Technology

Upskirt Photographers Use Silent Smartphone Apps

Most cameras and mobile phones in Japan automatically make shutter sounds when they are used to take a photograph, a feature that makes it difficult for perverts to secretly capture upskirt images. Smart phone such as the iPhone usually allow users to disable all sounds, but iPhones sold in Japan have been altered to keep the shutter sound on.

However, as the Yomiuri has pointed out, some smartphone applications can disable shutter sounds:

On Nov. 12, a man was arrested at a train station in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, after he took photos up the skirt of a female vocational school student with his smartphone as she stood on an escalator.

The man reportedly told police he used an app that silenced the shutter sound to prevent his target from noticing what he was doing.

A man arrested in September after he photographed a woman’s underwear in Tokyo also reportedly told police he had used such an app to stealthily take photos about 20 times.

According to the National Police Agency, 1,741 cases of illicit photography were reported nationwide last year, a 1.6-fold increase from 2006.

The largest number of snap-happy camera voyeurs was reported in Kanagawa Prefecture.

“About 30 percent of cases involved the misuse of smartphone apps,” a senior Kanagawa prefectural police investigator said.

There are already methods that allow determined people to disable the shutter sounds of non-smartphone cameras. It seems that smartphone apps are making this kind of behavior more accessible to people with less technical ability….

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Chinese Cyberattacks Threaten Japanese Industry

Earlier this year, Japanese police investigating a cyberattack on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries determined that there was a very high likelihood that the attack originated in China. The Japanese government asked the Chinese government to investigate, but as the Japan Times has reported, the Chinese government doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it:

China said in its reply it would contact the relevant authorities, but there has been little progress since, leaving the investigation at a standstill, they said.

After its own investigation, Mitsubishi Heavy said viruses had infected its in-house servers and computers in mid-August but there was no sign important defense-related data was taken.

NPR ran a story yesterday about how the same kind of thing has been happening in America. The U.S. authorities have privately complained to China, but they’ve also seen no significant action to stop the cyberattacks. This kind of industrial espionage is costing the American economy billions of dollars:

Rep. Mike Rogers has actually spoken with executives from some of the American businesses hit by cyberattacks, and he says stolen intellectual property from just one hi-tech company cost them billions of dollars in research and revenue as well as thousands of U.S. jobs.

“Those are 10,000 jobs that would be in this economy, that would employ Americans, that are gone because of Chinese economic espionage,” he says.

New estimates put losses from intellectual property espionage at about a trillion dollars a year, Rogers says. And he says U.S. companies that deal in intellectual property fall into two camps: those that know they’ve been hacked and those that don’t know.

“There really is no other exception than that,” he says.

And if that’s the case in America, you can be assured that the same thing has happened in Japan. The attack on Mitsubishi is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

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WiFi Angels

A commercial for NTT’s Hikari Wifi service educates viewers about the possibilities of wireless internet technology:

Cute angels from Sakura Gakuin send data with their arrows. The wireless signal also apparently has an impact on tea leaves. WiFi is amazing!

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Begging Starbucks For Free WiFi in Japan

Foreign residents and visitors to Japan are often surprised to discover that free Wifi internet access, which is relatively common at cafes and fast food restaurants in other countries, is a very rare thing in Japan. Even foreign chains are super stingy with WiFi. One notable example is Starbucks: it offers free unlimited WiFi access inside stores in its home country, while restricting WiFi access at Japanese stores to subscribers of paid WiFi services (Flet’s, SB, and Mzone ).

One unhappy customer in Japan has turned to the “My Starbucks Idea” site, which allows users to submit and vote on ideas that will improve Starbucks. Here is a screen capture of the submitted idea, which begs Starbucks to provide free wireless internet access at its store locations in Japan:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the idea will have much chance of succeeding. At the time of this blog post, it had a score of minus 30.

[hat tip to Maurie]

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Protecting Against Tsunamis

PBS takes a look at how Japanese and American scientists and engineers are studying techniques to protect coastal areas from tsunami damage:

Although there were several notable cases of towns with breakwaters and seawalls suffering heavy damage on March 11th, researchers still believe that both methods can be helpful. It seems that breakwaters do indeed weaken the force of tsunamis, and things could have been a lot worse if some of those towns had absolutely no breakwater. But, as March 11th demonstrated, it is a mistake to only count on protective barriers. There also needs to be a good evacuation plan in place, and people need to follow it.

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Japan Still Has World’s Fastest Super Computer

A super computer developed by a state-funded research project has retained its No. 1 ranking as the world’s fastest computer in computing speed:

The supercomputer, nicknamed “K” and being developed jointly with Fujitsu Ltd. at the institute’s facility in Kobe, retained the top post, which it first captured in June as the first Japanese computer to do so in seven years.

The feat came amid intense competition as countries race to develop ever-faster supercomputers to conduct simulations in research and development in the fields of science, industry and military.

“K” draws upon the Japanese word “kei” for 10 to the 16th power, with the word representing the system’s performance goal of 10 petaflops. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion operations per second.

This computer project was all over the news in 2009, when DPJ politician Ren Ho suggested that the Japanese government should save taxpayer money by slashing budgets for scientific research、and that it wasn’t really worth it for Japan to build the world’s best super computer.

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