 video streaming, user authentication, and detailed authorisation mechanisms need to be readily available to ensure that hackers do not get access to your sensitive data and video. In addition, the ability to pull user and device activity reports and remotely disconnect devices will equip you with additional tools to safeguard against loss or theft.
Scagell: Mobile devices are clearly taking over. In fact, most people coming online for the first time are doing so from a mobile device. Visec has built all interfaces in a responsive manner, utilising the latest bootstrap framework (which allows web pages to render in a friendly manner on their devices), we are also working on new mobile-friendly apps.
Goldridge: We have both iOS and Android offerings available, covering just about everything: live view, playback, push notifications, I/O control, PTZ control, audio etc. Security is essential and tight user rights can contain it, but using advanced routers with proper routing is essential to become truly secure. As for data protection, unfortunately, if rights are given there are leaks which cannot be protected against for any VMS.
Ainsworth: They range from apps that connect directly 1-to-1 to NVRs, to apps that connect to your entire Victor ecosystem and see all the NVRs.
Hi-Tech Security Solutions: What are the latest developments in your VMS platform that have been recently released or are going to be released soon?
Cary: In January, Genetec introduced a Retail Business Intelligence system that will offer insightful people counting, flow-management and customer retention data. Significantly, the system will include analysis features that provides end-users with easy-to-read reports on their business.
In 2016, Genetec released Mission Control, a decision support system that will meet the industry’s continued need to support security professionals in an increasingly complex world. Mission Control provides excellent operational intelligence by offering a clear path to better decision-making with tools that analyse and qualify data from thousands of sensors and security devices in real time.
Mission Control is designed to help security professionals be professional and calm when dealing with incidents, unplanned events or emergencies, by taking human emotion out of the equation in high-stress situations. The system can integrate standard operating procedures (SOP), and will play a big role in offering each company its own customised way of managing unplanned events. We have already moved well beyond the paper-based instructions usually found in a large binder. Mission Control will offer methodical and automated benefits of integrated SOPs, which will continue to advance in the years to come.
In addition to work efficiency, cost and compatibility advantages to be gained when an SOP is integrated with a decision support system, Mission Control can also measure reaction time and monitor how precisely the security operator followed SOP guidelines, to help learn from operational experience as a key advancement in security and business intelligence.
In addition to Genetec Mission Control, Genetec also released a new evidence management system. With the amount of digital content related to security operations and increasing at an exponential rate, security departments and law enforcement are always looking for tools that help them manage and share data, and this need will continue and expand. Genetec Clearance, a cloud-supported subscription system will help meet this need in 2017 and beyond.
Genetec Clearance helps manage the increasing amount of digital case evidence from PDF documents, audio recordings of interviews, captured video from surveillance and body-worn cameras, and the many additional digital assets shared by public and private contributors. It allows for the secure collection, management and sharing of evidence from different sources. And it facilitates collaboration between security departments, outside agencies and the public to help law enforcement overcome issues relating to sharing and protecting data, and also speeds up investigations in a cost-efficient manner.
After 20 years of innovation, Genetec remains an independent, private company committed to providing our end users with intelligent, unified solutions that help keep their assets, people and information safe. By helping them to ‘harden’ their systems against criminal cyber activity, protect privacy, develop business strategies that utilise the data collected in their systems and collaborate with other organisations, we will continue to support all our end-users as they protect the things that matter to all of us.
Scagell: Visec has built the first African cloud linking cities into an easy-to-use surveillance system. Our growth has been enormous and it brings with it challenges of technology, big data and machine learning. As such, Visec has assembled a global team of the brightest to create powerful technology on the back end, yet simplified user interfaces on the front end. The end users have no idea of the CPU and processing power of what happens when an event is triggered. They just know everything works and the system can be trusted.
Goldridge: Some of our latest features include NUface facial recognition, VM Crystal and cost-effective storage solutions, and up to 80 TB of storage (NUUO Storage). We are also focusing more on third parties this year, so we tied in Lenel, Tyco, Gallagher and Paxton to offer clients more from one solution.
Ainsworth: We have recently made new products available in the fields of LPR (licence plate recognition), SD Card Trickle/NVR backfill, and more PoE NVRs.
For more information:
Genetec:
NUUO:
Tyco Security Products:
Visec:
Refer to Hi-Tech Security Business Directory () for further details on these companies.Of all the stories being plucked from WikiLeaks' classified Afghanistan war logs, many analysts have picked out the Taliban's use of heat-seeking missiles as the most troubling. Remembering how the mujahideen used missiles to drive Soviet aircraft from the skies, pundits worried that the Taliban would inflict a similar pain upon American planes and helicopters in Afghanistan. But for those of us who follow the illicit arms trade, the documents simply underscore what we already knew: The Taliban has failed to reproduce the devastatingly effective anti-aircraft campaign that brought the Red Army to its knees in the mid-1980s.
Afghanistan's storied history of anti-aircraft weapons (known as Man-portable Air Defense Systems -- MANPADS) centers around the American Stinger missile, which played a decisive role in the U.S.-funded insurgency that ended nine brutal years of Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Prior to the arrival of the Stinger, none of the weapons procured and distributed to the Afghan rebels by their three main benefactors -- the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia -- had proven effective against Soviet aircraft, which bombed villages, attacked rebel strongholds, and strafed supply caravans with impunity.
That all changed in September 1986, when a newly trained mujahideen missile team fired its first Stingers at three Soviet Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships attempting to land at Jalalabad airfield. Locked onto the infra-red signatures of their targets, the five-foot-long, 35-pound missiles raced after the ill-fated helicopters at speeds of over 1,500 mph, smashing into them with "the kinetic force of a mid-sized car traveling at sixty miles per hour," according to a 1987 article in the Arizona Republic. The stricken helicopters fell to the ground and burst into flames, marking the advent of a new chapter in the war.
Over the next three years, the mujahideen, who received Stingers from Washington and extensive training on their use in Pakistan, staged dozens of attacks that brought down nearly 270 aircraft, contributing in no small part to the Soviet Union's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989. While no single factor can be credited for the triumph of a rag-tag militia over the formidable Soviet military, the Stinger missile was a game-changer, destroying hundreds of multi-million-dollar Soviet aircraft, killing dozens of highly trained pilots, and disrupting and degrading Soviet counter insurgency operations throughout the country. So pervasive was the Stinger's influence on events in Afghanistan that analysts coined a term around it: "the Stinger effect."
After the Soviet withdrawal, the U.S. government scrambled to collect the remaining Stinger missiles, fearing they could end up in the hands of terrorists. A top-secret CIA program dubbed "Operation Missing in Action Stinger" was established to buy back the missiles. Details on the classified program remain scant, but the information that is available suggests that, despite rewards of $100,000 or more for each device, the CIA failed to recover many if not most of the loose Stingers. Government officials interviewed by author Steve Coll for his book Ghost Wars claim that an estimated 600 of the Afghan Stingers were still missing as of 1996. Some of the missing missiles ended up in the hands of terrorists, insurgents, and hostile governments as far away as North Korea and Sri Lanka, but many remained squirreled away in rebel arms caches. As recently as 2005, Stingers were seized from a cache near the Pakistan border, and incidents of trafficking in Stinger components have been reported as recently as 2006.
AFP/Getty Images
Matthew Schroeder is manager of the arms sales monitoring project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Obama Is 0 for 4
On Foreign Policy
Who Will Be the Next Secretary of Defense?
The Circus Comes
To Pakistan
Could Mr. WikiLeaks Go to Prison?
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE
A Cause For Alarm
Considering the number of "stingers" that were not recovered in Afghanistan.I think there's every reason to worry.
Because I have reasons to believe that the called "leaked" war report may have been doctored to take away attention from what is really happening.
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