On a dare, Texas college researchers hacked into and hijacked a drone of the US Homeland Security before the eyes of the officials operating it.
Using a technique called “spoofing” where a signal from the hackers imitates the one sent to the drone’s on-board GPS, the researchers managed to take control of a small but powerful drone in mid-air.
The hostile takeover of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) owned by the college was done before the weary eyes of DHS officials, Fox News reported.
During the experiment conducted at the University of Texas stadium, the small red drone soared into the sky following a clear set of commands entered into its computer.
Shortly after, the aircraft veered to the side, making it obvious that it was no longer following its original orders. Then, the drone hurtled toward the ground as if given a self-destruct command and was saved in the last moment.
And the hijacking was just for a $1,000 wager.
However, the incident has unnerved American Homeland security officials, as the spoofing has made it possible for anyone with a $1,000 and a plan to turn a harmless UAV into a missile and crash it into a building.
Professor Todd Humphreys, who was leading the hijackers team at Austin Radio-navigation Laboratory, said his team, for a few hundred dollars, was able to build the most sophisticated spoofing system yet that tricked the drone into following a new set of commands.
“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys said.
The stadium display was not the first time government officials witnessed spoofing live.
Last Tuesday, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Department of Homeland Security watched as Humphreys’ team repeatedly hijacked a drone from a remote hilltop in the desert of the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The implications of the experiments are both far-reaching and unsettling since the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other groups to employ scores of drones in US airspace.
It is believed that a US drone was brought down in Iran last December when someone jammed its GPS system. Drones have been widely used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen to take out terror suspects.
Domestically, the use of UAVs has been limited to southern border patrols.
Grandpa of everyone in UK: DNA links man to Eve
LONDON: A retired lecturer who took a DNA test to find out where his ancestors came from has been found to be directly descended from the first woman on earth, Eve, who lived 190,000 years ago.
The test revealed that Ian Kinnaird has a genetic marker inherited from his mother that traces his ancestry to an African lineage that has not been found before in Western Europe. Researchers from Britain's DNA, who carried out the tests, said the result meant that in genetic terms he was a "thoroughbred" , and could be described as the "grandson of Eve, or the grandfather of everyone in Britain" .
They were so surprised by the results that they phoned the 72-year-old , a widower who lives in Scotland, to break the news to him. They said his mitochondrial DNA passed through the female line, was 30,000 years old and only two genetic mutations removed from the first woman, while most men have a genome with around 200 mutations since the earliest humans.
"It is an result and means he could have been in the 'Garden of Eden' ," the Telegraph quoted Alistair Moffat, the historian and rector of St Andrews University, as saying.
The test revealed that Ian Kinnaird has a genetic marker inherited from his mother that traces his ancestry to an African lineage that has not been found before in Western Europe. Researchers from Britain's DNA, who carried out the tests, said the result meant that in genetic terms he was a "thoroughbred" , and could be described as the "grandson of Eve, or the grandfather of everyone in Britain" .
They were so surprised by the results that they phoned the 72-year-old , a widower who lives in Scotland, to break the news to him. They said his mitochondrial DNA passed through the female line, was 30,000 years old and only two genetic mutations removed from the first woman, while most men have a genome with around 200 mutations since the earliest humans.
"It is an result and means he could have been in the 'Garden of Eden' ," the Telegraph quoted Alistair Moffat, the historian and rector of St Andrews University, as saying.
mind-reading speller
Researchers have come up with a device that may enable people who are completely unable to speak or move at all to nevertheless manage unscripted back-and-forth conversation. The key to such silent and still communication is the first real-time, brain-scanning speller, according to the report published in Current Biology.
The new technology builds on groundbreaking earlier uses of fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans to assess consciousness in people described as being in an unconscious, vegetative state and to enable them to answer yes and no questions.
fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging) is typically used for clinical and research purposes to track brain activity by measuring blood flow.
“The work of Adrian Owen and colleagues led me to wonder whether it might even become possible to use fMRI, mental tasks, and appropriate experimental designs to freely encode thoughts, letter-by-letter, and therewith enable back-and-forth communication in the absence of motor behaviour,” said Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in The Netherlands.
The new evidence shows that the answer to that thought question is yes. Sorger’s team came up with a letter-encoding technique that requires almost no pre-training.
Participants in their study voluntarily selected letters on a screen, which guided the letter encoding; for each specific character, participants were asked to perform a particular mental task for a set period of time.
That produced 27 distinct brain patterns corresponding to each letter of the alphabet and the equivalent of a space bar, which could be automatically decoded in real-time using newly developed data analysis methods.
In each communication experiment, participants held a mini-conversation consisting of two open questions and answers. Everyone the researchers tested was able to successfully produce answers within a single one-hour session.
The results substantially extend earlier uses of fMRI, which allowed individuals to answer the equivalent of multiple-choice questions having four or fewer possible answers, by enabling free-letter spelling.
That could make all the difference for people who are completely paralysed and unable to benefit from other means of alternative communication, Sorger says.
Ultimately, she says their goal is to transfer the fMRI technology they’ve developed to a more portable and affordable method for measuring blood flow, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy.
The new technology builds on groundbreaking earlier uses of fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans to assess consciousness in people described as being in an unconscious, vegetative state and to enable them to answer yes and no questions.
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fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging) is typically used for clinical and research purposes to track brain activity by measuring blood flow.
“The work of Adrian Owen and colleagues led me to wonder whether it might even become possible to use fMRI, mental tasks, and appropriate experimental designs to freely encode thoughts, letter-by-letter, and therewith enable back-and-forth communication in the absence of motor behaviour,” said Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in The Netherlands.
The new evidence shows that the answer to that thought question is yes. Sorger’s team came up with a letter-encoding technique that requires almost no pre-training. Participants in their study voluntarily selected letters on a screen, which guided the letter encoding; for each specific character, participants were asked to perform a particular mental task for a set period of time.
That produced 27 distinct brain patterns corresponding to each letter of the alphabet and the equivalent of a space bar, which could be automatically decoded in real-time using newly developed data analysis methods.
In each communication experiment, participants held a mini-conversation consisting of two open questions and answers. Everyone the researchers tested was able to successfully produce answers within a single one-hour session.
The results substantially extend earlier uses of fMRI, which allowed individuals to answer the equivalent of multiple-choice questions having four or fewer possible answers, by enabling free-letter spelling.
That could make all the difference for people who are completely paralysed and unable to benefit from other means of alternative communication, Sorger says.
Ultimately, she says their goal is to transfer the fMRI technology they’ve developed to a more portable and affordable method for measuring blood flow, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy.
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