2014: GPS Modernization Stalls

As reported by Inside GNSS: With the optimism of college-bound seniors touring the Ivy League, GPS managers have been weighing options to dramatically change the GPS constellation. Now, after studying the costs, considering the benefits, and assessing the funding climate, officials have made the starkly fiscal decision to stick close to home and take a few extra years to finish.

Although the final decisions will not be made until sometime this spring, proposals for a distinctly different type of GPS constellation appear to be off the table, sources tell Inside GNSS. The plan now appears to forego any major shift in the design of the satellites such as those proposed in Lower Cost Solutions for Providing Global Positioning System (GPS) Capability, an Air Force report delivered to Congress last April. 

The established course of modernization will proceed largely unchanged, say sources, but it will take longer to build and launch the GPS III satellites and add the new signals. Full implementation of the new military M-code, for example, will be pushed back roughly four years at least, noted one source. Those waiting for the new civil signals will also have to be patient. 

The current course of action will likely raise the total cost of the modernized system although the higher costs will be spread out over time in a way that fits more appropriately into budgets constrained by sequestration and the overall post-war downsizing taking hold at the Pentagon. 

“We’ll pay a unit price that’s a little higher, but just like when you buy your car on payments, you pay more for the car but you have cash flow management,” Maj. Gen. Robert McMurry, director for Air Force space acquisition told reporters during a briefing on the military space budget. 

The fiscal year 2015 (FY15) budget McMurry was describing reflects the decisions so far. The FY15 request for money to procure GPS III satellites is just $292.397 million — down dramatically from the White House’s request for $477.598 million in FY14 and roughly half of the $531 million the White House projected it would need for the program just last year. It is less even than the $450.598 million allocated by Congress. 

The administration is also asking $212.571 million for GPS III development, somewhat less than the $221.276 million requested last year and only slightly smaller than the $215 million that was projected to be needed last year. The request is a bit more than the $201.276 million Congress appropriated for FY14. 

The request to procure Block IIF satellites is about the same as last year — $52.09 million — but the new ground control segment faces al reduction. Whether it is a big or small cut depends on how you look at it. The White House is asking for $299.76 million in FY15 for the Next Generation Operational Control System or OCX. That is down sharply from its $383.5 million request last year and the congressionally approved FY14 amount of $373.5 million. 

In the projections that accompany each budget, however, the White House last year only anticipated asking for $303.5 million for FY15. In fact, both the FY14 and FY15 budgets project falling GPS allocations for the next several years. This is despite the fact that the program has been experiencing delays and challenges — the sort of things that normally add to the cost. How these two trends will mesh in the end is unclear. 

Implications 
Where it had planned to buy two GPS IIIs this year, the Air Forces now plans to buy only the ninth in the series and put down money for long lead items on Space Vehicle 10 (SV10). It will then buy just one new satellite next year and three each year for the next three years, according to McMurry. 

The launches will be stretched out a bit as well. Five GPS missions will see their booster procurement moved past 2017, said McMurry. That has implications for Department of Defense (DoD) plans to introduce more competition into the launch procurements. 

“Those five will still be available for competition,” he said. “It’s to be determined how we’ll do that competition. It will be part of the phase two, and they’re working on that strategy.” 

The long life of the existing satellites is making it possible to find savings without undermining the quality of the GPS system, officials said. 

“(The) satellites are living longer than we predicted so we didn’t need to replenish those as fast as we originally planned. And it made no sense to spend that money if we didn’t need the satellites,” said Troy Meink, deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space. 

The Constellation 
Less clear is how many satellites the Air Force plans to have in the constellation over the long run. 
The FY15 budget “reprofiles Global Positioning System, GPS III, to meet constellation sustainment demands,” said Under Secretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning. 

“Sustainment,” however, does not necessarily mean supporting the constellation in its current configuration, which stands at 31 satellites plus spares. While having more satellites is advantageous to those on the ground, it is not strictly necessary according to Air Force mandates. 

“The requirement is 27 satellites to maintain 24,” McMurry told the audience at a March 7 breakfast on Capitol Hill sponsored by the Mitchell Institute. “I think our approach will be to absolutely assure that requirement, which meets that mandated performance, but in doing so I will expect that we’ll, in reality, maintain a slight surplus to that as we move on.” 

“It is clear that they are going to stay with the ‘enhanced 27,’ which is 27+3 for as long as they can,” said a source familiar with the issue. “And even if for some reason those (satellites) that are turned on now drop out, they’ve got as many as five that they can turn back on.” 

Those backup satellites just have “to last until the next launch,” said the source, suggesting it is realistic that the Air Force will be able to keep the number of satellites up even though the spacecraft have been operating far past their design lives. 

The question is whether the next launch, or launches, can happen fast enough. The existing satellites were launched in clusters and are therefore at risk of failing in groups as they age out. Will the Air Force have the satellites it needs and the lift capacity required to deal with a sudden, rapid loss of the older spacecraft? 
It appears that the answer may be “Yes.” 

Dual Launch After All 
Inside GNSS has learned that, even though the Pentagon has slashed the funding for dual launch, plans are in the works to enable the lighter payloads and dual-launch capability needed to rapidly refresh the constellation. 

The United Launch Alliance, a 50/50 joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing, is stepping in to finish the work. “ULA is funding the launch vehicle development work that will enable dual launches of GPS III and other potential satellites, with a planned first launch capability in 2017,” the company said in a written response to a question from Inside GNSS. 

And the Air Force will continue to fund the technology needed on the satellites to make dual launch possible. 

“We have maintained the development of dual-launch capability within the satellite line,” McMurry said. “The satellite itself will have the dual transponders and radio frequencies in place so that, if you launch two of them together, you could communicate with both of them independently.”

Slimmer Sats in a Pinch
The satellites might still be too heavy to launch two at a time unless some other changes are made. 
To address that, said a source, military managers are planning to build flexibility into the GPS III satellites that will enable the service to drop the Nuclear Detonation Detection System or NDS payload from the GPS III satellite if necessary. 

“They are going to ensure that they have the option to fly GPS III without the NDS,” said the source, adding that, without NDS, “should there be the requirement . . . to rapidly replace the constellation, they will actually be able to launch two.” 

The built-in flexibility also means the GPS program will not have to plan around any delays in the new NDS payload — which is on schedule but still needs a good deal of testing, the source said. 

Dual-launch capability and potentially lighter satellites are a variation on a far more ambitious proposal to develop a stripped-down version of the GPS III spacecraft that would not carry the NDS and provide fewer signals. These smaller satellites would likely have been used in combination with some of the larger, regular GPS spacecraft. 

The austere NavSats or “NibbleSats” were cheaper to build and could have been launched at least two at a time — perhaps even in clutches of three or four — dramatically reducing the cost of maintaining the constellation. But the proposal was set aside after hitting a number of stumbling blocks involving funding and contract management, sources told Inside GNSS. 

“I think the pressure to reduce the cost of the satellite is very much there,” said an expert. “Obviously anything the Air Force can do to drive the cost of the satellite down — I think they’re still alert to those opportunities. But I think the Congress has made it very difficult for them too create a ‘new start.’”

It is not only hard to get money for new starts (new programs), the rules governing the seemingly endless rounds of Congressional budget extensions mean the program could have become tangled in delays, said Stan Collender, national director of financial communications for Qorvis Communications and an expert on the federal budget. 

“Under a continuing resolution,” said Collender, “new starts are prohibited.” 

Moving to small satellites would also have been such a big change that it likely would have required the Air Force to recompete the GPS III contract. New procurements face a long process fraught with complexities and the uncertainties created whenever new contractors enter a program where legacy satellites have been in place so long that they are frequently referred to jokingly as being “old enough to vote” — that is, have reached 18 years of age. 

The prospect of reopening the contract is why “NavSats, small sats, little sats — that stuff is off the table,” said a source, who has been following the issue. 

Thrifty Innovation
That does not mean the GPS III program will proceed without a few enhancements. 

Col. Bill Cooley, director of the GPS Directorate, said the Air Force is “looking at a design turn” and is examining using better solar panels and traveling wave tube amplifiers or TWTAs (TWEEtas) which could reduce power requirements. 

Changing the batteries is also under consideration, according to sources. One expert pointed out that some of older battery technology is not even available anymore. Another source said that lithium-ion batteries were being considered. 

“The decisions are in the process of being made,” Cooley told Inside GNSS. That decision process may be playing a role in the delay of the first GPS III satellite, which is now not expected to be ready until FY16. 
The design of the first satellite is supposed to be a template of sorts for the rest, and Cooley made it clear to the Mitchell Institute audience that he wanted the design to be “repeatable.” 

Right now, however, interference problems within the satellite’s navigation payload have to be resolved. The problems in the payload, which is being build by Virginia-based Exelis, have already been cited as a reason for delays in the program. 

The GPS IIIs must generate and transmit eight signals — legacy military P-code on L1 and L2 frequencies and civil C/A-code on L1, as well as the new dual-frequency M-code, and civil L1C, L2C, and L5 signals. In order to keep the timing and everything synchronized, there is “one critical box” involved in their generation, said Cooley. 

“There’s a whole bunch of techniques you can use,” Cooley told Mitchell Institute attendees. You can use absorptive material, he said, redesign some of the boards or separate the signals by putting them in separate boxes. “All options are on the table.” 

Sources confirm that the Air Force seems to have workable solutions in hand. Although those solutions may need extensive testing, the potentially two-year delay could also give the program time to work in some of the innovations mentioned previously. Program managers may also just be working hard to get the most out of the new satellites. 

“The GPS IIIs have a design life of 15 years,” said Cooley. “That’s a real challenge — to get 15 years in that harsh environment. We hope that they will last much longer. We hope that we can get a satellite that can vote and drink and all those kinds of things.” 

What the changes, delays, and development problems mean for GPS III prime contractor Lockheed Martin is unclear. 

“Over the next few weeks we will review the budget in detail to understand the specific impacts to our business,” the company said in a written response to Inside GNSS. “We look forward to working with the administration and Congress over the coming months as budget discussions continue.” 

OCX and Civil Money
What the delay in the first GPS III satellite means to Raytheon is that the OCX prime will have more time to work on ground segment modernization that already slipped behind schedule, said McMurry, who attributed slippage in the initial GPS III delivery as the biggest reason for a new delay in the OCX program. 

OCX program managers may get more time still if all the money from the civil side of the GPS program does not come through. 

As noted earlier, the White House scaled back their FY15 defense budget request for OCX to $300 million This is just under the $303.5 million that was projected to be needed this year though the program has been experiencing difficulties. This is the request for the Defense Department. OCX also gets part of its money from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT), and a long string of underpayments from DoT has put GPS program managers in a position where they will be forced to reprogram OCX, adding some six months to the schedule and tens of millions to DoT’s bill, according to an expert with knowledge of the issue. 

The White House gave DoT the responsibility for funding those parts of the GPS program needed by civil users, and DoT handed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) the actual funding task. 

The FAA has largely failed, however, to persuade Congress to allocate the money for the civil funding. This has forced the agency, which has cost overruns on other programs, to short its payments to DoD for the last several years. 

The FAA is now trying to make up for those too-small payments but “it’s not pretty,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

The Administration’s FY15 budget request for civil funding actually jumped from the $20 million requested last year to $27 million — better, but still a far cry from the $40 to $50 million that was supposed to be allocated each year for five years. Even so, if FAA convinces Congress to approve the whole request it will be a dramatic improvement over the scant $6 million it got for FY14. 

Failure to win over lawmakers could have significant consequences. 

Up to now the Air Force has been able to manage around the budget shortfalls and keep things more or less on track. With sequestration and other cuts coming out of DoD space programs, GPS program managers are no longer in a position to finagle funding for civil capabilities. 

The source told Inside GNSS that, should the FAA fail to secure adequate monies, the OCX program to will have to be stretched out some six months at considerable expense — money that FAA will also be expected to make up. The total bill for what FAA owes plus the added cost of delay would top $100 million said the source — nearly four times the current budget request. 

DoD and FAA will have to work together pretty closely to manage during these austere times, said the source. “When you get cut to the bone you have to work pretty closely just to survive.” 

Sequestration Looms 
The budget crunch could get even worse if sequestration is applied without changes in 2016.
 
Military officials made it clear that they are assuming sequestration will not resume in full in 2016, as is now the law. If it should reemerge, said Fanning, “we would be unable to procure one of the three GPS III satellites planned in FY17.” 

Still unclear is how the launch rate or other aspects of the program would be affected, but it is clear, said Collender, that budget politics mean sequestration is likely to remain a factor. He estimated a 3-out-of-4 chance that the cuts will return in full force in the 2016 budget. 

“It will be a presidential year,” he said. “You’ll have Republicans that don’t want to be blamed for increasing spending; so, spending cuts might be in place. There’s probably a 75 percent chance that the 2016 sequester stays in place as is.” 

That could force still more changes to the GPS program and perhaps even reopen consideration of a GPS III redesign,experts hinted. Asked what options the Air Force was looking at for the long term, Cooley left the door open. 

“What options are we not looking at?” he said. 

Does Google Glass Distract Drivers? The Debate Continues

As reported by NPR: Shane Walker hops into his Toyota Prius hybrid and puts on his Google Glass. It's a lightweight glasses frame with a tiny computer built into the lens.

Google is at the forefront of a movement in wearable technology, gadgets we put on our bodies to connect us to the Internet, and perhaps nothing embodies that more than Glass. But the eyewear is raising eyebrows outside the high-tech industry. Before Glass even hits stores, lawmakers in several states want to ban it on the roads.

Walker, an independent developer living in San Francisco, turns on the GPS app and starts driving. Instead of talking out loud, like an app on a smartphone might, it shows him his route as a thin blue line and a triangle on the upper right corner of the lens.

"Google did a good job of making it nonintrusive, so it's not directly in your line of sight," he says.
But Walker's favorite feature is the camera. Say you're on a road trip. With a tap of the side, you can record the entire thing in decent resolution and then, with another tap, share it with your friends. Or you can wink and take a picture.

At a stop sign, Walker strokes the Glass frame with his right index finger. He's flipping through stored photos. The movement is so discreet — no bending his neck down like you would with a smartphone — and I have to ask him: "Is it something you would do if there was a police officer right in front of you?"
"I mean, it's debatable," he replies. "It is hands-free, so I do feel like in my legal right, it's OK for me to interact with stuff that doesn't require my hands, like winking, taking pictures."

Legislative Battle Over Public Safety
Ira Silverstein, a Democratic state senator from Illinois, disagrees. "Yeah, it's hands-free, but it can affect your vision," he says.

He's written a bill that says using Glass distracts drivers. "The first offense would be a misdemeanor. The second offense if, God forbid causes death, could be a felony."

Leading car insurance companies have not yet taken a position on Glass, but at least eight states have proposed legislation banning the use of Google Glass on the road. In West Virginia, Republican state Delegate Gary Howell says lawmakers need to act before Glass gets out of hand.
Glass is the ultimate multitasking machine. It streams incoming emails and scans the human eyelid for commands. But Howell says its high-tech creators aren't seeing a basic fact about the real world.

"Have they driven on mountain roads in West Virginia, where you've got one 15-mile-an-hour turn after another one, where you really need to be concentrating on what you're doing?" he says. "You could be wearing it, not looking at your driving but watching a video screen."

Google is responding to this roadblock by sending lobbyists around the country to dispel concerns. Spokesman Chris Dale says Glass can help drivers.

"It's actually not distracting, and it allows you — rather than looking down at your phone, you're looking up and you're engaging with the world around you," Dale says. "It was specifically designed to do that: to get you the technology you need, just when you need it, but then to get out of your way."

Not Texting, But Text
Back in Walker's car, Glass does something that a smartphone can't do. We turn a corner past a golden fire hydrant, and obscure facts suddenly start streaming in front of Walker's iris.

"When San Francisco burst into flames in the days following the disastrous 1906 earthquake, much of the city's network of fire hydrants failed," Walker reads. "Miraculously, this fire hydrant, nicknamed 'The Little Giant,' is said to have been the only functional ..." He goes on reading like this for about half a minute.

"Are you reading all of that from the upper right-hand corner of your eye?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "It's pretty cool. It's like text just floating in air."

Walker has a theory about why the text is not distracting him: "The layer is transparent, so your eye does a good job of seeing through it while also staring at it."

Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT who specializes in multitasking, says this sounds like wishful thinking.

"You think you're monitoring the road at the same time, when actually what you're doing [is] you're relying on your brain's prediction that nothing was there before, half a second ago — that nothing is there now," he says. "But that's an illusion. It can often lead to disastrous results."

In other words, the brain fills in the gaps in what you see with memories of what you saw a half-second ago. Among scientists, that statement is not controversial. The politics of Google Glass — and where it's worn — clearly is.

LA Police Argue All Vehicles Are Under Investigation

As reported by Gizmodo: Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff's Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California's California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week's worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that "All [license plate] data is investigatory." The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn't matter.

This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicion-less investigations under "general warrants" that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. This happens without an officer targeting a specific vehicle and without any level of criminal suspicion. The ALPR system immediately extracts the key data from the image—the plate number and time, date and location where it was captured—and runs that data against various hotlists. At the instant the plate is photographed not even the computer system itself—let alone the officer in the squad car—knows whether the plate is linked to criminal activity.

Taken to an extreme, the agencies' arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.

However, as we argued in the Reply brief we filed in the case last Friday, the accumulation of information merely because it might be useful in some unspecified case in the future certainly is not an "investigation" within any reasonable meaning of the word.

LAPD and LASD Recognize Privacy Interest in License Plate Data

In another interesting turn in the case, both agencies fully acknowledged the privacy issues implicated by the collection of license plate data.  LAPD stated in its brief:

"[T]he privacy implications of disclosure [of license plate data] are substantial. Members of the public would be justifiably concerned about LAPD releasing information regarding the specific locations of their vehicles on specific dates and times. . . . LAPD is not only asserting vehicle owners' privacy interests. It is recognizing that those interests are grounded in federal and state law, particularly the California Constitution. Maintaining the confidentiality of ALPR data is critical . . . in relation to protecting individual citizens' privacy interests"

The sheriff's department recognized that ALPR data tracked "individuals' movement over time" and that, with only a license plate number, someone could learn "personal identifying information" about the vehicle owner (such as the owner's home address) by looking up the license plate number in a database with "reverse lookup capabilities such as LexisNexis and Westlaw."

The agencies use the fact that ALPR data collection impacts privacy to argue that—although they should still be allowed to collect this information and store it for years—they should not have to disclose any of it to the public. However, the fact that the technology can be so privacy invasive suggests that we need more information on where and how it is being collected, not less. This sales video from Vigilant Solutions shows just how much the government can learn about where you've been and how many times you've been there when Vigilant runs their analytics tools on historical ALPR data. We can only understand how LA police are really using their ALPR systems through access to the narrow slice of the data we've requested in this case.

We will be arguing these points and others at the hearing on our petition for writ of mandate in Los Angeles Superior Court, Stanley Mosk Courthouse, this coming Friday at 9:30 AM.

Apps By The Dashboard Light

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Starting next month, many car buyers will be getting a novel feature: Internet connections with speeds similar to those on the fastest smartphones—and even a few early dashboard-based apps, engineered to be as dumbed-down as possible.

Backseat passengers could get streaming movies and fast Wi-Fi connections to smart watches and tablets in (and near) the car. For drivers, high-resolution navigation maps would load quickly, and high-fidelity audio could stream from Internet radio services. But the first dashboard apps will be limited, spare versions of familiar ones like the Weather Channel, Pandora, and Priceline.

The first U.S. model with the fast wireless connection—known as 4G LTE, around 10 times faster than 3G connections—is expected to be the 2015 Audi A3, which goes on sale next month for a starting price of $29,900. Data plans will cost extra—an average of around $16 a month.

GM says it expects to sell 4G-equipped 2015 Chevrolets and other models starting in June. Many other carmakers, including Ford and Toyota, are following suit, both in the U.S. and worldwide, using partnerships with wireless carriers to deliver the connectivity.

By providing apps, carmakers see an opportunity for product differentiation and steady revenue streams. They also suggest that connectivity can lead to new safety features, and that using these onboard services will be safer than furtively glancing at phones.

But when drivers browse the GM AppShop, they shouldn’t expect what they get on an iPhone or a Galaxy phone. GM expects to provide just 10 apps initially, most of them mapping, news, and radio services.



That’s partly because the automaker’s screening process for apps is brutal, says Greg Ross, director of product strategy and infotainment for GM vehicles. “They go through rigorous safety and security standards,” he says. “And since it’s pulling data from the car, it’s locked down before it ever gets into the vehicle.”

As a result, the technology and interface need to be almost as simple as an analog radio knob, says Bruce Hopkins, cofounder of BT Software, based in San Diego. He is one of a very few developers whose apps will be available in GM cars.

Called Kaliki, BT Software’s app provides audio readings of stories—done by humans, not text-to-speech software—pulled from mainstream publications such as USA Today and TV Guide, as well as podcasts from radio and TV stations. (Its advantage over the radio? “Radio has been around for the last eight decades, and you still can’t pause it,” he says.)

Hopkins followed detailed rules from GM—no pinch-zoom controls or tiny icons allowed, for example—and spent two years developing the app, including time in a test facility in Detroit. “One of the terms GM talks a lot about is driver workload,” he says. “You cannot have anything that would require the driver to have several different things they have to think about. At the end of the day, they want something that works as simple as the regular radio.”

The apps know if you are driving. Drivers will never be able to open a “terms and conditions” screen—or play a game, assuming games ever come—unless the vehicle’s transmission is in “park.”

Despite the hurdles, 4,000 developers have registered with GM’s app store, because the payoff could be large for them: getting their apps included in a car could help them market versions that work on smartphones. And apps in cars command much more attention if they are among just a few that a driver can choose from while sitting behind the wheel for an hour or two every day.

In the longer term, apps will emerge that draw on data generated by the car, says GM’s Ross. 

This could be useful for maintenance or driving efficiency—or to generate data for insurance discounts. Apps tapping information from many cars could alert drivers to accidents; signals indicating hard braking or slipping wheels in other cars could warn of slick roads ahead. 

Sensors can ultimately help bring about semi-autonomous or fully autonomous cars (see “Data Show’s Google’s Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I”).

Henry Tirri, CTO of Nokia, says the potential for apps in cars is vast, given the amount of data vehicles produce. “The car is already probably the densest sensor hub that an individual owns right now,” he says. (See “After Microsoft Deal, What’s Left of Nokia Will Bet on Internet of Things.”)


In Audi’s case, the service will cost $100 for up to five gigabytes of data over six months, or $500 for 30 gigabytes over 30 months. GM has not announced pricing except to say that customers can get various plans combining service to their homes, phones, and cars. Both GM and Audi are using AT&T to provide service (see “GM and AT&T Blur Line Between Car and Smartphone”).

Flying Drones Can Monitor Smartphones From the Air Posing As WiFi Networks

Turn off your Wi-Fi.  This flying drone could be hacking your
smartphone from the air.

As reported by International Business Times: UK security firm Sensepost has discovered that unmanned flying drones can be used to hack into smartphones by simply flying over London pretending to be a Wi-Fi network.

Smartphones are constantly sending out signals trying to find familiar Wi-Fi networks to connect to, such as your home or work network, or even the Starbucks free Wi-Fi network you accessed two weeks ago.

Using a simple off-the-shelf helicopter drone it bought on Amazon, the researchers were able to create a piece of software called Snoopy that can detect those signals and trick the phone into thinking that the drone is a familiar Wi-Fi network.

Once the phone is connected to the drone, all data traffic sent from apps like email, Facebook and even banking apps captured and fed back to those controlling the drone. This shows that cybercriminals don't have to infect your smartphone with malware in order to monitor your activity.

Sensepost developers tested their flying drone two weekends ago by flying it over people's heads on a sunny afternoon in London Fields, Hackney, and to their amazement, no one noticed the drone at all.

The drone is watching you
"In the old days, to hack someone you needed a laptop with a big antenna which would be really obvious, but now we're in the age of really small devices. We thought, can we apply an old-school Wi-Fi hack called Karma?" Sensepost's chief operating officer Daniel Cuthbert tells IBTimes UK.

Not only can the drone monitor your smartphone, but it's also very easy to track someone's movements and habits through their phone.

The firm first programmed an old Nokia N900 smartphone to become a spying device two years ago, put the device in their pocket and then spent some time hanging out in major London train stations Liverpool St, Oxford St, Victoria and Kings Cross St Pancras.

While they blended in and sat having a coffee, the device picked up data from over 60,000 smartphones in the four stations.

Sensepost took the data and put it into Wigle, an open-source geo-location service. When they cross-referenced the data with Google Streetview, they were then able to track all the people and their smartphones as they moved throughout the stations and beyond.

Turn off your Wi-Fi
"People put so much trust into the Internet, it's mind-boggling. Stop putting so much trust in the Internet. When you go out, turn your Wi-Fi off on your phone," Cuthbert warns.

"We want more pressure put on the developers of iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry to improve security on smartphones. You wouldn't buy a car with poor security, why are we willing to do it with the Internet?"

Cuthbert also warns against connecting to free public Wi-Fi if you're not sure where it's coming from.

"If you don't know who the Wi-Fi network belongs to, how do you know if it's malicious? Someone could be accessing your data and you don't know where it's going," he says.

Sensepost will be presenting their research at the Black Hat Asia cybersecurity conference in Singapore next week.

The firm is also working on non-security deployments of unmanned flying drones being used for crowd management and to collect data about people in a certain geographic location, so that advertisers can serve them targeted advertising.

How Your Tweets Can Reveal Your Home Location

IBM researchers have developed an algorithm that predicts
your home location using your last 200 tweets.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: One of the optional extras that Twitter allows is for each tweet to be tagged with the user’s location data. That’s useful if you want people to know where you are or so that you can later remember where certain events took place. It also gives researchers a valuable tool for studying  the geographical distribution of tweets in various ways.

But it also raises privacy issues, particularly when users are unaware, or forget that, their tweets are geotagged. Various celebrities are thought to have given away their home locations in this way. And in 2007, four Apache helicopters belonging to the US Army were destroyed by mortars in Iraq when insurgents worked out their location using geotagged images published by American soldiers.  

Perhaps these kinds of concerns are the reason why so few tweets are geotagged. Several studies have shown that less than one per cent of tweets contain location metadata.

But the absence of geotagging data does not mean your location is secret. Today, Jalal Mahmud and a couple of pals at IBM Research in Almaden, California, say they’ve developed an algorithm that can analyse anybody’s last 200 tweets and determine their home city location with an accuracy of almost 70 per cent.

That could be useful for researchers, journalists, marketers and so on wanting to identify where tweets originate. But it also raises privacy issues for those who would rather their home location remained private.

Mahmud and co’s method is relatively straightforward. Between July and August 2011, they filtered the Twitter firehose for tweets that were geotagged with any of the biggest 100 cities in the US until they had found 100  different users in each location.

They then downloaded the last 200 tweets posted by each user, rejecting those that posted privately. That left them with over 1.5 million geotagged tweets from almost 10,000 people.

They then divided this data set in two, using 90 per cent of the tweets to train their algorithm and the remaining 10 per cent to test it against.

The basic idea behind their algorithm is that tweets contain important information about the probable location of the user. For example, over 100,000 tweets in the dataset were generated by the location-based social networking site Foursquare and so contained a link that gave the exact location. And almost 300,000 tweets contained the name of cities listed in the US Geological Service gazetteer.

Other tweets contained clues to their location like phrases such as “Let’s Go Red Sox”, a reference to the Boston-based baseball team. And Mahmud and co say that distribution of tweets throughout the day is roughly constant across the US, shifted by time zone. So a user’s pattern of tweets throughout the day can give a good indication of which time zone they’re in.

So the question these guys set out to answer was whether it was possible to use this information to predict a user’s home location, a result they could test by matching it against the user’s geotagged metadata.

Mahmud and co used an algorithm known as a Naive Bayes Multimonial to do the number crunching. The trained it by feeding it the training dataset along with the geolocation data.

They then tested the algorithm on the remaining 10 per cent of the data to see whether it could predict  the geolocation.

The results are interesting. They say that when they exclude people who are obviously travelling, their algorithm correctly predicts people’s home cities 68 per cent of the time, their home state 70 per cent of the time and their time zone 80 per cent of the time. And they say their algorithm takes less than a second to do this for any individual.

That could be a useful tool. Journalists, for example, could use it to determine which tweets were coming from a region involved in a crisis, such as an earthquake, and those that were just commenting from afar.  Marketers might use it to work out the popualrity of their products in certain cities.

And it also suggests ways that people can improve their privacy–by not mentioning their home location, of course.

Mahmud and co say their algorithm could do better in future. For example, they think they can get more fine-grained detail by searching tweets for mentions of local landmarks that can be pinpointed more accurately. Whether that turns out to be possible, we’ll have to wait and see.

An interesting corollary to all this is that our notion of privacy is more fragile than most of us realize. Just how we can strengthen and protect it should be the subject of considerable public debate.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1403.2345 : Home Location Identification of Twitter Users

GPS Technology Takes Root In Agriculture

As reported by the Imperial Valley Press: The history of agriculture is full of ideas and concepts that have allowed farmers to incrementally improve efficiency to unprecedented levels.

Global Positioning System satellites orbiting the Earth — the same satellites that guide automobiles and allow smartphone users to “check in” are helping farmers reach unprecedented levels of efficiency even as they try to figure out the best use for it.

“GPS in agriculture is new as far as heavy implementation,” said Tom Mastin, bio-resource and agricultural engineering lecturer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

“Without GPS, large-scale farming is going to be way too inefficient. Large-scale farms now have guidance systems and a GIS (geographical information system) manager.”
Some applications are obvious.

Farm implements, like tractors and fertilizer applicators, nowadays are self-guided and require minimal driver input.

“As far as a guidance system, it has reduced labor,” Mastin said.

Other applications are arguably more impressive.

For instance, GPS technology allows farmers to precisely level their fields and map the location of ditches, underground tile drainage lines and subsurface drip irrigation tape.

“You can disc the surface and you never lose the (subsurface drip) tape,” said David Layton, manager of an alfalfa farm in Calipatria.

Extensive use of GPS technology has allowed his company to profitably work land that might not be economically viable with conventional techniques. He asked that the name and location of the company not be published.

The idea is to be able to not just fine-tune the amount of water and fertilizer for given field, but to maximize the use of space.

“GPS makes the whole thing work,” said Ed Hale, an Imperial Valley farmer and consultant for Layton’s company.

Hale cites subsurface drip irrigation technology as a case in point.

“Drip (irrigation) doesn't work without GPS,” he noted.

He said he keeps running across examples where good concepts did not reach their potential.

“We’re tearing out the evidence of the drip that was tried by the Israelis during the late ’70s and early ’80s. They’re the pioneers of drip. When they first started they were so enamored with drip, they thought that it cured everything. That was a fallacy. 

They didn't have GPS technology.”
While he declined to say how much money that his companies have saved through a systematic use of GPS technology, he said that water savings at the Calipatria farm were “substantial.”

“Our feeling is that true conservation isn't so L.A. can grow. It’s so we can get more crop per drop,” Hale said.

The technology allows his operation to compete with growers around the world that operate with fewer constraints.

“Large ranches have compared efficiency with and without GPS,” he said. “GPS is 22 percent more efficient. That’s the difference between losing money and making a profit.”

The cost of fuel and equipment has skyrocketed in recent years, he noted.

“Our costs are local. Markets are global. We’re competing with guys growing the same crop in Argentina, where there are no regulations or social safety nets. My local costs are important to me,” Hale said.