In the 2015 movie “Chappie”, which is set in the near future, automated robots comprise a mechanised police force. An encounter between two rival criminal gangs severely damages the law enforcing robot (Agent 22). His creator Deon recommends dismantling and recycling the damaged police droids. H...
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As you are reading this newspaper, you may be partaking in a cyber-attack far away in another land another country totally oblivious to the role you are playing in it. This may seem like a plot to the latest Hollywood thriller, but it occurs every day in the world of cybercrime. At this minute, yo...
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In 1983, police find a 15-year-old Lynda Mann raped and strangled outside Leicester, a small village in the UK. Detective Baker after three years of meticulous but fruitless investigation is still clueless. In 1986, he meets Alec Jeffreys a genetics professor at the nearby University of Leicester ...
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The US government was the first to use blockchain technology to investigate and bring down a dark-web marketplace called the Silk Road, which sold drugs, weapons, and everything illicit on this planet. The blockchain also helped nail two corrupt investigators investigating the black-market site. Aut...
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Nenikikamen! Who would have thought one Greek word, uttered from the mouth of a dying man, as he lay sprawled on the ground in front of his countrymen, would have spurred the imaginations of men, living centuries after? Nobody would have ever imagined that the story of the first ‘Marathon’ runne...
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On November 26, 2008, at around 830 pm, 10 men in inflatable speed boats came ashore at two locations in Colaba, Mumbai. They split into small teams. Two of them who seemed like good looking college boys walked into “Leopold Cafe and Bar” at Colaba which was bustling with cheerful customers whil...
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Sharon Beshenivsky had always wanted to be a police officer. After being a community police officer, in May 2005, she became a British police constable in Bradford South, New Yorkshire. On 18 November 2005, which was her daughter's fourth birthday, she definitely would not have known she would wear ...
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On July 19, 2015, in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Samuel DuBose, an unarmed 43-year-old black rapper, got fatally shot by Ray Tensing, a 25-year-old white police officer of the University of Cincinnati, for a moving violation and failure to produce a driving licence. The Body Worn Camera (BWC) on Tensing ...
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20th Century Fox’s Independence Day released on July 4, 1996, was a blast – A sci-fi disaster film about an alien spacecraft that attacks Earth on Fourth of July weekend. But, the scene at the climax where Jeff Goldblum uses a Mac laptop to upload a computer virus to the alien mother ship disabl...
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George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984,” written in 1949, describes an eerie future where the ‘Thought Police’ of the superstate Oceania, detect and punish subjects for ‘thoughtcrimes’ which are thoughts unapproved by the state. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we are today star...
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In Minority Report a 2002 Sci-fi film set in 2054, Tom Cruise plays a Washington DC police officer going by the name John Anderton. In a scene from the movie, billboards recognise and solicit people strolling in a mall by scanning the eyeballs. As John Anderton walks through the mall, interactive ad...
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When one browses the digital storefronts of the online markets of the dark web, one gets the feeling that with a handful of bitcoins and a few clicks of the mouse, it’s trifling to buy an AK-47 or a Bushmaster M4 deployed by the Special Forces in Afghanistan which has an intrinsic potential to fir...
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The world was thunderstruck on May 11, 1997, when the IBM computer “Deep Blue” beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. This was the first time a machine had beaten any human chess champion. Google’s AlphaGo AI in October 2015, once more made the case that...
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As I dug into the Internet of Things (IoT) to understand the revolution of IoT, which is sweeping the world. I noticed that it had changed the way I see everything including policing. I questioned- Would 9/11 or a 26/11 or a Pulwama have happened in a connected world, where police have access to con...
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India has witnessed a few massive crowdsourcing campaigns during the past few years. One of the most renowned campaigns was a design contest conducted by the Ministry of Finance to create a symbol for the rupee. The Government received thousands of entries, but the design submitted by Udaya Kumar Dh...
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What’s in a name? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" enunciated Chief Justice Misra referring to William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet,during the 377 IPC verdict.In all probability, he implied that it doesn’t really matter, if someone is straight or gay, as all of us are in es...
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Steven Spielberg's “Minority Report” nailed the driverless car technology way back in 2002 with its futuristic Lexus-designed auto-piloted car. In one of the scenes, Tom Cruise decides to "run" from the authorities and sets off an exciting driverless car chase. Driverless cars used to be ...
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“The Diamond Age” a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1995 depicts a near-future world, in which nanotechnology affects all facets of existence. Nanotechnology is already influencing many features of our life today including crime investigation and law enforc...
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Michael Crichton's 2002 bestselling novel, "Prey”, is ostensibly about nanotechnology gone wrong. It’s about a swarm of Nano-particle having the capability to self-replicate, wreaking havoc, when an experiment in the Nevada desert goes horribly wrong. The little critters evolve swiftly becoming ...
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Although bioterrorism might seem a problem beginning in the late twentieth century ,a short story, written by H.G.Wells in 1894, portended the threat of an attack with biological agents. It tells the tale of an anarchist who steals a vial of what he believes to be cholera bacilli to poison the water...
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Rampage”, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, is a 2018 Hollywood sci-fi monster movie which is slated for Indian release on April 13, 2019. In the film, a biotech company “Energyne” under the guise of researching a cure for diseases, decides to advance CRISPR research to use it as a biolo...
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“The Cobra Event” written by Richard Preston in 1998 is a science thriller which narrates a botched bioterrorism offensive on the USA. In the book, the perpetrator of the attack, clones a virulent smallpox genome with a highly contagious common cold virus, and cranks out a genetically engineered...
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On a fine afternoon in San Diego, California. Things suddenly began to go amiss. Air-traffic controllers at the airport tower, stared at their monitors only to discover that the systems for monitoring approaching planes had become abruptly dysfunctional. At the Naval Medical Centre , emergency ...
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Speaking about the weather, Mark Twain wrote, everybody, talks about it, but nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. When it comes to corruption in our country, the situation is no different from what Mark Twain had to say about the weather. Corruption in India is a phenomenon that pervades...
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The 1997 Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”, feels intriguingly relevant, for fortuitously prognosticating the alarming state of the world today. In the movie, an evil media baron Elliot Carver grabs hold of a GPS encoder and uses it to send counterfeit signals, hoodwinking a British warship to s...
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A 2004 American science-fiction film “The Day After Tomorrow” directed, and produced by Roland Emmerich highlights what the world would look like if the greenhouse effect and global warming continued under the onslaught of environmental crimes being perpetrated by humankind .The film's protagoni...
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Can robots commit crimes? Killer robots are an erstwhile fodder of science fiction cinema. Films like Terminator have already given us a peek of the apocalyptical world we are quite likely to inherit. Researchers have cautioned that robots and computers will commit more crimes than humans by 2040. M...
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In Neptune’s Brood a sci-fi novel by Charles Stross,set in AD 7000, Homo sapiens are extinct and all the characters are androids .In that part of the galaxy, interstellar money is entirely cryptocurrency which goes by the name of "bitcoin". If so ? Is that an indication that cryptocurrencies will ...
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Cybercrime is on the way up, and it is becoming easier and easier for criminals to steal people’s data or alter it. Toolkits to create viruses, spyware, and other forms of malware which alter data are now readily available to anyone yearning to Hornswoggle and do damage. As a result, the integrity...
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Back in 1818, when people even in their wildest imagination could never have conjured up computers and robots, Mary Shelley in her book “Dr Victor Frankenstein” prophesied artificial intelligence (AI) with her bizarre concoction of an artificially generated creature who could think as we do. Tod...
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When I show up at my office at Alandur for work, I am required to flash my ID badge to the ID reader to gain access into my office. Likewise, when I open up my laptop, I need a login to log into my computer, and a PIN at the ATM to retrieve my cash. Similarly, when I get to the airport, I need an ...
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In the fictional novel “Coma” written by Robin Cook and made into a movie by Michael Crichton, a quizzical physician (Genevieve Bujold) discovers that nefarious seniors are drugging healthy patients into a comatose state, killing them, and selling their organs to wealthy patients in desperate ne...
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Back in 2002, when I along with a batchmate of mine watched the flick “Minority Report” little did we envisage the possibility of the Orwellian 2054 setting, dawning on us, so fast so soon. It’s been only 16 years since Steven Spielberg’s movie was released, but anyone revisiting the film wo...
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Fifteen cronies who have known each other since school have bunched-up for a party at a beach house off the ECR road, Bala their favourite Psychonaut host, plucks at a bag of heroin, and sets forth, to cut it into lines at the table. He snorts a line of heroin and another of MDMA. Other cronies stri...
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Sixty-six-year-old Anup Jalota’s headline-making affair with a 28-year-old Jasleen Matharu might have been a dupery stage-managed to have viewers hooked to “ Big Boss 12”. But what do you think when an everyday 80-year-old wealthy man weds a drop-dead gorgeous 22-year-old girl? Is it not plain...
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Is a perfect murder possible ? I am yet to come across an Agatha Christie novel to date, where the murderer is sipping wine in a countryside villa, laughing to himself over the murder he got away with. Though most of Christie’s crimes seem unsolvable, but Poirot or Miss Marple always solves the mu...
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Back in 2002, I saw “Minority Report” a sci-fi film in which, Tom Cruise flings stuff blithely into translucent screens using gestures to get displays of information in his field of vision. When he strolls down the mall he’s bombarded with ads mentioning his name, by specific AR “Augment...
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My very first experience of a virtual world, came about during my high school days when my cousin tugged me to a video arcade. The bizarre ecosystem of shimmering game cabinets, flickering lights and phantasmagoric sounds of the arcade simply blew my mind away. For 50 paise at a time , I yanked on ...
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As I riffled through the day's newspaper, a report titled “Swine flu virus claims six lives in Tamilnadu“ grabbed my attention. It made my mind, hark back to a time when Billy Corgan, the lead singer of famous “Smashing Pumpkins” had bemoaned in his blog that the swine flu virus was not a na...
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History has time and again taught us that, science fiction is only a fantasy until science makes it a reality. In the 1940s Isaac Asimov, a prolific science fiction writer wrote about a future where robots are a part of the human world. Similarly, in a sci-fi film, “ Robocop” made more than thir...
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There is, of late, a revival of interest in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, just a couple of days ago, the world's tallest statue having a height of 182 metres, the “Statue of Unity “, befitting the leader got unveiled. Back in my school days, I found myself enraptured when my fifth class Anglo-Indian...
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On May 6, 2013, a video surfaced on the internet showing a young man in blue jeans and a black polo shirt firing a single bullet from an off-white, plastic 380 single-shot pistol called "the Liberator", fabricated by him with a Stratasys 3D printer bought on eBay. That young man was Cody Wilson - a ...
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What would Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the first modern printing press in 1454, have said if someone told him that one day we would be printing human beings? He would have probably cocked a snook at the idea. Recently, in 1997, “ The Fifth Element” an iconic sci-fi film made by the ...
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When I saw the movie “Lara Croft-Tomb Raider” back in 2003, I was blown away to watch Angelina Jolie perform her own stunts. The way she galloped on a dark horse, spun a shotgun from side to side and fired at alternating targets amazed me to no end . She not only was an epitome of paramount fitn...
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My biology teacher in school taught me that a drone meant a male bee without stingers which did not gather nectar or pollen but simply existed to copulate with the unfertilised queen. Fast forward to today, the real male-bees in the bee-hives suddenly appear to have got drowned and stifled in the di...
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God does not discriminate between genders, who are we to do so? Enunciating so, the Honourable Chief Justice of Supreme Court, heading a five bench constitution bench, flung open the doors of Sabarimala temple to women of menstruating age. The looming retirement of Lordship Dipak Misra has spurred a...
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The smartphone is the world's greatest weapon of mass distraction (WMD), owing to the magnitude of the distraction epidemic and cyber-mania it has unleashed on us. Day and night our mobile phones, and other devices, buzz, ping, beep, hum, drone, croon, howl their way into our attention. Our brains a...
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DNA was discovered as the genetic material by Oswald Avery and his associates in 1944 but it took 44 years for it to become admissible as evidence in the courts. Would the brain fingerprinting technology become admissible in our courts or would it be junked as a junk science? Only time will be able ...
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Third degree has travelled quite a long way from being an intensive qualifying examination for a member in Freemasonry to become eligible for Masonic meetings to a brutal and ruthless method of interrogation routinely being employed by police all over the world to elicit information from suspects. A...
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