Law enforcement agencies in the Northwest are preparing to test a new kind of non-lethal weapon. The Dazer Laser, made by North Carolina based company Laser Energetics, emits a ray of bright green light that it says temporarily blinds and disorients. It has less side affects than the popular taser and can be used at more »

Apparently this is becoming a trend in the mobile phone space. With Apple coming off of its iPhone 4 debacle with Gizmodo, Nokia puts itself in a similar situation after a prototype of the unreleased N8 (pictured right) reached the hands of a blogger by the name of Eldar Murtazin, editor-and-chief for the Moscow-based mobile.review.com. more »

Boston police have used Craigslist in order to find more potential victims of accused killer Philip Markoff. Markoff was arrested early this week as evidence mounted against him that led police to believe that the medical student used Craigslist to prey on women. Markoff was charged with killing a masseuse on April 14 and robbing more »

A new service focused around the use of cell phones has been announced, it’s called “My Mobile Witness.” Upon first seeing the name, I immediately felt like I wanted to bash it for being some sort of invasion of privacy-enabling service. Turns out that isn’t the case. My Mobile Witness is actually what it calls “a personal security device.” It actually sounds a bit useful if not hard to anticipate when to use it.

The service works by the user taking a picture of the area they are in, a license plate, a suspicious person, or something similar. The picture (or text message) is uploaded to a server that is apparently only viewable by police. The situations the press release describe would prove the service to be useful: taking a picture of a street sign in an unfamiliar area, taking a picture of a marker on an unfamiliar hiking path during a storm, among others. The information, if used for a crime, can apparently be used in court as well.

The alleged takeover of the City by the Bay may sound totally rare, but, unfortunately, it has happened before that disgruntled employees take to modern technology as a means for revenge.

City tech employee Terry Childs, allegedly modified the city system so that he was the only one with top level clearances. The city is still in a tizzy trying to regain control of their new fiber optic municipal network that handles everything from the mayor’s email to electronic court records. Childs, who was arrested on Sunday, is still being held on $5 million bail, after allegedly refusing to hand over the passwords. He at first did supply some, but they turned out to be bogus.

It isn’t even clear why he did what he did, although it’s been said that in days leading up to his arrest, his behavior towards his colleagues was becoming erratic. A new security chief had been brought in to oversee the group’s security, and over the past few weeks some evidence of tampering had been found. It was escalated to the police, who in turn brought in their own forensics team to investigate their network.

Recently, we reported on how the OpenTable Beta version has made it possible to set up a reservation at your nearest restaurant, however it would appear that restaurant reservations aren’t the only thing that have been updated for mobile technology.

Police departments in Boston, Cincinnati, and 100 other communities have adopted a text message tip-line. So if someone sees a crime being committed, all it would take is a dropped line to alert the authorities.

So far, this new department system has produced “great drug information, specific times, dates, names of suspects, locations, pick-up times, and license plate numbers”.

YouTube, while being widely popular and still taking more than its fair share of criticism over the use and what videos get uploaded still has some very good potential uses. It’s just up to the user or in this case the group to make good use of such a wide potential audience. The Palm Bay more »

Is GoDaddy playing censorship God again or did the police ranking site RateMyCop actually really hit its bandwidth limit? RateMyCop has been gaining popularity lately because it allows visitors to post comments and ratings on police officers. It would have been alright if the site was not disclosing officer names and badge numbers, but unfortunately it does.