Clone Wars category archive

Writing in the Roanoke Times, John Freivalds draws parallels between the NSA vacuum cleaner and the military’s attitude towards nuclear weapons in the 1950s.

What do they have in common? Paranoia.

Just read it. An excerpt won’t do it justice.

From David Rovics.

Via LO.

Only a year ago, US intelligence officials were holding China’s feet to the fire over matters of cyber-espionage. A year later, it seems that the tables have turned. But in order to glimpse the hypocrisy of the US intelligence community, we must start in late 2012, when the US House Intelligence Committee first condemned two Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei and ZTE, for alleged ties to the Chinese government.

(snip)

Revelations of the closely knit relationship between private US technology corporations and the NSA’s data mining efforts have not only brought Washington into the spotlight, but have had the same effect on US tech companies operating abroad..

Read the rest, in which the author puts forth cogent arguments that the rationalization for the electronic surveillance vacuum cleaner is less than persuasive when considered critically.

I remember diagrams like this from when I was young.

Those showed Russian aircraft.

Via Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

Yet another wedding party . . . .

I should have known that it was too good a target for a talented cracker to overlook.

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes last Sunday to show a prototype of a drone Amazon plans to use for a new Prime Air delivery service, hacker Samy Kamkar wasted no time in linking Amazon’s drone to his own design for a SkyJack drone that could hijack it. The Linux-based hack, which was released with source code, is not Amazon specific in anyway, but is designed to de-authenticate any client linked to the WiFi-equipped drone and then take control of navigation and camera functions. Not only could you hijack an Amazon delivery drone — holiday shopping made easy! — but create “an army of zombie drones under your control,” says Kamkar.

Back to the droning board.

Via LQ.

Funny or Die lists how companies are planning to compete with the drones from (at?) Amazon. A nugget:

RadioShack’s Pretty Good Throw™ Service

A large man will throw your order as hard as he can in your general direction.

(Not availale [sic] on windy days or if man is tired)

Read more »

Via Cowgirl Up.

Sic Transit Monopolus.

Now in high schools.

Unmanned aircraft soon could be zipping around the grounds of Sunlake High School.

The school plans to offer a course on drone technology in January as it launches an Aerospace Career Academy with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

“Drone techonology.” Model airplanes with data links.

And when I was in high school, I thought the only drone was Mrs. Holla–oh, never mind.

We t-ped her front yard.

It was magnificent.

In Japan Times, Gregory Clark says there’s not much there there in the fuss over the NSA’s internet vacuum cleaner’s indiscriminately sucking up signals and that, furthermore, the only folks who didn’t know this sort of stuff was happening are folks who don’t pay attention.

He suggests that the real danger is corruption of the public discourse through the use of misinterpreted or twisted information. A nugget:

“Group-think” is now openly blamed for the Iraq disaster. Criminal collusion would be the better word.

Over Iraq, bogus reports of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear ambitions (the “mushroom cloud”) and phony al-Qaida links (by a regime dedicated to suppressing al-Qaida?) were all fed into that “twilight world” to call for an attack that today no one even tries to justify.

As the U.S. and U.K. try to dig themselves out of the current diplomatic mess created by their runaway spy agencies, both like to insist they have not used spy information for economic gain. But that is untrue; business information is a major target for all such agencies, especially since it usually falls into the easily code-breakable category.

Read the rest.

George Smith harpoons the hysteria over castor beans and ricin.

Contrary to American war on terror mythology, castor seeds don’t make a good weapon. They contain ricin and it’s easy to grind them to powder but, In fact, it is harder than one might think to achieve simple poisoning.

Science (gasp!) at the link.

Afterthought:

It’s been within that last several weeks that I saw a major network’s TV detective show (can’t remember which one) that propagated the ricin myth.

Robitic death raining from the skies.

And don’t tell me how stressful it is to be the gamer on the other end of the controller. That’s a misdirection play par excellence.

He goes home at night.

How the NSA thinks like Facebook. Watch it all the way through.

Facebook it. We’re all zucked.

Instead of designing UAVs from the ground up, Boeing is taking old mothballed jets and tweaking them so they can fly without a pilot.

Last week at Tyndall AFB in Florida, a pilotless F-16 roared into the sky with an empty cockpit, according to Boeing.

The QF-16 the pilotless jet didn’t just take off, turn around and land. It climbed to 40,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico, broke the sound barrier and performed maneuvers like barrel rolls at more than 7Gs.

They are going to serve as targets in pilot training.

Collateral damage?

In the Inky, Margaret Kaminsky wonders whether you can protect your droning from their droning.

Several states have wiretap laws that require a person to get permission from all parties in a conversation before recording it. These wiretap laws have been used by police to arrest people who record police activity in public using cellular phones. But several courts have found that such recordings are protected by the First Amendment, recognizing a First Amendment “right to record.”

The “right to record” is not firmly established; nor is it clear how broad this right might be. So far, the “right to record” has been used by courts to protect people who record public officials acting in public, as a matter of public interest.

It is not clear if the “right to record” can be used to successfully challenge privacy laws that protect private spaces, or private citizens. But several older cases suggest that a person appearing in a public space cannot prevent another person from taking a photograph of them.

Regardless of what courts may find, I expect we can expect to have the eaves dropped on us with regularity. Pretty soon, there will be no cone of silence.

Expect more like this:

The FAA is now investigating after a drone crashed into a crowd of people Saturday at the Bull Run event in Dinwiddie.

It drove right into Patrick Lewis and two of his friends sitting in the stands.

(snip)

Virginia Beach film maker, Scott Hansen, owns the drone involved in the crash. He says he loaned it out to a pilot covering the event that day. And he says pilot error led to one of the batteries dying, causing it to crash.

Wonder how long it will take for “DUI” to stand for “droning under the influence”?

And don’t get me started on the stupid, dangerous, and cruel faux running of the bulls.