. Quoting: 'He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust that there's a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that's really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).""
We have just launched a brand new low cost product called Hydra Control Freak. After persistent troubles over a few years in and around my property my home evolved system was getting pretty good and I decided it would be great to commercialise it. It's not well known yet as the first production run was finished just before Christmas and we are not a large company. Our focus is on proactive early warning video alerting and then flexible real world responses initiated from your smart phone. The idea is that several sensors placed around your property alert you via SMS (Or E-mail if you refer) with links allowing you to see video of what triggered the sensor (It records before the trigger event to ensure this) and provides for very flexible real world response from smart phone buttons.
We aim to provide extremely fast alert verification (A few seconds of the breaching of a sensor you will already be viewing the video stream [MJPG or a Pseudo MJPG stream for Android and other phones]) and your real world response can be very flexible as we support a flexible range of third party output devices. Currently, we support Phidget 4, 8 and 16 port I/O devices for input and output events and responses as well as the cm15a X10 Controller. We aim to support the RFXCOM transceiver shortly as well which will add support to a wide range of home automation products. For sensor input it's best to use quality professional PIRs. For Europe we support a quality sensor from an Italian company called CST Europa that breaks out it's wireless sensors (Multi tech PIR, Microwave, PIR, curtain and door sensors) into a relay box which you can then wire into the Phidget inputs. These have a great range. If you have enough repeaters you can get some milage out of X10 PIRs such as MS13 as well, but their range is not great. Or you can wire in sensors, this gives you a lot of choice, such as PIRs, trip beams etc. By triggering both home automation devices as well as custom I/O you can do things such as trip flood lights and set off alarms before the intruder has entered your home.
Everything about our device is about flexibility and interoperability. You can create pages of custom buttons and then link up those buttons to any manner of events by the gui driven event processor. Some of the output events can be used to add "state" then affects whether other events can fire or not. This state can also have a time to live so you can create actions that must happen without periods of time. In this way for example by using two PIRs you can easily make an alert that triggers on incoming movement (Approximately) but not out going. You would make the one sensor add some state with a short time to live, that like a firewall allows you to walk past the second sensor without triggering the alert. The other way around would immediately send the alert. That sort of thing is easy to do with HCF
Clustering and video slices : Each device can record approx 3-4 video streams depending on the resolution but they can communicate with each other regarding events recording across multiple devices but registering to the same event to the millisecond. There is a view builder page that allows you to build up views or slices across your freaks that line up events that relate to the same trigger. This is automatic, you add the credentials and details of the other freaks in your cluster and when you build your view it queries the cluster partners to see what cameras it has available and alters the selection gui so you can choose between multiple freaks for your current view (Which can also restrict time of day range and event names).
Full HTTPS: The devices comes with a gui-driven trust manager that supports the generation of self signed certificates or the importing of CA signed certificate chains.
WebM: I think ours is the first security device that supports the open WebM format. Please contact me if you know of another, I've not seen one yet.
Scheduled events: You can setup flexible daily events with the same level of flexibility on what th