Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.

Academic researchers have implanted a wireless brain-machine interface into a locked-in subject who is almost completely paralyzed.

The system uses brain electrodes to read signals meant for jaw and mouth muscles. An FM radio is used to transmit these brain signals to a computer, which transforms them into recognizable sounds. Currently the system is only able to produce vowels, but with more electrodes and more powerful algorithms it should be able to scale up to fully vocalized words.

Previously, previously.

This is pretty cool. Delaunay is the inverse of Voronoi, so this is the same family of tesselations that the Voronoi XScreenSaver does.

He did it manually, though, which is kind of weird. Would have been cooler to automatically pick the control points by the first derivative of the image. Animation: