Lifeboat Foundation

We finally get to see one of the key missing links that bridged the gap between Lockheed’s RQ-3 Darkstar and RQ-170 Sentinel flying-wing drones.

Small drones that can automatically spot, identify and target vehicles and people are planned by the US military, although humans would still be overseeing them.

When the first laser was invented the idea of using it as a superweapon seemed like science fiction. Almost 60 years later and it still seems that way, despite a remarkable degree of progress. Prototypes have been used to destroy small watercraft, shoot down missiles and drones, and have even been deployed at least once in a war zone, but the revolutionary destructive ray that would change the face of battle as fundamentally as the longbow or the airplane has yet to appear. So just what is the current state of laser weapons technology, and what does it hold in store for the future of warfare?

D rones have become the must-have gadget for tech fans and videographers. Drones let you become a pilot and aerial photographer, getting incredible footage or even taking part in activities like drone racing.

There are a couple of major drone brands out there. DJI is known for making high-end drones close to those used by professionals. Parrot makes cheaper drones, which have slightly less powerful cameras but come cheaper.

Until recently, GoPro produced the GoPro Karma, but the company has recently cut its drone division and will no longer be producing it, so we have left it out for the purposes of this review.

That’s not a lot to you. If your watch is off by 13.7 microseconds, you’ll make it to your important meeting just fine. But it wasn’t so nice for the first-responders in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Louisiana, whose GPS devices wouldn’t lock with satellites. Nor for the FAA ground transceivers that got fault reports. Nor the Spanish digital TV networks that had receiver issues. Nor the BBC digital radio listeners, whose British broadcast got disrupted. It caused about 12 hours of problems—none too huge, all annoying. But it was a solid case study for what can happen when GPS messes up.

The 24 satellites that keep GPS services running in the US aren’t especially secure; they’re vulnerable to screw-ups, or attacks of the cyber or corporeal kind. And as more countries get closer to having their own fully functional GPS networks, the threat to our own increases. Plus, GPS satellites don’t just enable location and navigation services: They also give ultra-accurate timing measurements to utility grid operators, stock exchanges, data centers, and cell networks. To mess them up is to mess those up. So private companies and the military are coming to terms with the consequences of a malfunction—and they’re working on backups.

The 2016 event was an accidental glitch with an easily identifiable cause—an oops. Harder to deal with are the gotchas. Jamming and spoofing, on a small scale, are both pretty cheap and easy. You can find YouTube videos of mischievous boys jamming drones, and when Pokemon GO users wanted to stay in their parents’ basements, they sent their own phones fake signals saying they were at the Paris mall. Which means countries, and organized hacking groups, definitely can mess with things on a larger scale. Someone can jam a GPS signal, blocking, say, a ship from receiving information from satellites. Or they can spoof a signal, sending a broadcast that looks like a legit hello from a GPS satellite but is actually a haha from the hacker next-door.

Continue reading “GPS Isn’t Very Secure. Here’s Why We Need A Backup” »

NYC’s CTO Miguel Gamino explains why major technology innovations from drones to AI to blockchain will significantly impact how New Yorkers work, live, and play.

I’m excited to share a new article of mine via The Daily Dot on the future of so-called “gun control,” one that promises freedom and protects people from criminals and mass shooters. As usual, the answer is in technology to improve the world—and not in Congress changing or creating laws. This is a policy article of mine, and this is the technology you could expect to see in California if I was elected Governor:

High-tech drones and surveillance technology can offer a radically new type of gun control, helping detect possible the presence of guns and intervene in mass shootings.

To better protect against the rise of ill-intended AI, policymakers ought to be working closely with technical specialists to be aware of potential applications of machine intelligence. Also, technical developers ought to be proactively reaching out to appropriate leaders when they understand the technology they are developing can have negative applications, the report says.

New report from 26 technology experts issues dire warning about the potential of malicious artificial intelligence.

What if instead of blasting cargo into space on a rocket, we could fling it into space using a catapult? That’s the big, possibly crazy, possibly genius idea behind SpinLaunch. It was secretly founded in 2014 by Jonathan Yaney, who built solar-powered drone startup Titan Aerospace and sold it to Google. Now TechCrunch has learned from three sources that SpinLaunch is raising a massive $30 million Series A to develop its catapult technology. And we’ve scored an interview with the founder after four years in stealth.

Sources who’ve spoken to the SpinLaunch team tell me the idea is to create a much cheaper and sustainable way to get things like satellites from earth into space without chemical propellant. Using a catapult would sidestep the heavy fuel and expensive booster rockets used by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

SpinLaunch plans to use a centrifuge spinning at an incredible rate inside a vacuum that reduces friction. All that momentum is then harnessed to catapult a payload into space at speeds one source said could be around 3,000 miles per hour. With enough momentum, objects could be flung into space on their own. Alternatively, the catapult could provide some of the power needed with cargo being equipped with supplemental rockets necessary to leave earth’s atmosphere.