DTV provides a greatly increased choice of channels and services. By choosing functions such as action replays whilst a game continues or selecting an answer to a quiz question, the viewer is able to interact with, rather than just watch, a program. DTV also has the potential to bring the internet to households who do not have PCs, allowing the user to surf the web, send emails and use home shopping, banking and interactive local and national government services. DTV programmes are also of a much higher quality in terms of both sound and picture.

Where are we now?

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell MP made a statement to Parliament in 2004 to provide an update on the progress made towards digital switchover. In the statement the Minister said that 2012 may be the most appropriate date for the completion of switchover, rather than the original proposition of 2010, and that Ofcom would include the first references to the timetable in draft Digital License agreements for Channels 3,4 and 5, to be published in September 2004.

The Government also announced that switchover should be broadcaster led and tasked the BBC with preparing a detailed plan for switchover, which the Government would later 'endorse'.

Why is switchover important to the Consumer Electronics sector?

The Government's commitment to upgrade the UK broadcasting system from analogue to digital transmissions will dramatically affect the Consumer Electronics market. As public awareness of digital switchover increases, the demand for digital products will increase and the demand for analogue products will decrease. The Consumer Electronics sector is therefore integral to the switchover project; it must be ready to meet these changes in demand.

Intellect members have already committed years of R&D and investment to developing a wide range of digitally compatible products such as iDTVs (Integrated Digital Televisions), Set Top Boxes and Personal Video Recorders. Intellect is now working to ensure that the supply chain is properly represented as the digital switchover project begins to be implemented and Consumer Electronics manufacturers are in the best position to respond to their new digital market place. intellectuk.org

The Public relations is so reassuring but It's YOU that they really want to herd like cattle

SMART-TECH will go global: prepare to either fight this fascism or be doomed to be controlled by it...

Satellite radio navigation is an advanced technology. It is based on the emission from satellites of signals indicating the time extremely precisely.

This enables any individual to determine his or her position or the location of any moving or stationary object (e.g. a vehicle, a ship, or a herd of cattle, etc.) to within one metre thanks to a small cheap individual receiver.

GALILEO is based on a constellation of 30 satellites and ground stations providing information concerning the positioning of users in many sectors such as transport (vehicle location, route searching, speed control, guidance systems, etc.), social services (e.g. aid for the disabled or elderly), the justice system and customs services (location of suspects, border controls), public works (geographical information systems), search and rescue systems, or leisure (direction-finding at sea or in the mountains, etc.). - see here for more

Wi-Fi population command & control

wireless CCTV in lamposts - This BBC story reports WiFi internet friendly lamposts to be tested on student campus in Scotland ... BUT... this page reveals - from 'Starlight' - the company involved - says they have a CCTV capability: "It is a system which allows the provision of multiple services including Wireless Internet, Wireless Street Lighting, Wireless Electricty, Wireless Security, Wireless CCTV, and Wireless Surveillance."

Wi-fi CCTV systems being used already:

Example: Bolton UK - The images from each dome camera are transmitted via wireless from the camera to a central aggregation point. The signal is then transmitted via wireless from each site back to the town hall where the control room is located. The control room houses the Titan Vision viewing and recording system where images are viewed at 25 fps (frames per second), MPEG4 quality and controlled from a desktop PC.

The Titan Vision system also has software and hardware security measures to make the network secure and the feature-rich management system means that, should an incident occur, digital video footage can be accessed and retrieved immediately and burned onto CD. It can then be used by the police and is acceptable as evidence in court, according to the House of Lords Fifth Report.

1984? our concept of reality is being manipulated via a multi billion dollar PR campaign

Terror attacks make us WANT to feel safer - Tony Blair said after rejecting a full public inquiry into 777:

"I do accept that people want to know exactly what happened. We will make sure they do."

The total digital switchover really gives the controllers of reality the edge - the ability to manipulate mass transmissions of moving images GLOBALLY in REAL TIME via a Satellite...

flashback 1999 - When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing

By William M. Arkin Special to washingtonpost.com Monday, Feb. 1, 1999

"Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.

At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.

But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.

Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most memorable is Colin Powell stating "I am being treated well by my captors."

"They chose to have him say something he would never otherwise have said," chuckled one of Papcun's colleagues.

A Box of Chocolates is Like War

Most Americans were introduced to the tricks of the digital age in the movie Forrest Gump, when the character played by Tom Hanks appeared to shake hands with President Kennedy.

For Hollywood, it is special effects. For covert operators in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, it is a weapon of the future.

"Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things," says Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of the Information Operations department of the National Defense University in Washington, the military's school for information warfare.

PSYOPS seeks to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations.

Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.

To some, PSYOPS is a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping and radio propaganda. To a growing group of information war technologists, it is the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup.

Allah on the Holodeck

Pentagon planners started to discuss digital morphing after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Covert operators kicked around the idea of creating a computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or showing other such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Iraq and the Arab world.

The tape war never proceeded, killed, participants say, by bureaucratic fights over jurisdiction, skepticism over the technology, and concerns raised by Arab coalition partners.

What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad?

But the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air Force officer asked in 1990?

According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air.

But doing so over the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over Baghdad on the order of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take a mirror more than a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and power sources.

And besides, investigators came back, what does Allah look like?

The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space ... for special operations deception missions."

War is Like a Box of Chocolates

Voice-morphing? Fake video? Holographic projection? They sound more like Mission Impossible and Star Trek gimmicks than weapons. Yet for each, there are corresponding and growing research efforts as the technologies improve and offensive information warfare expands.

Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or words together to make a composite, Papcun's software developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations.

The irony is that after Papcun finished his speech cloning research, there were no takers in the military. Luckily for him, Hollywood is interested: The promise of creating a virtual Clark Gable is mightier than the sword.

Video and photo manipulation has already raised profound questions of authenticity for the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not only journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy-minded who will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too distant future.

"We already know that seeing isn't necessarily believing," says Dan Kuehl, "now I guess hearing isn't either."

William M. Arkin, author of "The U.S. Military Online," is a leading expert on national security and the Internet. He lectures and writes on nuclear weapons, military matters and information warfare. An Army intelligence analyst from 1974-1978, Arkin currently consults for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, MSNBC and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Washington Post

The combination of real-time, virtual insertion with existing and emerging post-production techniques opens up a world of manipulative opportunity. Consider Video Rewrite technology, which its developers at the Interval Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley first demonstrated publicly three years ago. With just a few minutes of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person's mouth-area looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds. Drawing from the resulting library of "visemes" makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream up-including utterances that the subject wouldn't be caught dead saying.

In one test application, computer scientist Christoph Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created "animations" of Kennedy's mouth saying things he never said, among them, "I never met Forrest Gump." With technology like this, near-future political activists conceivably will be able to orchestrate webcasts of their opponents saying things that might make Howard Stern sound like a mensch.

Haseltine believes video manipulation techniques will quickly be carried to their logical extreme: "I can predict with absolute certainty," he says, "that one person sitting at a computer will be able to write a script, design characters, do the lighting and wardrobe, do all of the acting and dialog, and post production, distribute it on a broadband network, do all of this on a laptop-and viewers won't know the difference."

The End of Authenticity

So far, the widely witnessed applications of real-time video manipulation have been in benign arenas like sports and entertainment. Already last year, however, the technology began diffusing beyond these venues into applications that raised eyebrows. Last fall, for instance, CBS hired PVI to virtually insert the network's familiar logo all over New York City-on buildings, billboards, fountains and other places-during broadcasts of the network's The Early Show. The New York Times ran a front-page story in January raising questions about the journalistic ethics of altering the appearance of what is really there.

The combination of real-time virtual insertion, cyber-puppeteering, video rewriting and other video manipulation technologies with a mass-media infrastructure that instantly delivers news video worldwide has some analysts worried. "Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance," says George Washington University's Livingston. "You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened," he says.

Haseltine agrees. "I'm amazed that we have not seen phony video," he says, before backpedaling a bit: "Maybe we have. Who would know?"

It's just the sort of scenario played out in the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, in which top presidential aides conspire with a Hollywood producer to televise a virtually crafted war between the United States and Albania to deflect attention from a budding Presidential scandal. Haseltine and others wonder when reality will imitate art imitating reality.

The importance of the issue will only intensify as the technology becomes more accessible. What now typically requires an $80,000 box of electronics the size of a small refrigerator should soon be doable with a palm-sized card (and ultimately a single chip) that fits inside a commercial video recorder, according to Winarsky. "This will be available to people in Circuit City," he says. Consumer gear for virtual video insertion is likely to require a camcorder with a specialized image-processing card or chip. This hardware will take signals from the camera's electronic image sensors and convert them into a form that can be analyzed and manipulated in a computer using appropriate software-much as photo editors at newspapers use Adobe Photoshop and other programs to "clean up" digital image files. A home user might, for instance, insert absent family members into the latest reunion tape or remove strangers they would prefer not to be in the scene-bringing Soviet-style historical revisions right into the family den.

Combine the potential erosion of faith in video authenticity with the so-called "CNN effect" and the stage is set for deception to move the world in new ways. Livingston describes the CNN effect as the ability of mass media to go beyond merely reporting what is happening to actually influencing decision-makers as they consider military, international assistance and other national and international issues. "The CNN effect is real," says James Currie, professor of political science at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. "Every office you go into at the Pentagon has CNN on." And that means, he says, that a government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopolitical events in motion on the strength of a few hours' worth of credibility achieved by distributing a snippet of well-doctored video.

With experience as an army reservist, as a staffer with a top-secret clearance on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, and as a legislative liaison for the Secretary of the Army, Currie has seen governmental decision-making and politicking up close. He is convinced that real-time video manipulation will be, or already is, in the hands of the military and intelligence communities. And while he has no evidence yet that any government or nongovernment organization has deployed video manipulation techniques, real-time or not, for political or military purposes, he has no problem conjuring up disinformation scenarios. For example, he says, consider the impact of a fabricated video that seemed to show Saddam Hussein "pouring himself a Scotch and taking a big drink of it. You could run it on Middle Eastern television and it would totally undermine his credibility with Islamic audiences."

For all the heavy breathing, however, some experts remain unconvinced that real-time video manipulation poses a real threat, no matter how good the technology gets. John Pike, an analyst of the intelligence community for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., says the credibility risks are simply too great for governments or serious organizations to get caught attempting to spoof the public. And for the organizations that would be willing to risk it, says Pike, the news folks-knowing just what the technology can do-will become increasingly vigilant.

"If some human rights organization popped up at CNN with some video, particularly an organization they were not familiar with, I would think that [CNN] would consider that radioactive," says Pike. Same goes for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). "No responsible director of an established organization would authorize such a thing. And they would fire on the spot anyone caught doing it. The stock-in-trade of NGO policy organizations is that 'we tell the truth.'"

Even cool heads like Pike, however, concede that the media's fortress of skepticism has an Achilles heel: the Internet. "The issue is not so much your ability to get fake video on CNN, but to get it online," he says. That's because so much Internet content is unfiltered. "This could play into the phenomenon in the news production process where you would not replicate the original report, but you might report that it was reported," says Pike. And that could cascade into a CNN effect. "These are undoubtedly experiments that will be done," Pike says.

The trouble is, says Livingston, it may only take a few such experiments to forever make people question the authenticity of video. That could have enormous repercussions for military, intelligence and news operations. An ironic sociological consequence might emerge: a return to heavier reliance on unmediated face-to-face communication. In the meantime, though, there will undoubtedly be some interesting twists and turns as pixels become ever more plastic. source

Ivan Amato is a correspondent for National Public Radio and the author of Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made Of a chronicle of cutting-edge research in materials science.