Fighter Jets and X-47B Drones Practice Rapid-Fire Launches Together

As reported by Fox News: The U.S. Navy recently conducted its first successful tests of drones and jets operating together aboard an aircraft carrier. The test flights, which took place Aug. 17 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, focused on assessing whether unmanned drones could be deployed quickly and safely alongside manned fighter jets.

Despite tight space and time constraints, the X-47B drones and the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets performed well in the tests, according to the U.S. Navy.

In urgent situations, fighter jets must take off and land in quick succession. That means that when one jet is taking off, another is close behind it, shielded from the blast of the first jet's engines by huge metal shields called "jet blast deflectors," according to online defense magazine Breaking Defense. As soon as one jet takes to the air, these metal walls are retracted and the next jet taxis onto the aircraft carrier's catapult. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

When landing to refuel, a jet must automatically disconnect from the cables that help it come to a stop. This makes it possible for an aircraft to get out of the way quickly so that another jet can land behind it.

For manned aircraft, the Navy has the precise timing needed to deploy a whole squadron of fighter jets down to science. But in the past, getting a drone to fall into this hectic rhythm has been a challenge, according to Breaking Defense.

"Our goal was to minimize the [X-47B's] time in the landing area and improve the flow with manned aircraft in the landing pattern," said Lt. Cmdr. Brian Hall, the flight test director for the X-47B drones. Hall said that to achieve this goal, the X-47B aircraft, which flew for the first time in 2011, needed a few upgrades.

Most of the X-47B's improvements focused on decreasing the time it takes for the drone to get out of the way of piloted aircraft after landing on the aircraft carrier. This is no easy feat, since a drone has only about 90 seconds to clear the landing area before another aircraft comes speeding down behind it.

For the recent test flights, the drone's operating software was updated, thus speeding up the time it takes for the aircraft to fold its wings and clear the landing area. Other improvements to the physical design of the plane also help move the drone out of the way as quickly as possible.

Getting drones and jets to work seamlessly and safely together is crucial to the success of the Navy's so-called carrier air wings naval aviation units comprising aircraft carriers and the different kinds of aircraft they carry said Capt. Beau Duarte, program manager for the Navy's unmanned carrier aviation office.

"Today, we showed that the X-47B could take off, land and fly in the carrier pattern with manned aircraft while maintaining normal flight-deck operations," Duarte said.

This type of cooperation between drones and jets will be tested several more times, according to a statement from the U.S. Navy. The next challenge includes performing all of these same tasks in the dark of night a procedure known as "night deck handling."

After Ferguson, Police Should be Wearing On-Body Cameras

As reported by The Verge:After conflicts between protestors and police in Ferguson, Mo. yesterday — particularly in the wake of militarized police officers arresting Washington Post and Huffington Post reporters working in a nearby McDonald's — some have suggested that on-body cameras should be more widely used among on-duty police. The theory is that by recording every situation and every conflict that an officer encounters, law enforcement and citizens have an unquestionable account of what really happened. It might also stop an officer from crossing the line.

The Verge produced a story and documentary last year about Axon Flex, perhaps the most advanced of these on-body police cameras, and the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. In that story, civil rights attorney Scott Greenwood talked about his work to establish concrete rules regarding on-body police cameras. I asked him to talk a little about how on-body cameras couldn't helped the situation in Ferguson last night.

"The proper use of OBRS is going to be a very important part of how these agencies restore legitimacy and public confidence."

"On-body recording systems [OBRS] would have been incredibly useful in Ferguson," he says. "This is yet another controversial incident involving one officer and one subject, a minority youth who was unarmed," a reference to Michael Brown, who was killed by police on August 9th. "OBRS would have definitively captured whatever interaction these two had that preceded the use of deadly force." Armed with footage from an on-body camera system, it's possible that police would've had no option but to take swift action against the officers involved — or if Brown's behavior wasn't as eyewitnesses describe, perhaps protests wouldn't have swelled in the first place. Instead, the citizens of Ferguson are left with more questions than answers.

Moving forward, Greenwood doesn't see how on-body cameras can be avoided. "I see no way moving forward in which Ferguson police do not use OBRS," he says. "The proper use of OBRS is going to be a very important part of how these agencies restore legitimacy and public confidence."

There need to be rules, of course — and in his capacity working with the ACLU, Greenwood has helped to sketch out some of those rules. But when situations like Ferguson emerge, it seems reasonable to think that more transparency and more public records are what's needed, not less.

Internet of Things (IoT) and Autonomous Vehicles in the Hype(r)-Cycle

As reported by MemeBurn: Technology research house Gartner has released its annual hype cycle graph, which shows where various technologies are in terms of maturity, business benefit and future direction. This, the 201th edition of the hype cycle, shows that right now we’re really excited by technologies like autonomous motoring and data science and are becoming disillusioned with things like NFC and cloud computing.

Perhaps most intriguing though are the technologies that lie on the axes of inflated expectations and those heading up the slope of enlightenment toward the plateau of productivity.

In the case of the former, the trend that stands out is the Internet of Things. Over the past couple of years we've been told that this trend, which refers to the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing like devices within the existing Internet infrastructure, would massively improve the way we collect data and do business.

Its position on the graph does not however mean that it’s not doing those things, just that our expectations around the Internet of Things are way higher than the technology is currently capable of delivering. The same is true of natural language question answering. There can be no doubting the fact that it’s helped make things easier for some businesses but the fact that no seems to be in too much of a rush to replace their call centers suggests that we could soon start to become disillusioned with it.

The hope for these technologies is that they will eventually be able to overcome their over-hyped expectations and eventual disillusionment to hit what Gartner calls the plateau of productivity. In this stage, technologies may not seem as exciting as they once were but they do become an every day part of the way we do business.

The most familiar technology in this section of the graph is speech recognition, which has found its way onto our phones and is making increasingly prominent appearances in our cars. The same will likely happen to enterprise 3D printing and 3D scanning in the near future.

While Gartner says that it’s worth bearing the Hype Cycle’s trends in mind, the stages the various technologies represented on it are at are not universal. “Many early adopters have embraced quite advanced technologies, such as autonomous vehicles or smart advisors,” says Hung LeHong, vice president and Gartner fellow. “While they continue to improve nexus-related areas, such as mobile apps – so it’s important to look at the bigger picture.” 

FAA Advises Pilots on GPS Problems as Air Force Training Jams Signals

As reported by Alaska Public Media: The Air Force is jamming Global Positioning System signals periodically around military airfields in Alaska during Red Flag training exercises now under way in and around Eielson Air Force Base. Officials say the GPS interference testing could affect other devices that rely on GPS.

The Federal Aviation Administration is advising pilots flying around Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Greely and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson over the next few days to expect unreliable or unavailable signals for their aircraft’s GPS set.

Air Force Lt. Col. Allen Knapp says it’s being done to prepare Air Force pilots to operate in environments in which GPS is not available.

“In a modern contested environments, most of the modern battlefields that our will face, the reception of GPS is definitely not guaranteed,” Knapp said. “It’s something that is going to be up for grabs. And it helps to have our airmen experience GPS being denied here in a training environment, like Red Flag, prior to an actual engagement where they lose their GPS reception.”

The FAA has issued several advisories in recent days informing pilots about the periodic GPS interference testing around the military airfields over the next 10 days, during Red Flag.

The agency says pilots may experience GPS problems at different times and at different altitudes. But the F-A-A says pilots should expect anomalies anywhere within 365 nautical miles from Fort Greely, up to 40,000 feet. Knapp says pilots should also expect GPS anomalies today through Friday within 150 nautical miles of Eielson, at 40,000 feet; and within 120 miles of JBER, at 40,000.

This week’s GPS interference testing around Eielson and Greely is being conducted from mid-morning to around 12:30 p.m. and again from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. daily. The schedule will vary beginning this weekend, with once-a-day testing scheduled for some days.

FAA officials ask pilots to report all GPS anomalies they encounter during the testing to the agency’s Anchorage Center to help them measure the extent of the problem.

Knapp says the Air Force jamming should not affect cellphones or other mobile devices. But he says motorists will encounter problems with their vehicle’s GPS sets is they’re near any of the three military air bases during the tests.

He says members of the public may also notice problems when using devices that rely on GPS for time calibration.

“I can’t tell you that we categorically we will not affect anything else,” Knapp said. “More and more, technologies are drawing upon that (GPS) and using that for the services they provide.”

The FAA says additional Notices to Airmen will be issued throughout the testing period to keep pilots apprised of any changes in plans for the testing.

WorldView-3 Satellite Will Upgrade Google's Earth Images

As reported by NBC News: DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite, due for launch today from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop an Atlas 5 rocket, should provide pictures of Earth that are twice as sharp as the current standard — and that could generate a new round of buzz about pictures of the planet. Google, Microsoft and other online mapmakers are among DigitalGlobe's best-known clients for Earth imagery. The RV-sized WorldView-3 satellite is capable of 30-centimeter (1-foot) black-and-white resolution, which beats the 50-centimeter resolution for pictures fromWorldView-2. DigitalGlobe had to get clearance from the federal government to sell the sharper images to civilians.

The pictures won't be good enough to reveal license plates, but "we can tell you whether it's a truck, or an SUV or a regular car," Kumar Navulur, DigitalGlobe's director of next-generation products, told NBC News. Other applications include multispectral imaging for agricultural or urban planning, and cloud-piercing infrared views for tracking fires. You can watch the launch online at 2:30 p.m. ET, courtesy of United Launch Alliance, but you'll have to wait until 2015 for the best satellite images.

The FCC Wants to Protect Citizens from Stingray-style Cell Phone Trackers

As reported by GigaOM: Devices known as Stingrays, which can secretly track and record phone users by mimicking cell phone towers, have been a hot topic in law enforcement and civil liberties circles for some time. Now, the FCC is set to take a closer look at who is using them.

In a letter reported Monday by the Washington Post, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler stated that the agency would create a task force to examine the threats posed by Stingrays, which is the trade name for a technology known as “ISMI catchers.”

The devices, which are manufactured by Florida-based Harris Corporation, work by tricking nearby cell phones into thinking they are part of the relay tower system that makes up a cell phone network. Here is a picture of a Stingray from the Wall Street Journal, which has been among the first news outlets to call attention to the technology:

The Stingray makes it possible to track the location of a cell phone user and, as Ars Technica reported, Harris Corporation also offers add-on technologies in the form of software known as “Fishhawk” and “Porpoise” that lets the Stingray operator listen to phone calls or capture text messages.

Wheeler’s decision to create the task force appears to have been prompted by a letter from Rep. Alan D. Grayson (D-Fla), who expressed concern that foreign governments and criminal gangs can use the tools to spy on Americans. Wheeler stated that the task force’s mission is to “protect the cellular network systemically from similar unlawful intrusions and interceptions.”

While Grayson’s letter to the FCC highlighted potential foreign threats, the use of Stingray technology by domestic law enforcement is also a growing source of concern. The ACLU and others have called attention to how the U.S. Marshall’s Service has been lending Stingray technology to local law enforcement troops, who in turn have been concealing from judges the use of the technology.

In his letter, Wheeler states that the FCC has the mandate to protect the national communications infrastructure, and that he will work with wireless carriers to ensure their networks are using up-to-date cryptographic standards — a measure that could make it harder to use Stingrays to capture cell phone information.

Here’s the pair of letters, which includes Grayson’s questions to the FCC, and Wheeler’s response:  Grayson – Wheeler Letter

How to Hack Nearly Any Wireless Device

As reported by Tom's GUIDE: Nearly a century ago, the advent of commercial radio broadcasts gave birth to the first generation of hackers.

Today, the proliferation of wireless communications, from Wi-Fi and cellular networking to Zigbee machine-to-machine communications, has led to an explosion of research into vulnerabilities of radio-based systems.

Keyless car remotes, home alarm systems, restaurant diner pagers, traffic alert systems, toll-collection transponders, TV satellites, airliner communications, medical pagers and even space probes can all be disrupted, thanks to software-defined radio (SDR) devices, two Australian researchers demonstrated in separate presentations at the BlackHat security conference here last week.

Radio unlock
Silvio Cesare, whose day job is at information-security firm Qualys, showed that anyone with a laptop, a device such as a USB TV tuner and software such as GNU Radio can "capture" transmissions between a wireless key fob that disables a home alarm system as the homeowner arrives.  

With a device that transmits as well as receives signals, an attacker can "replay" the unlocking signal and disable the alarm when the owner's away.

Wireless car-entry key fobs can be a bit harder, Cesare said, because they often transmit coded messages that change every time. However, Cesare determined that the key fob for his (actually his girlfriend's) test vehicle had less than a million possible codes — and that there was no impediment to "brute force" the code by simply trying one possibility after another.

Cesare wrote a script so that his laptop could cycle through and transmit all possible codes within two hours. He found instead that he could actually unlock the car within five minutes.
It seemed that some codes in the brute-force list worked every time, despite the carmaker's policy of changing the remote code with every usage, Cesare said. Once those "backdoor" codes were discovered, they would work for about a week. He found that the backdoor codes were unique to each remote.  

Cesare wouldn't disclose the make or model of the vehicle he researched, but said it was sold between 2000 and 2005 in Australia, was still built and sold in Malaysia and that a variant had been sold in North America.

Planes, medicine and satellites
Balint Seeber of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Ettus Research similarly started out small, showing how to intercept the signals sent to and from pagers that restaurants hand to waiting customers. He played video clips of himself pranking co-working waiting for their food, then setting off all the pagers in a restaurant at once.

Next Seeber showed how he decoded and learned to use FM-radio digital subchannels, which newer cars use to display both radio-station information and traffic alerts. Seeber said that if he ignored the law, as a malicious hacker would, he'd have been able to supersede an FM station's ID and information and broadcast false traffic alerts.

He briefly touched upon intercepting signals used by toll-collection systems such as FasTrak or E-Z Pass, a subject explored in greater detail in presentation slides posted to the BlackHat website. One could use SDR equipment to avoid paying tolls by masquerading as someone else, Seeber explained, or even disrupt traffic-management systems by transmitting hundreds of valid transponder IDs at once.  

Like other presenters at this year's BlackHat conference, Seeber showed it was possible to transmit false messages to modern airliners, which use protocols that are unencrypted by design. "Phantom" aircraft could be made to "appear" in the air or on landing runways, or course changes could be transmitted to an airliner cockpit in mid-flight. 

(Two pilots who spoke at the DEF CON hacker conference later in the week said any deviation from normal flight patterns would need to be confirmed with a voice query to air-traffic controllers.)

More serious still is the possibility that medical-pager systems can be disrupted, Seeber showed in his slides. Individual doctors or nurses could be sent on pointless errands throughout a hospital, bogus system-wide alerts could be broadcast to distract all medical staff, or doctors could be sent false last-minute surgery instructions just before cutting open a patient.

Radio-signal disruptions needn't be confined to planet Earth, Seeber showed. With sufficiently powerful hardware, a prankster could drown out uplink transmissions to a television-broadcast satellite, replacing regular programming with his or her own video feed.

Many of these activities are illegal, which is why Seeber didn't try them. However, he was on the team of amateurs who recently worked with NASA to revive the ISEE-3, a 36-year-old space probe that is currently passing close to the Earth.  

Using software-defined radio, Seeber and his fellow team members were able to "wake up" the probe in May and resume communications with its computers, although they discovered later that there was not enough fuel left in the thrusters to make a course correction that would have put the probe into a stable near-Earth orbit.