Today's tech round-up will be short, even though there is more than enough material to keep you reading forever.
- Police in Brazil have plans to use robocop eyewear during the upcoming Olympics there. Even creepier, researchers are testing the first round of wifi-enabled contact lenses that will ultimately, they hope, enable computerized viewing of the real world. Imagine the possibilities here: see through vision, face recognition software built-in to the eye, connections to databases and more. Eerie.
- DARPA is asking for researchers to help them develop smartphone apps to more effectively wage war, using robotics. One way they hope to use the technology is to use smartphone apps to manage drones. "How much more effective could [drones] be if an app were created that allowed a swarm of small deployed UAVs to be controlled as a single unit (a hive so to speak) without having to individually control each vehicle?"
- Speaking of drones, there's trouble in the press for the head of drone operations at DHS. He's being accused of shilling for the drone industry on the inside of government, while he runs the drone wing of a many billion dollar federal agency. Oops.
- Spy-tech company Gamma International is feeling the heat again over documents released by Wikileaks in its SpyFiles campaign. The latest scandal centers around the firm's promotion of malware that sneaks in through deceptive means, targeting common platforms such as iTunes, Gmail and Skype.
- While Gamma International has remained mostly quiet during recent press storms about its spyware, another spy company — Cellubrite — has fired back at Wikileaks, arguing that the firm only works for law enforcement during proper investigations, not on intelligence gathering fishing expeditions. That certainly wasn't true in Michigan, where police were accused of having used the cell phone snooping technology to vacuum up the data on people's phones at regular traffic stops. But besides that, how does the company know what police and FBI do with its products once they ship?