drones

Could soldiers of the future fight battles in robot bodies controlled from afar? DARPA apparently thinks so, and the agency wants to create an army of surrogate fighting droids.

The U.S. military's research wing apparently is planning surrogates like in the film "Avatar" but with robots instead of giant Na'vi. It has a $7 million program code-named "Avatar" in its 2013 budget, according to Wired.

The robots would reduce risk to human fighters, just as thousands of aerial drones are already keeping pilots out of harm's way. … Read more

Google is working on augmented-reality goggles, say goodbye to Blockbuster Express kiosks, and Redbox and Verizon team up to take on Netflix.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Fancy having your own self-guided flying camera mount? One that could get your Canon dSLR soaring over your house and neighborhood for only $2,500?

Kickstarter fans would, so much so that they ponied up triple the $25,000 funding goal for the Eye3 hexacopter, powered by the open-source APM2 autopilot platform.

After all, flying drones, military and civilian, can record stunning footage for a lot less than the price of a helicopter camera crew.

But Kickstarter has poked its finger in the Eye3, pulling the plug on funding. … Read more

The cool smartphone-controlled Parrot AR.Drone quadcopter, first shown at CES in 2010, is getting some good updates that are being announced at this year's conference.

The biggest changes for the AR.Drone 2.0 are hardware and software improvements to make the device easier to fly. Better location and orientation sensors should make the drone more stable in the air, and a new pressure sensor will help it hold its altitude more accurately when it's more than a few feet off the ground (when the ultrasonic ground proximity sensor is ineffective).

On the software side, a new &… Read more

In 2011, Boeing's 787 Dreamliner carried passengers for the first time, and the space shuttle landed for the final time.

For aviation buffs and aerospace junkies, those were the signature events of the year. In the case of the shuttle, there were actually three such moments, and each time we got more verklempt: Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis all flew their final missions. But as the door closes on that 30-year piece in history, a window is opening to private space ventures like SpaceX and the newly unveiled Stratolaunch effort from Paul Allen and Burt Rutan.

Boeing got a lot … Read more

A U.S. stealth drone in Iranian hands was hijacked by using software that spoofed GPS coordinates, forcing it to land at those coordinates, the Christian Science Monitor reported today.

Hackers reconfigured the GPS system of the RQ-170 Sentinel, forcing it to "land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications," said an unnamed Iranian engineer who said he examined the captured drone.

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," he told the newspaper. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into … Read more

A virus that keeps a log of what people type has found a persistent foothold in the computers that pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada use to remotely control the U.S. military's unmanned drone aircraft, Wired reported today.

It's not clear whether the virus was deliberately aimed at the military computers or whether it got there through the general spread of infectious malware, "but the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers," Wired reported, citing three unnamed sources.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the matter.

Wired … Read more

With a name like SkyNET, it's got to be scary. This flying robo-hacker deserves its "Terminator"-inspired moniker: Although it stops short of actually hunting humans, it's a potential nightmare for anyone with a wireless home network. Worse, it's a DIYer's dream: cheap and easy to build and fun to operate.

SkyNET combines a toy helicopter and a computer configured to attack Wi-Fi networks. The result is a drone the CIA would be proud of. The nasty little device can compromise computers on wireless networks and dragoon them into botnets. Botnets are widely used for hacking, denial-of-service attacks, and spamming.

The devious beauty of SkyNET is that by controlling the botnet from a drone rather than an Internet connection, the botmaster is harder to track down. To catch the bad guy you'd have to figure out that a drone is involved, spot the drone, and follow it back to its owner (assuming the black hat goes to pick it up). Either that or catch it and do a full-blown forensic investigation to figure out who made it.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Forget Wi-Fi war driving. Now it's war flying.

A pair of security engineers showed up at the Black Hat security conference here to show off a prototype that can eavesdrop on Wi-Fi, phone, and Bluetooth signals: a retrofitted U.S. Army target drone, bristling with electronic gear and an array of antennas.

"Nobody's really looking at this from a threat perspective," said Mike Tassey, a security consultant who works for the U.S. government intelligence community. "There's some pretty evil stuff you can do from the sky."

The term war driving, meaning … Read more