Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology powers IP surveillance cameras by transferring DC electrical currents and data over standard UTP cabling. This article explains everything you need to know about the advantages and limitations of PoE technology. One of the biggest… Read More
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DHS Outlines Its New Emergency Communications Plan
At the IWCE 2011 tradeshow in Las Vegas, DHS Director of the Office of Emergency Communications (OEC) Chris Essid estimated that 3 million people in the U.S. could be considered first responders. But what good is such an elaborate emergency… Read More
CMAS: The End of SMS Text Alerting as We Know It?
The Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) will be available in 2012, but it will come with some limitations. According to this article, campuses and other institutions use SMS messaging to get alerts out now, yet this could change. Campuses have… Read More
Commercial Mobile Alert System
The Commercial Mobile Alert System, otherwise known as the CMAS, is said to go into effect in 2012. According to this article, this system is supposed to eliminate the throughput/ network traffic challenges that are caused by many SMS… Read More
ISC West Happening in April
The International Security Conference and Exposition will be taking place April 5-7, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Sands Expo and Convention Center. The show will have many special events such as a golf tournament, awards, customer appreciation reception,… Read More
Proximity Card Access Systems
What is a proximity access card? A proximity access card is a card about the size of your driver’s license that can open and activate doors so that the holder of the card can enter. Embedded in the card is… Read More
Multispectral Technologies: Infrared Sensors More Than Night Vision
One of the many improvements made on infrared (IR) cameras in the last decade is multispectral technology. This feature operates different sensors from the same aperture of the camera and sometimes from the same semiconductor. These sensors can detect different… Read More
HSPD 3 scrapped
And just like that, the color-coded terrorist warning system has gone away. Actually, it wasn’t quite that abrupt. This article notes that the threat warning levels formulated in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 3 (HSPD 3) was used less and less during the past few years. Although the threat level changed 16 times since its 2002 introduction, two recent attempted attacks passed without a change in the threat level.
Smart card basics
In a recent post, we referred to the growing use of smart cards to advance electronic access control and wanted to explain a little more about these smart cards. This article offers a good summary, but we’ll condense it a little more.