Very inter­est­ing stuff indeed, Dave. I won­der if the U.S.‘ll build some­thing like that?

Steven: Maybe the U.S., and/or oth­er coun­tries already have!

Note, if you see a hov­er drone that looks more like a tra­di­tion­al heli­copter, you may want to run:

Navy inks deal to put laser-guid­ed mis­siles on drones

© Novem­ber 11, 2011

By W.J. Hen­ni­gan

Los Ange­les Times

LOS ANGELES

In 100 years of naval avi­a­tion, only the most expe­ri­enced com­bat pilots have per­formed the dif­fi­cult task of launch­ing an attack on a near­by tar­get and return­ing the air­craft to a ship as it bobs in the ocean.

Now that tricky task is being turned over to unmanned drones.

With a $17 mil­lion con­tract, the Navy has tak­en the first step in arm­ing its fleet of drone heli­copters with laser-guid­ed mis­siles to blast ene­my tar­gets. The Northrop Grum­man Corp.-made MQ-8B Fire Scout would be the Navy’s first sea-based unmanned sys­tem to car­ry weapons when it’s deliv­ered with­in 15 months.

“It’s a very sig­nif­i­cant moment in naval his­to­ry,” said Mark L. Evans, a his­to­ri­an at the Naval His­to­ry and Her­itage Com­mand. “The weaponiza­tion of this air­craft rep­re­sents a quan­tum leap in tech­nol­o­gy com­pared to what has come before.”
...

@Dave: Actu­al­ly, I do now remem­ber that the Air Force had a pro­gram as long ago as the ’50s.......guess my mem­o­ry slipped a bit:

@Pterrafractyl: Yikes. Would­n’t wan­na be tar­get­ed by one of those. Sad thing is, any one of the more pow­er­ful white suprema­cist groups could man­age to get enough con­nec­tions to buy one of these, and if that hap­pens, I might just make a run for Cana­da......

pst this is noth­ing, have you seen the space plane yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnszlJC8iGs

http://www.msfc.nasa.gov/news/x37news/index.html#x37photos

i see the space race is on again, ” hey look where i can place my pay­load”
with Chi­na and Rus­sia hav­ing ambi­tious plans

Moth­er­jones was blabing on about out nuclear arse­nal

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/nuclear-weapons-complex-budget-disarmament

Chi­na Holo­gram

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M_tVsGaGM

I’m not a Jesus per­son, but Project Blue Beam seems to be the cor­rect con­cept.

Dave,

Why isn’t there more press on the Stealth Heli­copter?

The one that crashed in Pak­istan.

I think this is a MAJOR event main­ly because the thing is so qui­et... Alien Abduc­tion and all and the Dulce BS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_helicopter

@Leif: Some­how, I’m not buy­ing the whole sto­ry. Moth­er Jones usu­al­ly puts out some good stuff, but only Chi­na & India have built new nukes since around 1994 or so. And frankly, I believe that fear­mon­ger­ing is VERY much a part of TPT­B’s agen­da. They want peo­ple to wor­ry about WW3, yet they large­ly have asked us to ignore nuclear terrorism(with the excep­tion of occa­sion­al fear­mon­ger­ing pieces)......interesting, huh?

Check out the lat­est addi­tion to the Inter­na­tion­al Spy Muse­um in Wash­ing­ton DC: a brand new spy drone that mim­ics cell­phone tow­ers. If you can’t make it to the spy muse­um to see it in per­son, don’t wor­ry. As some­thing that could be built in a garage for less than $6,000, you’ll prob­a­bly see all sorts of drones like this cov­er­ing around your favorite met­ro­pol­i­tan area soon­er than you think. Although you may not actu­al­ly see it since it’s kind tiny too:

WUSA
Spy Drone hacks WiFi net­works, lis­tens to calls
Erin Van der Bellen
12:42 p.m. EST Decem­ber 12, 2014

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) — It’s small. It’s bright yel­low, and it’s capa­ble of crack­ing Wi-Fi pass­words, eaves­drop­ping on your cell phone calls and read­ing your text mes­sages. It’s an unmanned spy drone and it just land­ed in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Long-time friends and for­mer Air Force bud­dies, Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins, describe their state-of-the-art cyber drone as hard to take down, hard to see and vir­tu­al­ly hard to detect.

They built it in a garage, using off the shelf elec­tron­ics to prove a drone can be used to launch cyber-attacks.

It needs a human for take-off and land­ing but once air­borne, it can fly any pre-pro­grammed route pos­ing as a cell phone tow­er and trick­ing wire­less cell phones.

While it’s fly­ing those points, the spy drone has a num­ber of anten­nas for pick­ing up your cell phone con­ver­sa­tion, for pick­ing up blue tooth, and for pick­ing up and mon­i­tor­ing Wi Fi sig­nals.

...

“We passed tele­phone calls, hacked into net­works, cracked the encryp­tion on Wi-Fi access points all of that sort of evil­ness is pos­si­ble,” said Tassey.

And now their spy drone has land­ed in Wash­ing­ton so every­one can see it.

“I think it’s fan­tas­tic to have an arti­fact like this in the Spy Muse­um,” said Vin­cent Houghton, Inter­na­tion­al Spy Muse­um Cura­tor.

“It’s the first of its kind, it’s a piece of mod­ern espi­onage equip­ment,” said Houghton. “This is some­thing gov­ern­ments should be doing and per­haps only gov­ern­ment should be doing.

“If two guys from the Mid­west can build this for six-thou­sand dol­lars in a garage, what can Iran do? What can nation states do?” said Rich Perkins.

The drone has a 50 mile range and while its cre­ators chose a cyber-attack test, they say this tech­nol­o­gy can be used things like anti-IED mis­sions and search and res­cue oper­a­tions.

Yes, just imag­ine with nations can do with cell­phone-spoof­ing qua­si-stealthy spy drone made from off the shelf parts. Espe­cial­ly once those off the self parts are biodegrad­able. It’ll be rain­ing drones!

Here’s a bit of fun/scary future-tech para­noid spec­u­la­tion: It’s worth point­ing out that if you had a super-AI with extreme human mim­ic­ry capa­bil­i­ties com­mu­ni­cat­ing with one of those new cell­phone-tow­er spy drones, it could con­duct a man-in-the-mid­dle attack between two con­vers­ing peo­ple by lit­er­al­ly mim­ic­k­ing each par­ty in the con­ver­sa­tion. Maybe it almost con­veys exact­ly the same audio between the two par­ties but with slight changes to the con­ver­sa­tion that are cal­cu­lat­ed by the super-AI not to arouse sus­pi­cion. Or maybe the super-AI could just car­ries on two com­plete­ly sep­a­rate com­bi­na­tions where each par­ty thinks they’re talk­ing to each oth­er but both are real­ly talk­ing to the super-AI the whole time.

In oth­er words, the Tur­ing tests of the future aren’t going to be “do you think this is a human or com­put­er you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with”, at least not once AIs start beat­ing that test. No, the next Tur­ing tests will be much more inter­ac­tive, poten­tial­ly lead­ing up to a final Tur­ing test that asks the ques­tion “do you think this is [insert close per­son­al acquain­tance here] or a com­put­er you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with?” And at that point, say hel­lo to Tur­ing-mim­ic man-in-the-mid­dle tow­ers!

Just because you’re para­noid does­n’t mean there there isn’t a drone sport­ing a super-AI mim­ic that’s man-in-the-mid­dling all your phone calls. Ok, today it hope­ful­ly means you’re para­noid. But how long before super-AI mim­ic­ry becomes one of the fun/scary new tech­nolo­gies for sale? Hor­ri­ble LULZ await.

Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a bird...it’s a plane...oh, it’s anoth­er deliv­ery drone:

The Wall Street Jour­nal

Ama­zon, Google See Shift in Reg­u­la­to­ry Stance on Com­mer­cial Drones
FAA plans to announce an ini­tia­tive to study drone flights beyond the sight of the oper­a­tor

By Jack Nicas
May 5, 2015 6:18 p.m. ET

The two biggest com­pa­nies seek­ing to use drones for pack­age deliv­ery say that U.S. reg­u­la­tors have sud­den­ly become more recep­tive to their efforts, a poten­tial boost to the chances of suc­cess for one of the bur­geon­ing technology’s most promis­ing com­mer­cial uses.

Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. say they have noticed the sharp shift in atti­tude in recent weeks on crit­i­cal issues such as drone test flights.

In an appar­ent sign of the recent shift in atti­tude, the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion plans to announce Wednes­day an ini­tia­tive to study drone flights beyond the sight of the oper­a­tor, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the agency’s plans. Thus far, the agency has vir­tu­al­ly banned such flights, includ­ing for research, and it pro­posed rules ear­li­er this year that would pro­hib­it them.

The drone indus­try views beyond-sight flights as key to unlock­ing the com­mer­cial poten­tial of drones, enabling every­thing from pipeline inspec­tions to deliv­er­ies.

Drone com­pa­nies have crit­i­cized the FAA for its stance on such flights and for its require­ment that one human over­see each drone flight, which pre­vents large-scale auto­mat­ed mis­sions by a fleet of drones. The poli­cies have cast doubt on the chances that Ama­zon or Google could deliv­er pack­ages with drones in the U.S. in the next sev­er­al years.

“Hon­est­ly in the last two to three weeks, things have made a dra­mat­ic change,” Dave Vos, head of Google’s deliv­ery-drone project, said Tues­day at a drone con­fer­ence. “Three to four months ago, we were a lit­tle bit con­cerned about how much progress we could make here in the U.S., but ... what we’re see­ing today is sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­ni­ty to work here in the U.S. with the FAA.”

“I don’t know what trig­gered it,” Mr. Vos said lat­er in an inter­view. “They’re talk­ing to us and we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing.”

...

Those flights are allowed because air-traf­fic con­trol man­ages sep­a­ra­tion between the drones and manned air­craft. Ama­zon and Google want their drones to fly vir­tu­al­ly autonomous­ly in busier air­space, which will require sen­sors and soft­ware that enable the devices to nav­i­gate envi­ron­ments on their own, sens­ing and avoid­ing obsta­cles. Sev­er­al com­pa­nies say they are get­ting clos­er to devel­op­ing such tech­nol­o­gy.

Amazon’s and Google’s com­ments are part of the larg­er embrace between the FAA and the drone indus­try at indus­try con­fer­ences over the past week, large­ly dri­ven by the FAA rules pro­pos­al, which was less restric­tive than expect­ed.

Woohoo! In just a few years the skies might be filld with fly­ing piñatas filled with all sorts of fun prizes. So try­ing to enjoy fly­ing piña­ta hunt­ing sea­son and remem­ber: the bul­lets you shoot up in the sky actu­al­ly don’t stay up there. Hunt respon­si­bly.