VIDEO: Inmates caught on camera breaking out of São Paulo jail

Intriguing video footage has emerged of last Monday's jailbreak in São Paulo. Despite recent efforts to reduce communication between prisoners and criminal gangs on the outside the break was the biggest security breach in the last 5 years, with around 60 juvenile prisoners jumping the wall of their detention facility. They then climbed down adjacent trees in an escape which looked surprisingly simple.

This was definitely not the high-tech, meticulously calculated prison breaks we are used to seeing on the movie screens! And whilst journalists and photographers managed to cover the escape in real time it seems that police officers were a little slower to respond.

According to local reports some of the escaped prisoners were quickly recaptured but many have apparently managed to escape permanently.

Watch the video here:

São Paulo in Statistics: The city's top 11 problems according to its voters

According to Datafolha and looking ahead to the local elections, São Paulo's voters have named the top issues they perceive the city is facing. The biggest problems identified in order of importance are:

Health 26%

Security 16%

Public Transport 15%

Flooding 6%

Education 6%
Transport 6%

Waste / litter  5%
Pavements 3%
Drug trafficking 2%
Housing 2%

Unemployment 2%

This does away with the stereotype that drug trafficking are a major concern for São Paulo residents, in fact the state of the pavements are perceived to be a bigger problem.

Personally I was surprised to see flooding so high up but it is true that the city is badly prepared for the downfalls it receives and for those whose streets are regularly affected it presumably bounces straight to number one priority.

Also interesting for European (or North American) eyes is the fact that unemployment only just scrapes in to the list of problems. If the same survey was carried out in Italy, Spain, Greece or Portugal it would be interesting to compare the percentages..

Human Aerial CCTV

Many of the high street shops over here don't have the budget for expensive tag based alarm systems or CCTV surveillance which incidentally I've always thought of as primarily a deterrent rather than a crimestopper. However they still have a need to protect their good from small time robberies and opportunist thieves.

One of the systems they use is simply to build a seat on top of a step ladder and put a security guard on top. From that vantage point he can usually see the whole shop and helps makes sure nobody makes off with their goods without paying. Plus, due to low labour costs it is much cheaper to implement than tags or CCTV. Here's an example:

Presumably if he spots something  there is someone else to stop the thief getting away because I don’t see safe way of getting down the ladder very quickly. In any case this is quite common not only in shops but also in car parks where you get more sophisticated turrets from which security guards have an aerial vantage point over the parking lot. If it’s used so much, I guess it's because it works.

Bradesco's biometric blood vessel recognition

One of the misconceptions in the so-called industrialised world is that developing countries are necessarily less technologically advanced. Wrong.

Having previously written about their drive through banking I risk sounding like a Bradesco corporate evangelist, but their embrace of new security technologies are worthy of another mention. Due to the inordinate amount of local admin I have endured in my first few weeks I have visited at least one branch of most Brazilian banks operating in São Paulo and noticed that Bradesco's ATMs are a little different. Here's a picture of an ATM on Amazonas street right next to my hotel in Vila Olimpia:

You will notice that there is a red contraption on the right hand side. Take a closer look:

What it does is permit the bank to read your vein signature and depending on whether it matched correctly decide whether to allow the transaction to take place. From a user point of view it's quite a simple process once you have registered your blood vessel pattern. When you go to a Bradesco cashpoint you place your hand in the red area and press the "pulso" button. Infrared light will be emitted allowing the machine to record the blood vessel patterns in your hand and match it back to their database.

Nature and biology plays a helping hand (excuse the pun) with veins guaranteed to create intricate anatomical variations both within the same species and in case you were wondering, between different species (your pet would probably struggle with other aspects of the cashpoint anyway). This means the pattern of veins is much more variable from person to person than arteries for example and can be used as a unique identifier. Interesting, huh?

And for you techies the service itself is called Palmsecure and is developed by Fujitsu which also partners with Bank of Tokyo in its home country, Japan. They mention that as it is the deoxidized hemoglobin in the palm vein which absorbs the infrared rays, "the sensor of the palm vein device can only recognize the pattern if the deoxidized hemoglobin is actively flowing within the individual's veins". Technically true but frankly, if your veins are not taking deoxygenated blood back to your heart, you've got a pretty major problem and cashpoint security is going to be the least of your short term worries..

Presumably if there were a cheap way to expand this technology you could get rid of physical money altogether and scan your hand anytime you needed to identify yourself and pay. Wow, how very new, you might say. This year Brazil has snuck one step ahead of us. Wrong again. Palmsecure has been in use at cashpoints for 5 years already as shown by this article and is therefore already old school technology over here..