Can Drones Be Beat?

It seems to me that drones have been portrayed in the media as completely unstoppable death-robots akin to the Terminator, only better. XYCD sums things up pretty well:

After recent operations in Mali, a list of Al-Qaeda's tips to countering drones was found and published in the Telegraph. Most of the list is some variation on "Run and Hide" but there also seems to be some ideas for techniques to try and jam the signals that control the drone and even a suggestion that snipers could take out a drone, a la the newest, Bourne movie.

All told, the best tactic for drone dodging seems to be "don't be Al-Qaeda."

Lucky for me, figuring out how to beat drones is more of an intellectual exercise or though-experiment for my in-the-works action movie script than a real life-or-death dilemma.

Welcome to the Info Wars

Nobody dies, but reputations, finances, and long stretches in prison are all in play. Turns out, despite the hacker credo, some information really doesn't want to be free. Or will result in massive amounts of shit raining down on your head if it gets out.

Of course, for every action there is reaction, and the hacker do what they can to strike back, but in the end, lots of powerful people want their information private and will act to keep it so.

Jetpack!

Ok, now we are living in the future.

The Right to 100 megabits per Second

The Finns have a legal right to broadband access. So cool.

Via Oliver, who thinks its silly. Oliver is wrong!

InfoWar

This is the world now. From Wired's Danger Room - denial of service attacks are now part of the fighting:

Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime’s propaganda sites with junk traffic. “NOTE to HACKERS - attack www.farhang.gov.ir - pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,” Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn’t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. “There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images,” notes Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov.

This is about the information. Information is key, not bombs. And the side of freedom always has better nerds than the fascists.

Step One

This is how it starts. Some poor slob on the factory floor gets attacked, then the next thing you know the world is like this:



If you can read this, then you are the resistance.

Not the Way to Get Around

I hate the Segway. I believe it to be a vast conspiracy to get Americans to stop what little walking and biking they already do now and render us all even fatter. Why o why would you have an "eureka" moment in the bathtub that goes "lets spend millions of dollars to replace walking"

And the new, bigger, two-person P.U.M.A. is even worse. It's way too big for sidewalks, poses a real hazard for both pedestrians and bike riders, but isn't fast enough or safe enough to hang out on the road with cars. And there's no way that cities can set aside space for a dedicated Segway/P.U.M.A lane. A built-up, walkable urban core just doesn't have any more right-of-way to set aside - after the sidewalk, the bike lane and the road there's no room left. We would wreak our densest and most walkable cities trying to make way for these beasts. And don't lecture me on the wonders of being zero emission electrical powered. These things are too slow and fragile to replace cars. They replace walking and biking, two modes of transportation that are already zero emission and have the added benefit of keeping you from dropping dead of a heart attack at age 39.

I'm a futurist. I love the future, I can't wait to see what comes next. But these little chunk of the future you can keep.

My Online World

When I think to myself "Valentines day is coming up, I better move some romantic mushy stuff to the top of my Nexflix's queue so that it gets here in time" you know that the digital age has officially arrived.

Too High a Price

Obama has to give up E-Mail.

I couldn't. Could you?

Hack the System

Here's something Truly Awesome. I came across doing some random China googling. Go read. Its the (translated) story of a attempt to slip pass the Chinese state security system. The wife and baby of Hu Jia, a Chinese AIDS activist now in prison, is under house arrest in a housing complex with the perfectly Orwellian name of BOBO Freedom City. What follows is a commando-style attempt to deliver milk powder for the baby. Now, clearly the author has played way too many computer games, and narrates his story like its an action movie that plays only in his own head. I totally approve. A certain detachment from reality is necessary if you're going to poke your finger in the eye of the Chinese Secret police and not piss yourself. So go read the story and read Rebecca MacKinnon for more information.

Black is the new President...

A response to this.

Oh and can I just say that Hulu is pretty great. Top notch video quality, a big library (Airwolf!) I know YouTube is the future, but there is something to be said for old media once it gets it act together.

Oh Boy

The future just done arrived:

A three-dimensional image of Prince Charles will deliver a speech at an international energy summit in Abu Dhabi to try and reduce carbon emissions.

That science fiction future they keep telling you about? Its here.

Up from the Underground

Graffi in my neighborhood:

Google Ron Paul

Thats right, someone is going around with a can a spray paint, try to drum up some attention for a dark horse through a web search.

I am so living in the future.

Real Life: Such a Disappointment

So the first honest-to-God Cyberattack has taken place in Estonia, of all places.

But compared to the supercool cyberattacks that were promised us in the novels of William Gibson, the real thing seems a bit of a letdown.