Most people are familiar with DJI as the manufacturers of the Phantom series, one of the most popular consumer drones on the market. The company is continuing to expand its horizons into the pro market with the new Spreading Wings S900 . This professional-grade drone not only looks cool. It also sort of works like a Transformer . Read more…
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DJI’s New Heavy-Load Drone Comes With Retractable Landing Gear
The most thrilling [marketing] advancement in recent years was unveiled last night on 60 Minutes . If you missed it— how could you have missed it? —Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos detailed the [marketing] future of his company for millions [of potential customers]: Amazon PrimeAir . The [marketing] future is here, and it is [vague promises of] 30-minute delivery by drones. Read more…
You don’t joke about mining important maritime trade routes—Iran did and nearly started WWIII . And while America’s fleet of MH-53E Sea Dragons and Avenger -class mine countermeasures ships are still quite effective, they’re getting really, really old. Both platforms entered service in the mid-1980s and are quickly nearing their retirement dates. Here’s what the Navy has in store for its future countermining operations. Read more…
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How the Navy of the Future Will Find—And Destroy—Underwater Mines
Teotihuacan, an ancient, abandoned city about an hour north of Mexico City, was once one of the largest cities in the world. It collapsed in the centuries ago (thanks either to an internal uprising or foreign invaders, depending on who you ask), but it’s never been completely deserted, since the ruins have always been a magnet for squatters, archeologists, and hordes of tourists. More »
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Archaeologists Are Unlocking a 1900-Year-Old Burial Chamber’s Secrets—With Drones
Seattle’s police force were very hot-to-trot for a pair of new surveillance drones, an issue that became a lightning rod for criticism of the scandal-haunted force. After public outcry, the city’s mayor simply returned the UAVs to their manufacturer Later this afternoon, Mayor Mike McGinn will announce that he is grounding the Seattle Police Department’s controversial drone program and returning the two remotely controlled planes to the vendor, according to sources at City Hall who asked not to be named. “The mayor and chief had a conversation and agreed it was time to end the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program,” one of the sources tells us. “It had become a distraction to the two things the department is working hard on, general public safety and community-building work.” The news comes on the heels of—and largely in response to—an angry hearing yesterday held by Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell, who was considering legislation to restrict the use of the drones for police investigations. The program has created a slowly burning outcry since 2010, when the city purchased the units for intelligence gathering with the help of a federal Homeland Security grant. Crime Mayor Will Kill SPD’s Drone Program [Dominic Holden/The Stranger] ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )
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Seattle Mayor returns police drones to the manufacturer
At the latest San Francisco Drone Olympics (now called DroneGames, thanks, no doubt, to awful bullying from the organized crime syndicate known as the International Olympic Committee), there were many fascinating entries, but the champion was James “substack” Halliday’s Virus-Copter (github), which made wireless contact with its competitors, infected them with viruses that put them under its control, sent them off to infect the rest of the cohort, and then caused them to “run amok.” Many people have written to point out that Virus-Copter shares some DNA with one of the plot elements in my novel Pirate Cinema , but I assure you the resemblance is entirely coincidental. Drones, after all, are stranger than technothrillers. Here’s the $300 drone the competitors were flying. The payload virus.tar includes: node cross-compiled for the ARM chips running on the drones * felixge’s ar-drone module * some iwconfig/iwlist wrappers in lib/iw.js * open wireless networks in nodes.json (gathered by the deployment computer) Report from the DroneGames (formerly Drone Olympics ;-))
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Flying malware: the Virus Copter