Who is the Prick Leaving Needles on Buses?

Who is leaving needles like this on bus seats in Hong Kong?

The ongoing news reports of passengers finding needles on bus seats is terrifying to say the least.

So far five needles have been found in the last four days, with no rhyme or reason, except they have all been found on buses run by KMB or Kowloon Motor Bus.

It seems only KMB buses have had these needles so far...

Four people have been injured from sitting on the needles, but thankfully so far the needles haven't been laced with anything nefarious. It's just frightening to think that one could possibly be sitting on a needle.

More importantly who has been doing this crazy act and why?

While KMB has asked staff to check seats before they leave the bus terminus, the company has also asked passengers to be extra vigilant and report any suspicious activity.

What's strange is that KMB claims its buses have video surveillance but has yet to release the footage or comment on it. Are the buses really recording what's going on?

More questions than answers...

Ai Weiwei's Modern Take of Hansel & Gretel

Visitors being tracked by cameras up on the ceiling of the armory

We managed to catch Ai Weiwei's intriguing interactive installation on surveillance called Hansel & Gretel, in collaboration with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who you may remember designed the Bird's Nest in Beijing.

At the time Ai also worked with them on that Olympic stadium, but later pulled out, stating that he didn't want to be a puppet of the Chinese government in its coming out party in 2008.

Called the "thinking person's 'Rain Room'"

So it's interesting to see this prominent collaboration again -- maybe Herzog and de Meuron want to repent for what they did? Or they now understand why Ai didn't want any part of the Bird's Nest project? Or perhaps they sympathize with what he went through when he was held for 81 days without any official charges, though later it was for "economic crimes".

In any event, we went to the site of the show, the Park Avenue Armory, and were promptly instructed by one of the staff to go to the back of the building to purchase tickets and enter from there.

We were led to a door into a very dark space and told the exit was where the blue light was. At this point we didn't know what to expect.

Why were we in such a dark room where the floor seemed curved? And what was happening on the floor?

Soon we realized there were images of us taken from above and projected on the floor, and we looked up and saw a bunch of lights lined up systematically across the ceiling of the 55,000-square foot armory, but we couldn't exactly see what they were. They were drones that were recording our movements, literally following us around with photographic evidence of their surveillance.

Being tracked is simultaneously cool and disconcerting

At first it seemed like a novelty, having machines tracking and taking picture of us. How did they do that? Infra-red cameras attached to 56 computers. But why were they doing this to us? What had we done to deserve that?

It also dawned on us that this is how Ai probably felt when he was under surveillance in Beijing, when he returned home from his unofficial incarceration to find cameras all over his home to track his movements, which is unsettling and scary how easily one can be followed at all times.

There were also at least two drones that wandered around ceiling hovering over people that gave an uneasy feeling.

After a while we emerged from the giant space and back into the sunlight, where we were instructed to go back to the front entrance of the Armory.

When we entered the doors, we were told to look at a series of red lights, which we later found had taken a picture of us that was projected onto screens in the hallway. We looked like zombies, our pupils were blank, making them haunting images.

A peephole view of the installation from a distance

Here there wasn't much to see except a kind of library space where people could sit down and browse through the Hansel & Gretel website that chronicles the history of surveillance over the centuries.

You can also take a picture of yourself on the iPad and then it will try to find the earlier picture of you when you walked through the entrance. In my case it was a successful (and creepy) match.

There was also an area where you could look through a peephole back at the armory space to have a more bird's eye view of the project, though you still couldn't clearly see what was going on.

What to do about it?

In the gift shop you can buy special foil bags or plastic case to put your smartphones in to stop others from tracking you, or buy a giant magnet that says #resist, as well as giant tomes of Ai's body of work.

There's also a phone case that says "The NSA has all your selfies" -- which pretty much hits the nail on the head.

The title of the show is a reference to the Brothers Grimm fairytale of two children tempted by sweets by an old woman who holds them hostage. Some critics have surmised from the show that the more you post online, the more Big Brother knows about you and your friends.

Will that stop you from posting on social media? Probably not, but don't say you haven't been warned.

Hansel & Gretel

Until August 6, 2017

Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory

643 Park Avenue

New York

www.armoryonpark.org

China's Terrorist Threat -- Smog

Visibility in Harbin dropped below three metres making surveillance difficult

It's sad but also amusing to hear the pollution is so bad in China that it has made surveillance very difficult, raising fears of not being able to detect terrorist attacks.

Beijing has invested so much in its nationwide surveillance network that the police can see what's going on in every major street of large cities.

But since smog has enveloped many places, such as Harbin last month where visibility dropped to below three metres, it makes it more difficult for surveillance.

"According to our experience, as the visibility drops below three metres, even the best camera cannot see beyond a dozen metres," said Kong Zilong, a senior project engineer with Shenzhen Yichengan Technology, and expert in video surveillance technology.

The central government realizes this is a serious issue and has commissioned scientists to come up with a solution. The National Natural Science Foundation of China has funded two teams, one civilian, the other military to study the issue and find solutions within four years.

Professor Yang Aiping is an expert in digital imaging with the School of Electronic Information Engineering at Tianjin University and leader of the civilian team.

"Most studies in other countries are to do with fog," she says. "In China, most people think that fog and smog can be dealt by the same method. Our preliminary research shows that the smog particles are quite different from the small water droplets of fog in terms of optical properties," she said.

"We need to heavily revise, if not completely rewrite alogrithms in some mathematical models. We also need to do lots of computer simulation and extensive field tests."

Meanwhile professor Zhang Li, an image processing expert with the department of electronic engineering at Tsinghua University, said researchers may have to be more creative, suggesting microwaves of electromagnetic waves could travel through smog and bounce back if it hit objects, but then it would generate radiation that could be bad for human health.

What we can't understand is -- why can't the country seriously start cutting back on air pollution? It has started to cut down on the number of coal-fired plants, but there are too many cars on the roads. Although lower-end factories are closing in the south and the rest are moving westward for cheaper labour, heavy industry such as making steel is still going strong.

China prided itself on being able to manipulate the weather before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the capital had the best weather (and hardly any traffic) during that period.

Many Beijing residents hoped the arrangement of odd and even license plate number cars on the roads would continue, but alas the dream was not possible as the restrictions were too extreme.

Nevertheless we find it interesting that China is worried that terrorists may choose the smoggiest days to launch attacks in the country. But even they would have trouble seeking their targets too, no?