7 ms·

Dubai detectives to get Google Glass

57 points by matthijs_ 12y ago

1971genocide 12y ago
I find it funny that everyone in the west allows their grandmas to have an opinion while dubai doesn't fuck around and let smart people make the best decisions for their society.
- hosay123 12y ago
  Where "best decisions" includes immigrant slave labour, legal/cultural nightmares for rape victims, and jail time for holding hands
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  I find it less than funny when people feign ignorance of actual oppression.
gus_massa 12y ago
I'd like to ignore the privacy aspect. I want to discuss the false positive problem. Is the technology reliable to have a low false positive rate? Probably face recognition is good enough to classify the photograph of your friends in Facebook, and the friends of your friends. It has to choose a person in a set of ~100. What happens when someone is falsely identified? Is the suspect released after a ID check or he is moved to the police station to a full check? Can this be a proxy for racial profiling? There was a horror story about a face recognition software that didn't detect someone with black skin. This can have the reverse problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM
- natch 12y ago
  In Dubai, I'd be concerned about TRUE positives. The more perfect the identification of someone who committed a supposed "crime" as deemed so by Dubai's ludicrous standards, the worse this is.
- andrewljohnson 12y ago
  Look at it another way... black people (in the US) are already profiled. This sort of technology could decrease that abuse - let all the races share the false positive rate.
- drpgq 12y ago
  The best public source on recent face recognition performance is NIST's latest tests: http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2013.cfm http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2013.cfm
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  > What happens when someone is falsely identified? I'm guessing the same thing that happens if someone is falsely identified without Google Glass. Why would it be different?
falcolas 12y ago
Always worth bringing up the CV Dazzle research project when you talk about globally available facial recognition. http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/
- vxNsr 12y ago
  The problem with their ideas is that you instantly become recognizable as the dude with a ton of different hair colors and strange face paint, you don't blend in with the crowd at all.
gaius 12y ago
And so it begins.
bluerobotcat 12y ago
Talk about bad PR for Google Glass. Already, the article has been amended with the notice '(This version of the story has been corrected to change headline to show recognition database software developed by police not Google)'. I don't imagine Google will be advertising this use case if they ever do a keynote on Glass again.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  On the contrary, I think this shows that despite the strong backlash that Google Glass has been receiving, we are beginning to find legitimate use cases where such technology will soon become indispensable.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Violating privacy has always been the complaint against Glass. This is a long-anticipated example thereof, not a new and "indispensable" application. The idea of a wearable HUD is cool, but I don't see how any implementation can ever by trustworthy to non-wearers.
    - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
      There is no added invasion of privacy here, just automating face recognition. In effect, you seem to be opposed to replacing brain processing with computer processing, which is squarely on the wrong side of history. This is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Banning it is a stopgap, we just need to start working on regulating it and defining the boundaries of such practices.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
jonalmeida 12y ago
I've mentioned this before else where, but Dubai doesn't need this because crime is so low compared to most countries that the only reason it may be used is solely for publicity. In majority parts of the city, you can still walk around at night and not be as worried as you would in other cities. Hence, it makes me want to throw out the idea of how effective this facial recognition really is. If your sole reason is marketing, you won't care much for effective use of said tech.
- hnriot 12y ago
  "crime" is low, mainly because you can get months in jail for kissing in public, and as for women, well, that's probably best avoided, since they (the Dubai state) have a really backward view of women and what they should or shouldn't do.
  - jonalmeida 12y ago
    I'm aware of the situation/culture having lived there the majority of my life.
atmosx 12y ago
Wouldn't be Facebook the best DB provider at this point in time? This is a state-level deal and FB has the most advanced face recognition software IIRC (I've read about this some months ago online), there's tons of $$$ to be made in the field.
saulrh 12y ago
Good. Scream as much as you want about facial recognition software; it doesn't give them any capabilities they didn't already have and if they do _anything_ with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court. What I'm more interested in is that all of these officers are now wearing cameras and sending an always-on video stream to home base. It's a trivial step to demand that that stream be saved.
- Crito 12y ago
  > "it doesn't give them any capabilities they didn't already have" Quantity has a quality all of it's own. While currently the police can attempt to observe and memorize every face they see during their patrols, and where/when they saw it, doing this without a technological assist will be fruitless. Police without technology can memorize the faces of a few select persons of interests, but for tracking the entire public they are relatively worthless. This technology threatens to change this. > "if they do _anything_ with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court." Why are you so confident of that? UAE police have been credibly accused of systematic human rights violations in the recent past, and I've seen no hint of eviscerating over that...
- avn2109 12y ago
  >> "... sending an always-on video stream to home base." The trouble is, so long as the cops have the ability to switch off the camera/pull the battery/cover the lens, we lose all the benefits of wearable video for police. Before beating up Rodney King 2.0, they just flip the switch. Then in court, "The officers' cameras had a technical malfunction at the time and there is no video of the incident." But if they want evidence of you doing/saying something incriminating, you bet your boots those cameras are rolling. This is actually an interesting systems design problem, wherein the users are adversarial but in total control of the hardware.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    The only way to stop a bad guy with a camera is a good guy with a camera. (And yes, the wording is intended to resemble a common talking point about guns. The difference is that a mistake made with a camera is often correctable, a mistake made with a camera is often final).
danellis 12y ago
How would this even work? Glass with the camera on has a battery life of about an hour. They could power it externally, but then it gets too hot, slows down and gives a warning message. Add in the CPU load of facial recognition and I just don't think Glass is up to the job.
- stereo 12y ago
  I guess it could be on demand, and handled server-side. Uploading an image every once in a while doesn’t use much energy.
- karmicthreat 12y ago
  You don't need to harvest a constant 20 fps. Every 30 seconds take a frame capture. Do a Haar transform to crop out candidate faces and upload to server that does the heavy recognition lifting.
  - danellis 12y ago
    I guess it depends what their use case is. In 30 seconds, a lot of people have walked past you unrecorded.
- Istof 12y ago
  Until they work out the heating issue and start using an external power supply, they possibly could trigger it manually (picture instead of video).
nl 12y ago
I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass. It seems to me that putting that technology in the hands of everyone would make more sense than restricting it to a few.
- Crito 12y ago
  Because the product does not yet have significant traction, and they believe enough bad press could kill the product completely. Facial recognition is something that they fear would invite bad press. Honestly, I think the product has been on borrowed time since the first person thought up the term "glasshole".
- drdaeman 12y ago
  Because there are too many people who suddenly got terrified about the fact their faces are visible in public and they could be recognized.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  > I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass. In ten years from now, everybody will probably wonder as well since by then, this technology (Glass + facial recognition) will most likely be mainstream. But right now, it's prudent from Google to make a theoretical stand against that while Google Glass gains traction.
  - nl 12y ago
    Yeah that's a fair way of looking at it.
stuaxo 12y ago
Yay dystopia !
kseistrup 12y ago
Wear a burqa, problem solved.
- therobot24 12y ago
  unless you completely cover the ocular region as well, that won't necessarily help don't know why the downvotes - my phd research is in periocular recognition (using only the eye, eyebrow, and surrounding region to do verification and identification), but if you don't believe it is possible i suggest you check out some of the work in ieee-xplore
aric 12y ago
Dubai's laws are atrocious. It's trivial to become implicated. Severe imprisonment of citizens and unwitting travelers alike is the primary reason to stay out and not support Dubai's economy. Only an illusion of legal modernity exists through wealth. Google Glass with facial recognition is an excellent fit.
th3iedkid 12y ago
>>Last year Dubai announced it would supply its police with $400,000 Lamborghini sports cars for use at major tourist sites. Dubai's deputy police chief said the vehicles were in keeping with the Gulf capital's image. Lamborghinis are fashion or do they have specific functions being part of police scheme of things?
- superuser2 12y ago
  Police need to be able to give chase to others who are speeding (away) at 150mph.
  - revelation 12y ago
    Because..? High-speed police chases are a classic example of fiction over data. They do vastly more harm than they help, but we still have them because police officers grow up thinking they would chase bad guys in cars.
    - superuser2 12y ago
      Should your purchase of a Lamborghini include immunity from speeding tickets? Dubai is surrounded by desert, where going 150+ in your $2 million car is something a lot of people would be tempted to do. If the police's top speed is 90, then the wealthy are above the law. High-speed police chases do a lot of harm when they take place in dense urban/suburban neighborhoods. The use case for police Lamborghinis is on huge rural/desert highways.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - nl 12y ago
        Speed camera are much more effective for speed limit enforcement. Helicopters work better for tracking high speed get aways. Lamborghinis work best in video games though.
- Crito 12y ago
lovelearning 12y ago
It sounds sophisticated to a layman, but I have doubts over its practicality. For example, how will the system overcome image noise introduced by traditional dressing, such as the keffiyeh and hijab? I'm no expert, but have played around with haar face detection, and eigen/fisher face recognition. My experience was that factors like face position, facial adornments (caps, spectacles, moustaches, etc) and ambient lighting had significant effects on accuracy. There was also the reported failure of face recognition in the Boston marathon bombing investigation [1]. [1]: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-recognition-identify-boston-bombing-suspects/ http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-recognitio...
autism_hurts 12y ago
Thanks Google!
kurtle 12y ago
Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years. This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible, paying top dollar to contractors to make it work. I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets. To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so. Some more examples of this: * They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime. * There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him. * Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something. * In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below * To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway. * All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat. * There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant). And there are many more. I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.
- superuser2 12y ago
  Many (most?) doorman buildings - whether high-rise apartments or office towers - have a security desk in the main lobby where someone watches the cameras and elevators. They may or may not have full elevator controls but they definitely have a "stop" button. That might be a foreign experience to SV natives, but for people who live in dense urban centers and work at medium to large organizations, it's pretty normal.
stfu 12y ago
Fortunately this is happening in an undemocratic country and not coming with the typical terrorism / save-the-children propaganda. I hope we soon can hear about the benefits Google glas will have for example on enforcing Dubai's stand on homosexuality: In keeping with traditional Islamic morality, both Federal and Emirate law prohibit homosexuality and cross-dressing with punishment ranging from long prison sentences, deportation, for foreigners, and the death penalty. (1) (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai

57 points by matthijs_ 12y ago

1971genocide 12y ago

I find it funny that everyone in the west allows their grandmas to have an opinion while dubai doesn't fuck around and let smart people make the best decisions for their society.

hosay123 12y ago
Where "best decisions" includes immigrant slave labour, legal/cultural nightmares for rape victims, and jail time for holding hands
spacemanmatt 12y ago
I find it less than funny when people feign ignorance of actual oppression.

gus_massa 12y ago

I'd like to ignore the privacy aspect. I want to discuss the false positive problem. Is the technology reliable to have a low false positive rate? Probably face recognition is good enough to classify the photograph of your friends in Facebook, and the friends of your friends. It has to choose a person in a set of ~100. What happens when someone is falsely identified? Is the suspect released after a ID check or he is moved to the police station to a full check? Can this be a proxy for racial profiling? There was a horror story about a face recognition software that didn't detect someone with black skin. This can have the reverse problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM

natch 12y ago
In Dubai, I'd be concerned about TRUE positives. The more perfect the identification of someone who committed a supposed "crime" as deemed so by Dubai's ludicrous standards, the worse this is.
andrewljohnson 12y ago
Look at it another way... black people (in the US) are already profiled. This sort of technology could decrease that abuse - let all the races share the false positive rate.
drpgq 12y ago
The best public source on recent face recognition performance is NIST's latest tests: http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2013.cfm http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2013.cfm
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> What happens when someone is falsely identified? I'm guessing the same thing that happens if someone is falsely identified without Google Glass. Why would it be different?

falcolas 12y ago

Always worth bringing up the CV Dazzle research project when you talk about globally available facial recognition. http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/

vxNsr 12y ago
The problem with their ideas is that you instantly become recognizable as the dude with a ton of different hair colors and strange face paint, you don't blend in with the crowd at all.

gaius 12y ago

And so it begins.

bluerobotcat 12y ago

Talk about bad PR for Google Glass. Already, the article has been amended with the notice '(This version of the story has been corrected to change headline to show recognition database software developed by police not Google)'. I don't imagine Google will be advertising this use case if they ever do a keynote on Glass again.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
On the contrary, I think this shows that despite the strong backlash that Google Glass has been receiving, we are beginning to find legitimate use cases where such technology will soon become indispensable.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Violating privacy has always been the complaint against Glass. This is a long-anticipated example thereof, not a new and "indispensable" application. The idea of a wearable HUD is cool, but I don't see how any implementation can ever by trustworthy to non-wearers.
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    There is no added invasion of privacy here, just automating face recognition. In effect, you seem to be opposed to replacing brain processing with computer processing, which is squarely on the wrong side of history. This is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Banning it is a stopgap, we just need to start working on regulating it and defining the boundaries of such practices.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

jonalmeida 12y ago

I've mentioned this before else where, but Dubai doesn't need this because crime is so low compared to most countries that the only reason it may be used is solely for publicity. In majority parts of the city, you can still walk around at night and not be as worried as you would in other cities. Hence, it makes me want to throw out the idea of how effective this facial recognition really is. If your sole reason is marketing, you won't care much for effective use of said tech.

hnriot 12y ago
"crime" is low, mainly because you can get months in jail for kissing in public, and as for women, well, that's probably best avoided, since they (the Dubai state) have a really backward view of women and what they should or shouldn't do.
- jonalmeida 12y ago
  I'm aware of the situation/culture having lived there the majority of my life.

atmosx 12y ago

Wouldn't be Facebook the best DB provider at this point in time? This is a state-level deal and FB has the most advanced face recognition software IIRC (I've read about this some months ago online), there's tons of $$$ to be made in the field.

saulrh 12y ago

Good. Scream as much as you want about facial recognition software; it doesn't give them any capabilities they didn't already have and if they do _anything_ with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court. What I'm more interested in is that all of these officers are now wearing cameras and sending an always-on video stream to home base. It's a trivial step to demand that that stream be saved.

Crito 12y ago
> "it doesn't give them any capabilities they didn't already have" Quantity has a quality all of it's own. While currently the police can attempt to observe and memorize every face they see during their patrols, and where/when they saw it, doing this without a technological assist will be fruitless. Police without technology can memorize the faces of a few select persons of interests, but for tracking the entire public they are relatively worthless. This technology threatens to change this. > "if they do _anything_ with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court." Why are you so confident of that? UAE police have been credibly accused of systematic human rights violations in the recent past, and I've seen no hint of eviscerating over that...
avn2109 12y ago
>> "... sending an always-on video stream to home base." The trouble is, so long as the cops have the ability to switch off the camera/pull the battery/cover the lens, we lose all the benefits of wearable video for police. Before beating up Rodney King 2.0, they just flip the switch. Then in court, "The officers' cameras had a technical malfunction at the time and there is no video of the incident." But if they want evidence of you doing/saying something incriminating, you bet your boots those cameras are rolling. This is actually an interesting systems design problem, wherein the users are adversarial but in total control of the hardware.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  The only way to stop a bad guy with a camera is a good guy with a camera. (And yes, the wording is intended to resemble a common talking point about guns. The difference is that a mistake made with a camera is often correctable, a mistake made with a camera is often final).

danellis 12y ago

How would this even work? Glass with the camera on has a battery life of about an hour. They could power it externally, but then it gets too hot, slows down and gives a warning message. Add in the CPU load of facial recognition and I just don't think Glass is up to the job.

stereo 12y ago
I guess it could be on demand, and handled server-side. Uploading an image every once in a while doesn’t use much energy.
karmicthreat 12y ago
You don't need to harvest a constant 20 fps. Every 30 seconds take a frame capture. Do a Haar transform to crop out candidate faces and upload to server that does the heavy recognition lifting.
- danellis 12y ago
  I guess it depends what their use case is. In 30 seconds, a lot of people have walked past you unrecorded.
Istof 12y ago
Until they work out the heating issue and start using an external power supply, they possibly could trigger it manually (picture instead of video).

nl 12y ago

I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass. It seems to me that putting that technology in the hands of everyone would make more sense than restricting it to a few.

Crito 12y ago
Because the product does not yet have significant traction, and they believe enough bad press could kill the product completely. Facial recognition is something that they fear would invite bad press. Honestly, I think the product has been on borrowed time since the first person thought up the term "glasshole".
drdaeman 12y ago
Because there are too many people who suddenly got terrified about the fact their faces are visible in public and they could be recognized.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass. In ten years from now, everybody will probably wonder as well since by then, this technology (Glass + facial recognition) will most likely be mainstream. But right now, it's prudent from Google to make a theoretical stand against that while Google Glass gains traction.
- nl 12y ago
  Yeah that's a fair way of looking at it.

stuaxo 12y ago

Yay dystopia !

kseistrup 12y ago

Wear a burqa, problem solved.

therobot24 12y ago
unless you completely cover the ocular region as well, that won't necessarily help don't know why the downvotes - my phd research is in periocular recognition (using only the eye, eyebrow, and surrounding region to do verification and identification), but if you don't believe it is possible i suggest you check out some of the work in ieee-xplore

aric 12y ago

Dubai's laws are atrocious. It's trivial to become implicated. Severe imprisonment of citizens and unwitting travelers alike is the primary reason to stay out and not support Dubai's economy. Only an illusion of legal modernity exists through wealth. Google Glass with facial recognition is an excellent fit.

th3iedkid 12y ago

>>Last year Dubai announced it would supply its police with $400,000 Lamborghini sports cars for use at major tourist sites. Dubai's deputy police chief said the vehicles were in keeping with the Gulf capital's image. Lamborghinis are fashion or do they have specific functions being part of police scheme of things?

superuser2 12y ago
Police need to be able to give chase to others who are speeding (away) at 150mph.
- revelation 12y ago
  Because..? High-speed police chases are a classic example of fiction over data. They do vastly more harm than they help, but we still have them because police officers grow up thinking they would chase bad guys in cars.
  - superuser2 12y ago
    Should your purchase of a Lamborghini include immunity from speeding tickets? Dubai is surrounded by desert, where going 150+ in your $2 million car is something a lot of people would be tempted to do. If the police's top speed is 90, then the wealthy are above the law. High-speed police chases do a lot of harm when they take place in dense urban/suburban neighborhoods. The use case for police Lamborghinis is on huge rural/desert highways.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - nl 12y ago
      Speed camera are much more effective for speed limit enforcement. Helicopters work better for tracking high speed get aways. Lamborghinis work best in video games though.
Crito 12y ago

lovelearning 12y ago

It sounds sophisticated to a layman, but I have doubts over its practicality. For example, how will the system overcome image noise introduced by traditional dressing, such as the keffiyeh and hijab? I'm no expert, but have played around with haar face detection, and eigen/fisher face recognition. My experience was that factors like face position, facial adornments (caps, spectacles, moustaches, etc) and ambient lighting had significant effects on accuracy. There was also the reported failure of face recognition in the Boston marathon bombing investigation [1]. [1]: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-recognition-identify-boston-bombing-suspects/ http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-recognitio...

autism_hurts 12y ago

Thanks Google!

kurtle 12y ago

Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years. This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible, paying top dollar to contractors to make it work. I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets. To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so. Some more examples of this: * They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime. * There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him. * Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something. * In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below * To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway. * All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat. * There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant). And there are many more. I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.

superuser2 12y ago
Many (most?) doorman buildings - whether high-rise apartments or office towers - have a security desk in the main lobby where someone watches the cameras and elevators. They may or may not have full elevator controls but they definitely have a "stop" button. That might be a foreign experience to SV natives, but for people who live in dense urban centers and work at medium to large organizations, it's pretty normal.

stfu 12y ago

Fortunately this is happening in an undemocratic country and not coming with the typical terrorism / save-the-children propaganda. I hope we soon can hear about the benefits Google glas will have for example on enforcing Dubai's stand on homosexuality: In keeping with traditional Islamic morality, both Federal and Emirate law prohibit homosexuality and cross-dressing with punishment ranging from long prison sentences, deportation, for foreigners, and the death penalty. (1) (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai