crime

Seattle residents now have the option of following the local police department on Twitter. In a first-of-a-kind program, the city's authorities are launching a new initiative that involves cops translating the news they get on the streets to tweets.

Dubbed "Tweets-by-beat," this program attempts to replace the police blotter that normally runs in local papers with a tech version of basically the same thing, according to the New York Times. When residents follow the department on the social network, they'll get routine tweets of the up-to-the-moment crime happenings in their neighborhoods.

"Liquor violation -- intoxicated … Read more

You've double-parked your car to pick something up when a robot rolls up and threatens to give you a ticket. You might laugh, but the thing's talking with a human voice.

Researchers at Florida International University's Discovery Lab are working with a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build telepresence robots that could patrol while being controlled by disabled police officers and military vets. In a sense, they would be hybrid man-machine cops, like RoboCop. … Read more

Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.

Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving?

No one has easy answers, or even much beyond informed speculation -- certainly not the doctors we spoke to for this article or the medical students who addressed medical augmentation at a Defcon 20 session last month in Las Vegas. But all agree on one thing: A new frontier of medical augmentation isn't just coming sooner than you think. It's already here, as society moves from medically necessary augmentation to elective procedures. Call it human hacking. … Read more

McKayla is not impressed with Thursday's big tech stories:

Microsoft helped develop a surveillance system for New York that pulls in information from video camera footage, 9-1-1 calls, radiation detectors and license plate readers, and analyzes the data in real-time to better fight crime and terrorism. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the program, known as the Domain Awareness System, and it will be available to law enforcement agencies around the world (New York earns 30 percent of sales revenue). It doesn't use face-recognition software, but even still, some critics are worried officers could abuse this technology and … Read more

It must have been quite a surreal scene.

A woman in Louisville, Ky., claims that last Saturday she arranged a date with a man, who arrived at her door and pointed a gun at her leg.

He then allegedly forced her to drive around to several stores, in order to buy cell phones in her own name, with her own money.

According to WDRB News, one of those stores was an Apple Store in Oxmoor Mall.

Somehow -- it's unclear how -- her puported kidnapper, named as Victor A. Sarver Jr., 32, was sufficiently negligent to allow the unnamed … Read more

The three Chicago teens who allegedly posted a Facebook video in which they allegedly beat a disabled man and left him with fatal injuries were charged with first-degree murder, according to CBS and the Associated Press.

The suspects, identified as 16-year-old Malik Jones, 17-year-old Nicholas Ayala and 18-year-old Anthony Malcolm, allegedly attacked 62-year-old Delfino Mora in an alley early Tuesday. Mora was found hours later and taken to St. Francis Hospital in critical condition. He died Wednesday afternoon from blunt force trama, according to report.

Ayala and Malcolm are expected to appear in court Monday. A judge denied bail for … Read more

Back in '80s when the Internet more closely resembled a series of tubes, the state of Rhode Island passed a law making it illegal to lie online. And until this week, this law was still in effect, according to the Associated Press.

That's right, in Rhode Island someone could actually be slapped with a misdemeanor charge, fined up to $500, and sentenced up to a year in prison for lying about their age on an online dating site, fibbing on Facebook about how many people were at a house party, or pumping up their resume on LinkedIn.

According to … Read more

Several San Francisco Bay Area Target stores were the recent, uhhh, target of not one, but two unrelated barcode scammers who apparently found the manufactuer's suggested price of Lego sets too much to bear.

The two men allegedly replaced the bar codes on Lego boxes with phony bar codes, allowing them to waltz out of the store with hundreds of dollars worth of the building blocks for a fraction of the actual price.

And to add a touch of "you-can't-make-this-up" flair, one of the accused is a VP at software giant SAP. According to authorities, the … Read more

Think twice next time you're planning to tweet about what a great time you're having on your vacation, thousands of miles from your empty, vulnerable home.

A survey of 50 convicted burglars in the U.K. suggests the tools used by today's modern criminals include more than just a black ski mask and crowbar. Seventy-eight percent said they'd used Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other social-media sites to target properties.

Also notable, nearly three-quarters of thieves have stepped into the 21st century and take advantage of Google Street View to case joints that might be worth robbing.

The home of Israel Hyman in Arizona was burglarized a few years ago, shortly after he tweeted road trip status updates like "preparing to head out of town," "another 10 hours of driving ahead" and later, "made it to Kansas City" to his 2,000 followers.

Bloggers like myself rarely worry about this sort of thing since I write every CNET post from home and have everything delivered to me via Amazon Prime. In case I didn't make it clear, I never leave my house. Never. I'm way too far behind on polishing my gun collection to go out. And you know what else I like? Booby traps -- they really put the fun in home ownership.… Read more