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May 04 2011
Throwable Robot Can Climb Aboard Ships, Spy on Pirates
ReconRobotics has unveiled a reconaissance microbot that can provide anti-piracy forces with valuable surveillance information. Yep, that’s right: There are now tiny robots that board pirate ships.
Pirate-fighting forces often have to board a ship with incomplete information, not knowing exactly what’s going on below decks, how many pirates are on board, or how the ship’s crew is faring—putting them at a dangerous disadvantage. To help these forces take stock of the situation before going in, ReconRobotics is making a seafaring version of its ReconScout Throwbot, a one-pound remote-controlled robot that can be tossed into a building and zip around taking video surveillance, sending the feed back to its controller. This new bot has magnetic wheels that let it drive straight up a vertical metal wall—meaning that if anti-piracy forces toss the robot onto a ship’s hull, it can climb on board and send back valuable video recon.
The Throwbot can take useful video even in it’s pitch black below decks, using infrared illuminators. ReconRobotics is also developing a marsupial robot deployment system, which is exactly what it sounds like: a big robot that carries around the recon robots, then shoots them out ...
April 28 2011
Bonus! New Night-Vision Helmet Lets You See in the Dark AND Look Ridiculous
The latest state-of-the-art night-vision helmet should probably come with a warning label: “May cause uncontrollable laughter.” Despite its goofy, high-tech-Frankenstein appearance, the helmet actually makes a significant improvement in night vision by doubling the field of view compared to—and making that view much sharper than—the view through current goggles.
Called the High Resolution Night Vision System (HRNVS), these helmets are designed to give U.S. Air Force pilots higher-resolution images and an over-80-degree field of view, which is much better than the fuzzy, 40-degree field of view of conventional goggles. With the helmet in place, a pilot simply flips the viewers over his eyes to peer into the night. Each eyepiece is fed a synced image from two digital night-vision sensors. In addition to seeing more, the pilot also receives a crisper image because the helmet is programmed to enhance edges and contrasts, says SA Photonics, the company that developed the device. And as he spies another aircraft, a HUD-like digital overlay tells him how high it is and how fast it’s moving; and he can even record what he’s seeing as a video.
April 09 2011
How Cold-War Nuclear Tests Are Helping Heart-Disease Patients
Should we be strapping these to our torsos?
We’re all a little bit radioactive now. Thanks to atom bomb tests in the mid-20th century, it’s possible to use radioactive (but harmless) carbon-14 to date not only bristlecone pines and putative Noah’s Arks but also, in a recent Karolinska Institutet study, Grandma and Grandpa’s artery fat.
The technique used in this study—radiocarbon dating—is widely employed by archaeologists and geologists to determine when organisms like fossilized trees or plants lived. All organisms absorb carbon-14 along with normal carbon-12 in a ratio that mirrors how much of each type is present in the atmosphere. (Carbon-14 is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, and then mixes throughout the atmosphere and into the oceans.) When an organism dies, the carbon-14 starts to decay at a known rate—half the atoms become nitrogen-14 in about 5,700 years—and the amount left in the tissue when it’s dug up can be used to back-calculate its age.
The above-ground atom bomb tests of the Cold War era raised the amount of carbon-14 in the air; after the tests stopped, atmospheric radiocarbon declined at a very precisely recorded rate. Using this information, scientists ...
March 18 2011
U.S. Government Writes Software to Enable Squads of Propaganda Comment Trolls
It sounds like the deranged words of a conspiracy theorist: The U.S. military is (not so) secretly creating software that’ll generate phony online personae in order to subtly influence social media conversations and spread propaganda. But what may sound like wacky theory is actually wacky reality, or at least will soon be, depending on whether it’s already in the works.
Dubbed the “online persona management service,” this technology would enable a single soldier to assume upwards of 10 different identities. As United States Central Command Commander Bill Speaks told The Guardian, “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”
Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home ...
November 22 2010
Amateur Cryptographers Go Gaga Over New Kryptos Clue: B-E-R-L-I-N
To mark the 20th anniversary of his “Kryptos” sculpture, and its lingering mystery, sculptor Jim Sandborn has released a clue to deciphering the message engraved on the statue.
“Our work is about discovery — discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the C.I.A. Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.” [The New York Times]
In 1999 three of the sculpture’s four sections were confirmed solved by computer scientist and amateur code-breaker James Gillogly. They contain historical references and cryptic sayings. Twenty years later, the remaining section, 97 characters long, is still unsolved.
And Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created “Kryptos” and its puzzles, is getting a bit frustrated by the wait. “I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,” he said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected. [The New York Times]
To help the obsessed along in their search, Sanborn told the New York Times the solution to six letters of the final section: letters 64 though 69 spell the world BERLIN.
“The ‘Berlin’ clue makes a lot of sense, in historical context of the Berlin Wall coming down that year,” says code cracker Elonka Dunin, a game designer who moderates [a popular Kryptos] Yahoo Group and maintains a comprehensive web site on Kryptos. [Wired.com]
The sculpture was installed 20 years ago at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It consists of a curved copper sheet engraved with letters, surrounded by large rocks and a pool of water. Sanborn, a former CIA man himself, was chosen to create the sculpture with the help of CIA cryptographer Ed Scheidt. Since its installation, the sculpture has not only fascinated crypto-nerds in basements but also crept into popular culture; Dan Brown included two references to the sculpture in the dust jacket for The DaVinci Code, and included it in the plot of his latest book, The Lost Symbol.
While he is getting eager for the solution to the fourth section to come to light, Sanborn admits it’s not the end. The other three sections contain clues to solving the fourth section, but then the four sections as a whole come together as one final riddle within a riddle. One of the sections even references a GPS location across the courtyard, and talk about something buried “undergruund.”
“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn said during a 2005 interview with Wired.com. “So in order to find that place, you have to decipher the piece and then go to the agency and find that place.” [Wired.com]
Sadly, since 9-11 visitors have not been allowed onto CIA grounds to view the statue, though Kryptos-ers have gotten a hold of satellite pictures and pinpointed the area.
Related content:
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD!
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Improves by Factor of 100; Ready for Primetime?
80beats: How the Russian Spies Hid Secret Messages in Public, Online Pictures
80beats: Quantum Cryptography Takes a Step Towards Mainstream Use
DISCOVER: Reviews: The Secret History of CIA Spy Technology
DISCOVER: The Cryptography of…Voting Machines
Image: Wikimedia/Jim Sandborn
October 20 2010
To Catch Hamburglars, McDonald’s Installs DNA-Spraying Security System
A McDonald’s in the Dutch city of Rotterdam has decided to crack down on burglaries with a high-tech security system previously used in the city’s jewelry stores. To catch anyone who makes off with the cash from the till (or a bag of Big Macs), the store’s managers installed a device that stealthily sprays synthetic DNA on the thief.
The system involves a small, strategically placed orange box that shoots out synthetic DNA when an employee pulls an unusual trigger: Removing a €10 bill from a special bill clip behind the counter not only activates the device, it also alerts the police that a robbery is in progress. The synthetic DNA spray is visible under ultraviolet light and contains markers that are unique to that location’s device, allowing police to match a suspect with the locale.
The security-conscious McDonald’s advertises the presence of its system with a sign on the door reading, “You Steal, You’re Marked.” The New York Times explains that the effect of the device is, well, subtle:
The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed in Britain by two brothers, one a policeman and the other a chemist. But they credit its presence — and signs posted prominently warning of its use — for what they call a precipitous decline in crime rates (though they could not provide actual figures to back that up).
There have been misfires–some McDonald’s employees have grabbed the special €10 bill when there was no crime in progress, causing the police to rush to the scene. And some customers have been “inadvertently” sprayed. Happily, those customers weren’t accused of living lives of crime.
The owner of the company that distributes the spray, the Rhine Group, rather depressingly attributed the technique’s success to the ignorance of the McDonald’s-eating masses. From The New York Times:
Much of the spray’s effectiveness, he said, comes from the mystique surrounding DNA. “No one really knows what it is,” he said. “No one really knows how it works.”
Related Content:
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80beats: How Beer Bears Witness: Your Hair Shows Where You’ve Been Drinking
80beats: CSI Canine: Dog DNA Can Help Cops Nab Dog-Fight Criminals
80beats: In Controversial Scent Lineups, a Dog’s Nose Picks Out the Perp
Image: flickr / EAWB
August 16 2010
Can Greasy Fingerprints on Smart Phones Give Away Passcodes?
That grease trail you’ve smeared on your smart phone’s touchscreen could give away more than your lightsaber skills or virtual girlfriend’s whims: Would-be smudge attackers, a recent paper argues, could follow your finger oils as a clue to your passcode.
In the paper “Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touchscreens,” which we first saw on Gizmodo, a team in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania tried to pick out grease patterns from Android phones by photographing the phones and enhancing the patterns with photo-editing software. From the paper’s introduction:
“We believe smudge attacks are a threat for three reasons. First, smudges are surprisingly persistent in time. Second, it is surprisingly difficult to incidentally obscure smudges through wiping or pocketing the device. Third and finally, collecting and analyzing oil residue smudges can be done with readily-available equipment such as a camera and a computer.”
Though the smudge alone can’t confirm the exact passcode, the study’s authors hint that it may help an attacker rule out possibilities. In the paper, the authors describe the three by three number grid of “contact points” that some earlier Android phones employed for entering passcodes. The team assumed three limitations on smudge patterns using this grid: it must have four or more contact points; it cannot use any contact point more than once; and if there is any contact point between two others on a smudge trail, then it must also be a contact point. They calculate that using just the last of these restrictions, an attacker could reduce the number of possible patterns from 1 million to 389,112 patterns–a way to reduce a phone lockout during hacking.
The study also investigated the best conditions for identifying a smudge pattern. A particularly easy partial pattern to find, the researchers say, appeared when the phone was “dirty prior to password entry,” i.e. after the user had just finished chatting, allowing the phone’s screen to soak up some extra face dirt for finger smudge contrast.
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Discoblog: Augmented Reality Phone App Can Identify Strangers on the Street
Discoblog: Augmented Reality Tattoos Are Visible Only to a Special Camera
Discoblog: One Small Step Closer to Superhuman Cyborg Vision
Discoblog: Will the Laptops of the Future Be a Pair of Eye Glasses?
Image: flickr / p_kim
June 30 2010
Extreme Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Makeover!
“Peacekeeper” missiles are getting a new lease on life: as satellite launchers. Next week, NASA plans to launch the second of these decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles, renamed “Minotaur IV,” to deploy a trash-tracking satellite.
It’s nice to know that one relic will help NASA spot others–pieces of junk, like abandoned rocket stages left over from other space missions. As the IV in the new rocket’s name implies, the Peacekeeper isn’t the first retired missile to enter the Air Force’s very special recycling program. The first Minotaurs (pdf) incorporated stages from Minutemen missiles.
Barron Beneski is a representative of Orbital Sciences Corp., which holds the Air Force contract to transform the missiles into launch vehicles. Beneski told Discovery News:
“What is neat is that what was once a military weapons system is now a peaceful use of government assets. It’s the whole idea of turning ’swords into plowshares.’”
Other countries, notably Russia and China, have similar missile makeover programs. Unlike these countries, the United States does not offer the boosters for sale on the open market–only for government use.
“OSC (Orbital Sciences) can’t sell a Minotaur to Brazil,” Wayne Eleazer, a retired Air Force officer, told Discovery News. “That’s still not allowed.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Dang, What Was That? Astronomers Wonder What Just Whizzed by Earth
Discoblog: Killer Military Robots Gaining Independence
80beats: Laser-Bearing Jumbo Jet Shoots Down Its First Missile
80beats: Russia’s Flawed Intercontinental Missile Test Lights Up Norway’s Sky
Image: NASA/JPL
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