The US Military Is Developing a Drone That Can Fly For a Week Straight

While America’s most expensive surveillance drone, the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, can stay aloft for 32 hours, the Pentagon is looking for a drone that can fly nonstop for a week or more at a time, if two recently submitted solicitations are to go by.

In a solicitation published last November, the Department of Defense (DoD) is calling on contractors to submit designs for a low cost, ultra-long endurance UAV that can perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions for seven days or more. Specifically, the DoD wants to eliminate the need for launching new waves of drones to replace the ones that have run out of fuel and have to return to base.

“The objective of this topic is to develop a low cost UAV with very long endurance, of at least seven days, that would enable the ISR mission to be accomplished with reduced manpower and system resources (esp. number of vehicles) to maintain near continuous coverage,” writes the DoD.

“Notionally the UAV will transit from its launch point to the area of interest nominally several hundred miles away, and loiter in that region for the mission duration, although the ability to move quickly between nearby areas of interest is also desired.”

The ability to maintain secrecy is a necessity with this proposed drone, and the DoD requires submitted proposals to have an acoustic and visual signature that is “virtually undetectable” by unaided ground troops. The solicitation is offering a sum of less than $1 million for this project, and application proposals are due by February 8, 2017.

How does the Pentagon think such a drone would be powered? “A number of possible technologies can be considered to meet this requirement, but it is anticipated that the most likely candidates include hybrid power systems, solar power, and possibly power harvesting,” the agency writes.

Solar technology for drones is a tested but yet to be proven method for prolonged flight. Facebook’s Aquila solar-powered drone, a key aspect of the social network’s ‘internet for everyone’ initiative, is still in an intensive testing phase. Airbus’s Zephyr solar-powered drone is also being trialed by the British military for surveillance purposes. Still, the DoD mentions conventional and logistically available fuels for powering the drones too, such as diesel and jet fuel.

In January, a DARPA-sponsored small aviation manufacturer flew a small, diesel-powered drone for 56 hours, but had to be brought down ahead of schedule because of bad weather. The VA001, built by Vanilla Aircraft, started its flight on the morning of November 30, 2016 at New Mexico State University’s Unmanned Air Systems Flight Test Center near Las Cruces International Airport. For two days and two nights, the drone flew at an altitude between 6,500 feet and 7,500 feet above sea level, averaging 57 knots before landing on the afternoon of December 2.

Simultaneously, another drone solicitation from the Department of Defense, first reported by The National Interest, calls for contractors to build a capability to conduct air-to-air refueling of UAVs to “radically increase” mission length. “Unfortunately, returning to base of operations to obtain additional fuel creates a deployment and logistics challenge,” writes the DoD.

A standard air-to-air refueling (AAR) operation for the US Air Force involves a KC-135 tanker aircraft dragging along a refueling boom or hose to allow an aircraft to come up behind the KC-135, dock a refueling probe with the fuel house, and fill up on fuel. The problem for the Air Force is that KC-135s and other tankers are large, loud, and need humans to fly them. As America’s surveillance UAVs tend to fly over hostile territory, flying in a crewed tanker would be problematic, and also alert the enemy to the presence of drones. “Because of this, an unmanned, automated tanker could a potential solution,” writes the DoD.

Read more: How the US Air Force’s Biggest Drones Help Set Up Attacks on ISIS

The US Navy’s X-47B drone has already completed successful air-to-air refueling tests in conjunction with a K-707 tanker, proving that drones can easily perform the precise manoeuvres needed for AAR, but delivering heavy fuel from another drone is something yet to be seen. The refueling procedure would require the UAV to operate in close proximity of the tanker drone. Ergo, one of the aircraft would need to know its own location relative to the other. Because of latency issues or the possibly of signal disruption interrupting delicate drone operations, “one or both the tanker and UAV must respond quickly if an unsafe refueling condition occurs,” writes the DoD, therefore it can be inferred that autonomous technologies may be required in any future drone AAR operations.

While the solicitations may not bear any fruits for some years to come, the requests from the Department of Defense clearly demonstrate the future direction of America’s UAV surveillance program that’s as much about intelligence gathering as it is about psychological warfare. Possessing the ability to keep a drone in the air for weeks at a time is a significant boon for both of those tactics.

from The US Military Is Developing a Drone That Can Fly For a Week Straight

Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock Is 30 Seconds Closer to Midnight

Image: BlackPyro1994/YouTube

Thanks to President Trump, humanity is closer to armageddon than it has been for over 60 years.

This reassuring news comes from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the experts who control the hands of the Doomsday Clock, the metaphorical timepiece that measures society’s vicinity to complete destruction.

Earth is now at two-and-a-half minutes from midnight, with midnight being the figurative end of the world.

The Doomsday Clock was moved 30 seconds towards midnight today, largely due to the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, according to the scientists behind the horological harbinger of doom. The last time humanity was this close to oblivion in the Doomsday Clock’s 70-year history was in 1953 when both the US and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons within nine months of each other.

"Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person," Bulletin scientists Lawrence Krauss and David Titley said in a New York Times op-ed. "But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter."

In January 2016, the Doomsday Clock’s minute hand saw no change at all, remaining at three minutes before midnight. The clock was changed in 2015 from five to three minutes to midnight because of a global lack of action to prevent climate change. That was the closest it had been since the nuclear arms race of the 1980s.

The Doomsday Clock’s monitoring panel is made up of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’Science and Security Board, who are in turn advised by a team of Nobel Laureates who are experts in global affairs and crises.

Read more: The Looming Extinction of Humankind, Explained

“Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change," the Bulletin scientists said in a statement to media. "This already-threatening world situation was the backdrop for a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a US presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.”

Gulp.

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Will Trump Stay Silent on the Drone War He Inherited From Obama?

Three US drone strikes in Yemen over the weekend, a country deemed by America as being an area outside of active hostilities, killed five Al-Qaeda members. The drone victims are the first under President Trump.

While on Monday the Pentagon confirmed the strikes, initial reporting of the attacks came from local sources speaking to the Associated Press. Like most drone strikes, the specific numbers or allegiances of the victims vary depending on the media outlet, source, or information from the victims’ families. As per the Pentagon’s official line, five Al-Qaeda operatives were killed. Local security forces tallied three deaths at first. Discrepancies like these have come to be expected in America’s drone war, as one of Obama’s last acts of office last Thursday highlights.

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), acting under Obama’s July 2016 decision to publish drone strike victim summaries along with an executive order calling on relevant agencies to reduce civilian deaths, the US conducted 53 strikes against terrorist targets outside of areas of active hostilities between January 1, 2016, and December 31, 2016, killing 431 to 441 combatants, and one civilian.

These figures don’t quite add up when compared to other sources, however. As The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported on January 20, by its own count, the US conducted 49 strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan during 2016, killing four to six civilians. The Bureau goes into great deal about how it sourced its own figures, only adding credence to its long-running drone investigation. The same can be said for Obama’s entire two terms of drone strikes, too, dating back to 2009. There are always discrepancies.

They might not exist under Trump.

But some solace should be found in Obama’s decision to bow to pressure in 2016 and start publishing summaries of civilian casualties from drone strikes, because they might not exist under Trump.

“There is a lot of thinking that [O]DNI could be cut and that President Obama's rules for drone strikes may be cut as well,” Dan Gettinger, researcher at the ‎Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, told Motherboard. However, Gettinger was clear to point out that this all remains speculation for the moment.

Executive orders are easily overturned, and if President Trump follows through with his campaign rhetoric of targeting entire families of terror suspects, the civilian casualty numbers may not find a way into the public sphere. Trump has also been vocal on his desire to shake up the ODNI, a move that might help the disappearance of Obama’s voluntary publishing of civilian casualties. Motherboard has attempted to contact the ODNI by phone but has yet to speak with anyone at the office.

According to the ODNI, its statistics are the result of processes that “include careful reviews of all strikes after they are conducted to assess the effectiveness of operations”. These review processes include gathering intelligence from the media, too. The ODNI, however, admits to discrepancies between the US government and non-governmental assessments, but claims these discrepancies are only found with non-credible reporting outlets.

Read more: How the US Air Force’s Biggest Drones Help Set Up Attacks on ISIS

Yet the ODNI admits that, although the US government has access to a wide range of information, the figures released for 2016 “should be considered in light of the inherent limitation on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths given the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur.”

Still, under a Trump administration already taking action without sharing basic information with the public, and placing gagging orders on governmental agencies, it’s easy to imagine statistics and summaries that don’t lend themselves favourably to the White House getting swept under the carpet; summaries that are a welcome mark of transparency in murky theaters of war. The executive order that urges all agencies, from the CIA to the US Air Force, to thoroughly attempt to investigate civilian deaths and offer payments to victims’ families may be a curse for the Trump administration worth lifting.

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It's Official: Elon Musk Will Start Digging a Tunnel Under Los Angeles

More boring news from Elon Musk today. The SpaceX CEO’s recently-revealed plan to dig a tunnel under Los Angeles to ease traffic congestion has apparently been given the go ahead, according to Musk himself, who tweeted this morning, “Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so.”

The announcement comes two days after Musk, along with several other business leaders including Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, met with President Trump at the White House to discuss manufacturing issues.

Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so.

Elon Musk January 25, 2017

Not one to hang around, it seems. We only learned of Musk’s tunnelling ambitions last December when the mogul mused about LA’s traffic problems on Twitter.

“It shall be called 'The Boring Company',” he wrote. “Borings, it’s what we do.”

But just over a month later, following the high profile meeting with Trump, Musk has confirmed work on a tunnel, which will be carved out by Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs), presumably beginning next month across the road from SpaceX’s LA office in Crenshaw, near the 105 Freeway, “5 mins from LAX”.

Motherboard has contacted SpaceX and Tesla by email to get more information about the project, but has yet to receive a response.

Donald Trump is serious about infrastructure, and even specifically mentioned tunnels in his inauguration speech. "We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation,” he declared last Friday.

It’s entirely plausible that Trump gave Musk the go-ahead to pull the trigger on The Boring Company this week, with Musk’s surprise announcement of an LA tunnel fitting the profile of Trump’s erratic, off-the-cuff, business-minded attitude. And with Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan that looks to rely heavily on private investment, it would seem Musk is the perfect guy for the job to shake up America’s roads with tunnels.

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Elite Scientists Have Told the Pentagon That AI Won't Threaten Humanity

A new report authored by a group of independent US scientists advising the US Dept. of Defense (DoD) on artificial intelligence (AI) claims that perceived existential threats to humanity posed by the technology, such as drones seen by the public as killer robots, are at best “uninformed”.

Still, the scientists acknowledge that AI will be integral to most future DoD systems and platforms, but AI that could act like a human “is at most a small part of AI’s relevance to the DoD mission”. Instead, a key application area of AI for the DoD is in augmenting human performance.

Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD, first reported by Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, has been researched and written by scientists belonging to JASON, the historically secretive organization that counsels the US government on scientific matters.

Outlining the potential use cases of AI for the DoD, the JASON scientists make sure to point out that the growing public suspicion of AI is “not always based on fact”, especially when it comes to military technologies. Highlighting SpaceX boss Elon Musk’s opinion that AI “is our biggest existential threat” as an example of this, the report argues that these purported threats “do not align with the most rapidly advancing current research directions of AI as a field, but rather spring from dire predictions about one small area of research within AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)”.

A USAF Global Hawk UAV rests in its hangar on the flightline of this desert base. Image: Tech. Sgt. Mike Hammond/U.S. Air Force/U.S. Air Force

AGI, as the report describes, is the pursuit of developing machines that are capable of long-term decision making and intent, i.e. thinking and acting like a real human. “On account of this specific goal, AGI has high visibility, disproportionate to its size or present level of success,” the researchers say.

Motherboard reached out to the MITRE Corporation, the non-profit organisation JASON’s reports are run through, as well as Richard Potember, a scientist listed on the report, but neither responded to emails before this article was published. Motherboard is also awaiting a reply from the DoD on how heavily it relies upon JASON reports for guidance.

In an email on Thursday, Aftergood told Motherboard, “JASON reports are purely advisory. They do not set policy or determine DoD choices. On the other hand, they are highly valued, very informative and often influential. The reports are prepared only because DoD asks for them and is prepared to pay for them.”

Aftergood said that JASON reports act as a “reality check” for Pentagon officials, helping them decide what’s real and what’s in the realm of possibility.

In recent years, the purported malicious intent of artificial intelligence is an idea that has flourished in the media, compounded by much more realistic fears of entire employment sectors being replaced by robots. This issue is not helped by the conflation of robotics and AI by some media outlets and even politicians, as illustrated last week by a debate among members of the European Parliament on whether robots should attain legal status as persons.

Highly publicized recent AI victories against humans, such as Google’s AlphaGo win, don’t illustrate any breakthrough in general machine cognition, the report argues. Instead, these wins rely on Deep Learning processes on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs)—processes that can be trained to generate an appropriate output in response to an input. Think a dog sitting to your command, rather than a dog knowing to sit itself.

"The two main approaches to AI are nothing like how humans must live and learn,"

Andrew Owen Martin, senior technical analyst at the Tungsten Network, a collaborative team consisting of math, AI, and computer science experts, and secretary of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), agrees with the JASON report, arguing that the public’s and other high-profile technologists’ fear of existential threats is overblown.

“Any part of human experience that's at all interesting is too poorly defined to be described in either of the two main methods AI researchers have,” he tells Motherboard. "The implication here is that the two main approaches to AI are nothing like how humans must live and learn, and hence there's no reason to assume they will ever achieve what human learning can."

Nevertheless, AGI is recognised by the JASON scientists as being somewhat pertinent in the DoD’s future, but only if it were to make substantial progress. “That AI and—if it were to advance significantly—AGI are of importance to DoD is so self-evident that it needs little elucidation here,” reads the report. “Weapons systems and platforms with varying degrees of autonomy exist today in all domains of modern warfare, including air, sea (surface and underwater), and ground.”

Northrop Grumman’s X-47B uncrewed bomber is given as one example, and DARPA’s ACTUV submarine hunter is given as another. Systems like these could no doubt be improved by enhanced artificial intelligence, but the scientists note that while these systems have some degrees of autonomy, they are in “no sense a step…towards ‘autonomy’ in the sense of AGI”. Instead, AI is used to augment human operators, such as flying to pre-determined locations without the need for a human piloting the systems.

DARPA's ACTUV uncrewed submarine tracker. Image: DARPA

Yet, while not categorically autonomous, AI-augmented weapon systems are obviously are still pain points for opponents of their use in military scenarios. Max Tegmark, cosmologist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a think tank established to support research into safeguarding the future of human life, tells Motherboard that he agrees with JASON’s view that existential threats are unlikely in the near term. However, Tegmark believes the imminent issue of autonomous weapons is “crucial”.

“All responsible nations will be better off if an international treaty can prevent an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons, which would ultimately proliferate and empower terrorists and other unscrupulous non-state actors,” he says.

So human-like autonomy is still a long way off, if not impossible, and the goalposts keeps moving too, according to JASON. “The boundary between existing AI and hoped-for AGI keeps being shifted by AI successes, and will continue to be,” say the scientists. Even military applications for technologies such as self-driving tanks may be at least a decade off. Discussing the progress of self-driving cars by civilian companies such as Google, the JASON scientists conclude, “going down this path will require at least a decade of challenging work. The work on self-driving cars has consumed substantial resources. After millions of hours of on-road experiments and training, performance is only now becoming acceptable in benign environments. Acceptability here refers to civilian standards of safety and trust; for military use the standards might be somewhat laxer, but the performance requirements would likely be tougher.”

Read more: Better Facial Recognition Tech Could Lead to Robot Hitmen

This article must be concluded, however, with the looming caveat that the entire JASON report is based on upon unclassified research. “The study looks at AI research at the ‘6.1’ level (that is, unclassified basic research),” say the scientists. “We were not briefed on any DoD developmental efforts or programs of record. All briefings to JASON were unclassified, and were largely from the academic community.”

Could America’s military be working on top-secret artificial general intelligence programs years ahead of those known about in the public sphere? Probably not, ponders Martin. “AGI isn't around the corner, it's not even possible. I don't mean that it's ’too difficult’ like ‘man will never fly’ or ‘man will never land on the moon’, I'm saying it's hopelessly misguided like ‘man will never dig a tunnel to the moon’.”

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America’s 4G Carriers Are Bracing Themselves For Trump Inauguration Livestreams

When an estimated 1.8 million people congregated at the National Mall in Washington D.C. to witness Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, Snapchat was a mere glint in Evan Spiegel’s eye, Facebook was more than five years away from rolling out live video capabilities, and the first 4G smartphone wouldn’t be sold in the US for another 15 months.

But at President-elect Donald Trump’s own inauguration ceremony on Friday, despite predictions of well under one million attendees, America’s mobile carriers are bracing for a cellular logjam as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope, YouTube, and more push 4G LTE cellular data demand to maximum. Selfies, status updates, and other social media posts will spike in the concentrated area around Capitol Hill.

There’s good reason to think this will put unprecedented demand on mobile network operators, if recent high-capacity events are anything to go by. Festival attendees at 2016’s Coachella in California, some 75,000 of them, burned through 29.2 terabytes of AT&T’s mobile data alone. During Super Bowl 50, held at the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., around 75,000 football fans used 15.9 terabytes of cellular data over one single day. Using these events as a guide, and predicting a vast majority of inauguration attendees will be Tweeting, Snapping, or Facebooking, the demand on cellular networks looks to be huge for Friday. Carriers are ready for the influx, they claim.

“This is the one that provides 20x more LTE capacity than a traditional cell site,” AT&T’s communications manager Seth Bloom (known as Seth the Blogger Guy) told Motherboard in an email, attaching a photograph of one of the carrier’s Super COWs.

Image: AT&T

Bovine data peddlers they are not. COWs—Cells on Wheels—are mobile cell sites specialized for sporting events, concerts, and national emergencies. They’re part of the hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructure crucial to keeping social media flowing in today’s data-hungry age. You may have seen one or two if you’ve ever been to a giant football match like the Super Bowl, or a music festival such as Coachella, or wherever there are thousands and thousands of social media-savvy users wanting to connect.

AT&T is deploying seven Super COWs in Washington D.C., erecting them along the two-mile stretch of the National Mall. The COWs are fitted with AT&T’s most up-to-date Drum Set Antenna, which dishes out multiple network ‘beams’, dividing network users to balance the cellular load. AT&T’s Drum Set Antenna debuted at 2016’s Coachella Festival, which in previous years also saw AT&T’s Cheese Wheel Antenna and Giant Eyeball Antennas introduced—all technologies designed to cope with the massive demand for 4G network capacity.

AT&T claims to have invested $15 million in quintupling its network capacity in Washington D.C., using a mix of temporary and permanent solutions to prepare for the inauguration week. Alongside the Super COWs, Distributed Antenna Systems have been installed or upgraded, with 50 network engineers due on station during the ceremony.

T-Mobile says it has been preparing for the inauguration ceremony for a year now, permanently increasing its 4G LTE capacity in the areas surrounding the National Mall by almost tenfold. “We’ve juiced our coverage for customers in DC,” said T-Mobile’s chief technology officer Neville Ray in a statement.

Read more: Now You Can Build Your Own Private Mesh Network With Phones and Radios

Aside from adding new multi-beam antennas and other equipment, T-Mobile is also rolling outs its own COWs, which began deployment around Capitol Hill earlier this week.

As for Verizon, the network is betting on its own mix of permanent and temporary infrastructure bolstering. The network is boosting its capacity by fivefold, deploying Remote Electrical Tilt (RET) antennas that can be honed in on data hotspots, and Matsing Ball masts, which work in a similar way to AT&T’s Drum Set Antennas, splitting up users into different slices to equally distribute the data demand.

"Verizon customers attending the Inauguration will have early access to these new technological advancements we are deploying widely throughout our network in 2017," said Nicola Palmer, network officer for Verizon Wireless, in a statement.

Sprint, despite being one of the smallest providers in the US, isn’t letting down any of its 60 million-odd customers who may be at the inauguration. The company is making the most of carrier aggregation (a feature that bonds together bands of spectrum to create a wider lane that allows more data traffic to travel at higher rates) and boosting capacity in its 1.9 GHz cell sites around the National Mall and DC Metro stations.

Friday’s inauguration is just as much of a test for wireless network providers as it is for traditional transport or city center infrastructure. AT&T said the 2013 inauguration had a smaller crowd than in 2009, but its Washington D.C. area network saw demand for data jump 16 times over Obama’s first inauguration. Obviously, it expects another huge jump for this year.

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UK Government Sets the Stage for Wider Drone Strikes

The United Kingdom has sought to clarify its position on drone strikes in an unprecedented speech held by the UK government’s attorney general Jeremy Wright QC.

Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) on Wednesday, Wright described how, “it cannot be right that a state is prevented from meeting its first duty of protecting its citizens without nailing down the specific target and timing of an attack.” In other words, the UK government sees it not necessary to conclude a tangible victim, location, or time of terror attack against its citizens before launching an anticipatory attack by drones or crewed aircraft against the perpetrators.

To that end, the British government appears to be preemptively widening its remit for Royal Air Force strikes against jihadis and other non-state actors, allowing itself to legally hit targets that are further down the chain of posing an imminent threat to UK citizens.

The United Kingdom continued to launch Reaper drone strikes against ISIS throughout 2016, and according to drone watchdog Drone Wars UK, has conducted more than 1,000 Reaper missions over Iraq and Syria since September 2014. In December 2016, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon announced the UK would be doubling its Reaper drone fleet from ten to 20 aircraft by 2021 with a $127 million deal with General Atomics. Test flights are expected to begin in 2019, and the RAF will call the drone Protector rather than Reaper.

A pilot from 39 Sqn remotely controls a Reaper MQ-9 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, during a training sortie over the west coast of America from Creech Air Force Base. Image: MoD/Crown Copyright 2009

Lucy Powell, an MP and member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones, a political party-neutral group established to examine the use of drones by governments, told Motherboard in an email today that the attorney general’s speech is a “welcome step” towards transparency regarding the legal basis for UK drone strikes.

“However, in claiming that specific evidence of an attack is not required before lethal force may be used, the Government risks lowering the threshold for military action, and appears to be paving the way for more drone strikes abroad without the prior consent of Parliament,” she said.

But Wright insisted the government has not “watered down” the threshold for military force. “I am certainly not suggesting we adopt an analysis which amounts to a Global War on Terror paradigm,” said Wright. “It is absolutely not the position of the UK government that armed force may be used to prevent a threat from materialising in the first place.”

Chris Cole, who runs Drone Wars UK, told Motherboard in an email that Wright’s speech was not marking a specific policy change, but it was “setting out [a] legal case as [the] government sees it on [a] particular aspect of the debate—around how imminent a threat needs to be before preemptive action can take place.”

Jack Serle, a journalist working on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Covert Drone War team, told Motherboard in an email today that while the obvious conclusion from Wright’s speech is an increase in UK drone operations, the UK doesn’t have the capacity currently for more operations. “The Reaper force is working hard in Iraq and Syria; the new Reapers - renamed Protectors for the RAF - won't be in action for years yet,” he said.

According to Serle, while the UK policy outlined by Wright does share some similarities with US policy, it is much more to do with “the UK trying to articulate, in law, how it intends to respond with force to the threat of such brutal attacks that have hit European cities in recent years.”

"The 'inherent right'...to use force in self-defence against an 'imminent' armed attack,"

The UK currently abides by the concept of threat imminence when it comes to launching drone strikes. “Like many other states, the long-standing UK view is that Article 51 of the UN Charter does not require a state passively to await an attack, but includes the ‘inherent right’ – as it’s described in Article 51 – to use force in self-defence against an ‘imminent’ armed attack, referring back to customary international law,” said Wright.

As such, the nature and immediacy of a threat to UK citizens helps build the case for a drone strike. But Wright argued that in the era of evolving terror threats, mixed with the use of social media and technology, the government “must be sure the law is keeping up.”

“Now, an individual so inclined can watch a video on YouTube, source an instruction manual on homemade explosives on the Dark Web, and act on whatever misconceived ideology they have absorbed, all in a short space of time, without travelling abroad and without direct communication with any established organisational leadership,” said Wright. This, as the UK government sees it, is changing the game when it comes to deciding when an attack against the UK may be imminent.

Wright referred to a 2012 report by Sir Daniel Bethlehem, a former legal adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The report, published in the American Journal of International Law, proposed a list of factors that discussed:

(a) The nature and immediacy of the threat;
(b) The probability of an attack;
(c) Whether the anticipated attack is part of a concerted pattern of continuing armed activity;
(d) The likely scale of the attack and the injury, loss or damage likely to result therefrom in the absence of mitigating action; and
(e) The likelihood that there will be other opportunities to undertake effective action in self-defense that may be expected to cause less serious collateral injury, loss or damage.

“It is my view, and that of the UK Government, that these are the right factors to consider in asking whether or not an armed attack by non-state actors is imminent and the UK Government follows and endorses that approach,” said Wright.

In adopting this revised definition of imminence, Wright has subtly revealed the UK will assume a slightly more US-like approach to targeted killing, as well as giving a green light to increased drone operations, even in theatres where military operations might previously not have been given the go ahead. “A number of states have also confirmed their view that self-defence is available as a legal basis where the state from whose territory the actual or imminent armed attack emanates is unable or unwilling to prevent the attack or is not in effective control of the relevant part of its territory,” illustrated Wright.

This, with the addition of Wright’s statement that “specific” evidence is not necessary for a preemptive strike, in line with Bethlehem’s Principle 8 regarding imminence of attack, makes it clear that drone strikes are not only going to continue, but will indeed be allowed to happen under a wider set of laws than was previously adhered to.

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How to Win $200,000 Playing Poker Against an AI

Jason Les is a seasoned professional poker player, though even he would say there’s not much he can do to prepare for his next match.

Usually, Les would scrutinize videos of upcoming opponent to learn their playing style and analyse their previous poker hands. “You have the opportunity to get an understanding of your future opponent’s strategy and develop a counter-strategy,” Les told Motherboard.

But Les’ next match, a heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em match that will be played alongside three other professional poker players over the course of 20 days, isn’t a typical one. Accompanied by poker stars Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou, and Daniel McAuley, Les will be pitted against an artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The grand prize for beating the AI? A share of $200,000 and the satisfaction of having bested a machine—for the second time.

The Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante match, which begins today at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, is actually a rematch of an original 2015 AI experiment instigated by CMU. The ultimate goal, according to CMU computer scientists involved in the program, is the same as it was in the first match: setting a new benchmark for AI.

Just landed in Pittsburgh with Jason Les January 11, 2017

In the 2015 match, CMU’s previous version of the AI program, called Claudico, played 80,000 hands against four pros, including Les and Kim, but collected fewer chips than three of them. Ultimately, the results of the match weren’t decisive enough to determine whether CMU’s AI was superior to a human poker pro.

But in true ‘new year, new me’ style, the AI is back with a name change and enhanced capabilities, ready to play 120,000 hands at River Casino. Now called Libratus, the CMU AI has far more computing power than Claudico. “We’re pushing on the supercomputer like crazy,” Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science, told CMU, explaining how his team needed 15 million core hours of computation to build Libratus, compared to Claudico’s three million.

For Les, the rematch is a daunting prospect. “Playing this new AI, there's nothing to observe and study to prepare. It's an unknown competitor that they have never put in the field. So it's very exciting to see what this new system will play like,” he said.

Read more: Elon Musk’s Group Wants to Use Video Games to Teach AI About Life

Still, Les said he learned lessons from 2015’s match, and will use them in the rematch. One of the main strategies Les said he has to utilize is shedding the instinct of anticipating how the opponent (the AI, in this case) will perceive his strategy, and just focus on maximum exploitation. “It sounds easy, but it's an instinct built on years of experience and last time I really didn't let go of it as quickly as I should,” Les said. Libratus will be playing the match with the nash-equilibrium strategy—that of knowing a change in tactic won’t help with a win, as both players are assumed to be aware of their competitor’s strategy.

“When you're playing an AI who is attempting to play a nash-equilibrium strategy, your goal has to be finding any weakness and exploiting that as hard as possible,” said Les. “This week I think I have a much better focus on doing maximum exploitation on an opponent like this and making the most out of any weakness that we can (hopefully) find.”

Poker isn’t the only game AI researchers are trying to master, though. Almost two decades after IBM’s Deep Blue whopped chess champion Garry Kasparov, Google’s AlphaGo AI beat 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol last March in a five-game match held in South Korea. Just this month, AlphaGo was secretly released as a player called Master on Tygem and FoxGo online Go servers, causing a buzz when it won 50 games straight. The AlphaGo team later fessed up to training their AI against real players, and said that they’re excited by what the Go community can learn from the successful moved played by latest version of AlphaGo.

And there are even competitive AI turf wars within the world of poker itself. Rival academics at the University of Alberta this week published a paper on their program called DeepStack, which the researchers claim can beat professional poker players. “In a study involving dozens of participants and 44,000 hands of poker, DeepStack becomes the first computer program to beat professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em,” reads their paper. Motherboard reached out to one of the paper’s authors, Michael Bowling, to ask about the program but was told he’s unable to comment until the paper, first published on the Arxiv pre-print server, is peer reviewed. Still, in a previous paper, Bowling and his team found success in beating human players at limit hold-em poker, a slight variation on the no-limit version.

"The AI's strategy is impossible to emulate"

But whichever AI Les is playing against, he sees the task as not a challenge to the traditions of a human game, but rather a an opportunity to engage with a learning tool that can make human players even better.

“The AI's strategy is impossible to emulate as a human sitting down at a poker table, but I think it will open people's minds to a lot of different things they can try when they play,” Les said. “This isn't necessarily great news for me as a professional, but it will be interesting and probably entertaining to see people try to emulate the AI's strategy if they find it appealing.”

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It’s Not Just Pepe, The Russian Embassy Has Been Trolling on Twitter For Months

This week, the official Russian Embassy to the UK tweeted Pepe the Frog to British Prime Minister Theresa May, an apparent attempt to make a mockery of the UK’s relationship with both the US and Russia. Obviously not traditional procedure for such an institute, right? Fighting the good fight of national interest is fairly normal for embassies, sure, but using a politically volatile and racist meme? Less so.

Nevertheless, there it is, going viral as a dog whistle for Trump fans and alt-righters worldwide. Or so the thinking goes.

On first glance, the Embassy's deployment of Pepe may seem intended to target the usual SJWs and snowflakes. But take a step back, and you can see it's one of just many tactics that the London-based embassy has started exercising to go after the Western press. This is a social media propaganda game than extends from Twitter, to Facebook, to the embassy's own website. And it isn't a one off; it's the latest salvo in the Trump-era infowars.

In today’s papers: pundits call on Russian Embassy, UK January 9, 2017

For months now, between its expected tweets about the innocuous daily goings-on of a diplomatic office—images of London’s Hyde Park, or patriotic news clippings about Russia’s cultural escapades in the UK—are darker, less predictable tweets. The Russian embassy’s Twitter account has been lobbing attacks at media outlets such as the BBC and The Guardian newspaper, often tagging Western news publications directly in its posts.

Take this one for instance, which attacks the British media’s nonchalance to potential CIA hack reports that don’t include accusations of Russian involvement. “Breaking News: I Don’t Care” reads the quasi-meme, mocking the press not wanting to run stories that don’t include salacious finger-pointing of Russian hackers.

Then December saw the “Lame Duck” meme criticising Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats in response to accusations of Russian involvement in the US election. The image caught the attention of the international press. The account was getting noticed.

President Obama expels 35 diplomats in Cold War deja vu. As everybody, incl people, will be glad to see the last of this hapless Adm. Russian Embassy, UK December 29, 2016

Motherboard requested an interview with the social media manager of the account, but the embassy had yet to respond to our request as of publication. It’s likely the account has more than one user.

"These memes work which is why the Embassy uses them. They attract more attention from readers because they share the informal, often jokey style of other successful Twitter-users,” Charlie Beckett, professor in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics, told Motherboard in an email.

.Russian Embassy, UK January 1, 2017

The Tweets don't particularly seek to convey hard facts or detailed information,” Beckett continued. “Twitter isn't that good at doing that anyway. Instead, they are seeking to disrupt conventional narratives and to provide an alternative perspective in a way that is hard to counter with the usual style of 'rational' argument.”

I asked Beckett whether the embassy may be mirroring Trump’s unorthodox use of Twitter. He told me that he doubts the account is doing so deliberately, but that it has a similar strategy. “In that sense, their task is to spread doubt, at least, about the 'other side's' argument. Even when they attract critical responses they have achieved their aim of raising the profile of the Russian point of view,” said Beckett.

And raise the profile it has. The Pepe tweet has been covered by a plethora of media publications, including Motherboard (twice now). The tweet, at the time of publication, has just shy of 6,000 retweets and almost 10,000 likes. Stratospheric!

On Tuesday came a further scathing attack on British press, directed mostly at The Sunday Times, from the embassy’s official website. In a blog post, an unnamed author speaks out against a perceived “impending official anti-Russian witch hunt in Britain, ” goading the British press into covering their side of the story.

It’s confusing. It’s schizophrenic. But maybe that’s the point. Russia is using the same meme-laden mindset as much of the alt-right does to confound, attack, and mock critics. Memes, Twitter, and offbeat blog posts remain a surprisingly effective tactic of retaliation for an institution that’s supposed to play by the old rules of politics and media, such as official press conferences or memos to journalists. This is 2017, and in a climate of fake news, misinformation, and extreme political prejudices borne out of Facebook filter bubbles, the attention the Pepe tweet is garnering shows there’s no need to play by the rules of official protocol anymore.

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Blink And You’ll Miss Amazon Transforming Into a Logistics Company

Since 2013, Amazon has slowly but surely been extending its options in freight and delivery. No longer content relying solely on third-party couriers such as UPS to deliver packages to customers, Amazon is turning to its own delivery trucks, drones, ocean freight, and air cargo operations to fulfil deliveries itself; more control, higher profit. Amazon’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), now even offers up physical transportation of massive amounts of data so it can be moved to a data center and uploaded onto AWS. Amazon’s global business goes deeper than many people realize.

Amazon’s latest logistical solution, revealed in this patent, is the strangest one yet, but hints at Amazon’s future of hyperlocal, customer-tailored delivery. The 33-page filing, submitted in 2014 but only granted last November, describes “dedicated network delivery systems” that avoid traffic congestion by going underground. According to the Amazon patent, such a system would “avoid congestion experienced by traditional transportation networks and enable the delivery of objects from an origin to a destination using one or subterranean or above ground elements.”

Image: Amazon

The patent goes on to outline networks of vacuum tubes, conveyor belts, and rails that would carry parcels, carts, and boxes in both vertical and horizontal directions. “A path between the origin and destination may be defined based on any factor, including travel time or cost, and any actual or predicted congestion,” says the patent. Illustrations show how the delivery network would link up Amazon’s warehouses with locker storage locations, airports, railway stations, and even customer homes.

In the immediate future, however, air cargo is lining up to be one of Amazon’s primary avenues of delivery operations. Already boasting a planned fleet of 40 Boeing 767 aircraft, liveried with Prime Air logos, Amazon can start to put a cap on rising shipping costs as well as control its own delivery destiny, avoiding shipping disasters like the one it faced in 2014.

But for now it appears Amazon will get a boost to its current 767 aircraft leasing operations. One of Amazon’s two main providers of 767s for Prime Air has purchased an aircraft maintenance business that specializes in the upkeep of the narrow body aircraft. Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) on Tuesday announced its purchase of Pemco World Air Services, with ATSG CEO Joe Hete proclaiming the acquisition “will expand access to maintenance service for customers of ATSG’s expanding fleet of Boeing 767 cargo aircraft.” That’ll be Amazon.

While Pemco doesn’t convert 767s (it instead converts Boeing 737s), some suggest that the acquisition moves ATSG closer to one day being able to convert its own 767s, according to Alex Lennane at Loadstar.

The acquisition comes in the same week as Amazon revealed Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), the retailer’s service for selling and shipping products on behalf of other sellers, delivered more than two billion items for sellers in 2016. FBA sellers can store their products in Amazon fulfilment centers, where Amazon picks, packs, ships and provides customers service for sold products. If FBA, Which grew its seller base by 70 percent in 2016, continues its expansion, it will likely become an essential part of Amazon’s entire transportation business. For Amazon, big profits line the horizon if transport becomes a larger part of its business model. As for how it affects average folks, the expansion of Amazon’s transport business should usher in cheaper, faster, and more reliable deliveries.

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SpaceX Revealed the Cause of Its Rocket Explosion, And When It’s Launching Again

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has concluded its investigation into the September 2016 Falcon 9 rocket explosion that destroyed the $200 million Amos-6 Israeli communications satellite and pushed back SpaceX’s entire launch schedule by months.

The cause? One of the rocket’s three helium tanks, called ‘composite overwrapped pressure vessels’ (COPVs), situated in the second stage liquid oxygen tank, failed.

Specifically, SpaceX said in a blog post on its website that the “investigation team concluded the failure was likely due to the accumulation of oxygen between the COPV liner and overwrap in a void or a buckle in the liner, leading to ignition and the subsequent failure of the COPV.” The company made no mention to unfounded rumors of sabotage by rival spaceflight firms, which circulated online in the aftermath of the massive explosion.

In layman’s terms: COPVs are used to store chilled helium that maintains the tank pressure. The COPVs are lined on the inside with aluminium with a carbon overwrap. The investigation team concluded that buckles in one of the liners led to super chilled liquid oxygen pooling underneath the overwrap. Subsequently, this liquid oxygen became trapped when pressurized, in turn breaking fibers or creating friction that ignited the oxygen.

“In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition,” said SpaceX.

“The investigation team identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX in buckles under the overwrap. The corrective actions address all credible causes and focus on changes which avoid the conditions that led to these credible causes.”

SpaceX said it will now be changing the COPV configuration to allow for helium to be loaded at a warmer temperature and returning to a helium loading method used on prior, successful launches. In the long term, SpaceX said it will make design changes to COPVs to prevent buckles from forming altogether.

Read more: SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule Won’t Launch With Astronauts Until 2018

The investigation conclusion now means SpaceX can resume launch operations after the four-month dry spell. On Sunday January 8, SpaceX will launch with the Iridium NEXT satellite from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex, pending a launch license issued by the FAA. It’s good news for Elon Musk. The September 1 explosion and the following hold on SpaceX’s launch cycle lost the company the business of European satellite firm Inmarsat, with the company confirming in December it will be moving to launch with Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket in 2017.

NASA also confirmed last December that the first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle has been delayed until May 2018. The launch was initially scheduled for August 2017, when the capsule would ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, becoming the first private spacecraft in the world to carry people into orbit. Instead, November 2017 will see an uncrewed test flight for the Dragon capsule that was originally scheduled for May 2017.

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An Extra ‘Leap Second’ In 2016 Caused a Mini-Y2K

An extra second was bolted onto the waning moments of 2016; a leap second designed to make up for the slowing rate of Earth’s spin against our cesium-measured atomic clocks. Leap seconds are a fairly regular addition to international timekeeping, happening on average every 18 months, and have historically caused problems for web companies using code that can’t handle the time anomalies, much like the whole Y2K debacle.

This time round, content delivery network provider CloudFlare saw some of its servers go down at midnight UTC on New Year’s Day thanks to a fault in some code that saw a number go “negative when it should always have been, at worst, zero”. Most of the affected servers were patched within 90 minutes, but worldwide problems persisted for almost seven hours, and CloudFlare did not reveal how many of its servers were tricked.

Blogging out the mishap, CloudFlare admitted that some customers were hit when the company’s DNS proxy software, RRDNS, started panicking. You can get into the nitty gritty of the non-monotonic properties of Go here, but essentially, the root cause of the bug that affected CloudFlare’s DNS service was “the belief that time cannot go backwards”. A small number of machines across CloudFlare’s 102 data centers were affected, which in turn knocked out a some customers who use CloudFlare’s CNAME DNS records to validate DNS queries for their domains. Motherboard has contacted CloudFlare by email to clarify which customers were affected, but we did not receive a response in time for this article’s publication.

“Internally, Cloudflare operates DNS resolvers to lookup DNS records from the Internet and RRDNS talks to these resolvers to get IP addresses when doing CNAME lookups. RRDNS keeps track of how well the internal resolvers are performing and does a weighted selection of possible resolvers (we operate multiple per data center for redundancy) and chooses the most performant. Some of these resolutions ended up recording in a data structure a negative value during the leap second,” explained CloudFlare in a blog post. “The weighted selection code, at a later point, was being fed the negative number which caused it to panic. The negative number got there through a combination of the leap second and smoothing.”

Read more: Why the Whole World Is Fighting Over the Leap Second

Without the leap second, which is orchestrated by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and injected into Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), the time we keep on our clocks would start drifting out of sync with the movements of the Earth. Over hundreds of years, if the leap second wasn’t added, our noon would end up being in the middle of the night. While to humans the immediate difference is negligible, systems such as GPS and Russian-made GLONASS satellites rely on pinpoint accuracy for navigational purposes. Since 1972, a leap second has now been added 27 times in total.

But not all nations agree on the extra slice of time. In 2015, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced its decision on whether or not the leap second should be abolished would be delayed until 2023, giving the body more time to study a potential leap second elimination. Demetrios Matsakis, Chief Scientist for Time Services at the US Naval Observatory, told Motherboard in 2015 that the leap second should be abolished. "We should eliminate leap seconds because of the real-world practical impossibility of reliably implementing them, due to either their inherent nature or to general lack of knowledge of their very existence," he said. Japan, France, Italy also join the US in calling for the end to the leap second, while the UK and Russia remain supporters.

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You’ll Never Look at a 404 Error Page Again the Same After This

A 404 error is a destination we never want to reach. It’s an internet dead end, a webpage road block, perhaps an error message from a broken link that never ascended to Web 2.0.

For many creative types, though, a 404 error is an opportunity. It’s still a webpage, right, may as well use it for something? If you’ve ever been lucky enough to chance upon a broken link on Motherboard, you would have arrived at our own magnificent offering of a 404 error: Filly. For Motherboard, Filly represents not a dead end but a new beginning.

“Every time I feel like I cannot continue on in this sick sad world I look at that majestic beast and its inexhaustible canter into the future and everything becomes sane again,” Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead said, describing Filly to me over Slack this week.

So towards the end of this truly bizarre year, Filly, and Motherboard, is proud to be part of a new curatorial project that applauds the true meaning of a 404 error. The 404error.gallery, a collaboration between Matthew Britton, an artist and lecturer and the University of South Wales, and friend Brett O’Connor, celebrates the potential of the 404’s non-space on the internet, featuring a collection of imaginative 404s created by artists.

“I like to think of ways of subverting these every day online things that we take for granted, the mundane and the overlooked,” Britton told Motherboard over email.

Previously, Britton has turned out of office auto replies into art distributors, in the form of email addresses assigned to business cards. He’s also taken a single Google Doc and invited the internet to come and make art with him.

“These collaborative tools can be thought about in novel and more interesting ways,” he said. “So with www.404error.gallery I really wanted these spaces of disappointment on the internet—these spaces where content couldn't be found—to be filled with creative potential and to imagine how the overlooked could be interpreted by creative minds.”

Britton teamed up with Brett O’Connor and gave artists a week to respond to the concept of designing a 404 error page. The artist replies are now part of the ongoing archive at the 404error gallery online and there's 17 ace designs so far.

“It began as a kind of cool idea for an online show,” said Britton. “It was more of a statement that no space on the web should be overlooked for its creative potential. I like to put ideas for projects out into the world and see how the world responds, see if it can engage an audience and make them think differently about their everyday routine.”

Naturally, we had to ask Britton, obviously a respected custodian of 404 error pages, what he thought of our Filly. “I do love the 404 horse, I could watch he/she all day. But I've never been overly fond of horses, so that should say something. It's more than a horse for me.”

She’s more than a horse to all of us, Matthew.

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The Most Terrifying Weapons of 2016

It’s been a rough year, and while this is Motherboard and we like to provide our readers with factual, analytical content, it’s worth noting that the world is getting some really scary and pretty insane new ways to kill that have been developed and tested in 2016. Here are some of the scariest.

*

China’s VLRAAM

Image: lt.cjdby.net

In November, the Chinese military pushed the boundaries of air-to-air missile technology by test firing a brand new hypersonic missile, with reports of the atmospheric lance having a range of more than 300 miles.

The missile, spotted on the wing of a Chinese J-16 fighter, is estimated to be almost 20 feet long, and belongs in a missile category dubbed VLRAAM (very long range air-to-air missile).

As Popular Science noted, the missile has a longer range than any current US or NATO air to air missiles, and with speeds clocking Mach 6, this “aerial artillery” would be difficult to escape. Launched at altitudes of 40,000 feet or higher, a powerful rocket engine propels the missile up to heights approaching 100,000 feet, where it encounters less air resistance and reaches its dizzying speeds. The test firing was a success, according to scant, approved press leaks from China, and a drone was destroyed at long range over Chinese airspace.

X-37B

Image: NASA

The US Air Force’s ever-so-top-secret X-37B, or in Motherboard’s terms ‘scary space drone’, launched for its fourth mission on top of an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on May 20 2015. The mission is designated OTV-4, and the X-37B is still to this day orbiting the Earth testing a type of ion-based propulsion engines called Hall thrusters, as well as carrying out long-term spaceflight tests for NASA.

Aside from these tests though, there’s not much information about some alleged ‘other’ secret experiments that might be happening on the uncrewed space vehicle, which is now hundreds of days past OTV-4’s initial 200 day length. Some suggest it’s a cutting-edge spy satellite, while others purport the Boeing X-37’s real mission is to test bombing from space. Whatever it’s really doing up there, you can track it right from here.

SATAN 2

Image: Sputnik/Vladimir Fedorenko

Depending on where you read it, Russia’s new SATAN 2 nuclear missile can wipe out Texas, France, or Great Britain. I suppose it doesn’t really matter exactly what it can wipe out though because if this terror ever gets launched we’ll all be dead anyway in the ensuing global thermonuclear retaliation. Cheery, huh!?

The SATAN 2, officially called the RS-28 Sarmat (SATAN is its NATO namesake) is a Russian super-heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) equipped with a thermonuclear warhead. Development began back in 2009, but in August of this year, Russia conducted a successful test of the SATAN’s first-stage motor, subsequently declassifying an image of the missile.

The weapon has a reported range of just over 6,000 miles, and can deliver a payload of 10,000kg at speeds approaching Mach 7. Speaking at a press conference in 2014, Russia’s General Colonel Yesin said the ICBM gives Russia the opportunity to “deliver warheads and strikes from different directions including shipping units via the South Pole.” Excellent.

Phlox

WATCH: Russia showcases cutting-edge high-mobile self-propelled Sputnik September 10, 2016

Sometimes you just need to take technology back to basics. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so the saying goes. Which is presumably why Russian military unveiled a giant gun on the back of a truck this September, called Phlox.

Shown off at the annual Army forum in Russia, the Phlox is essentially a 120mm howitzer cannon mounted onto a Ural-4320 armored wagon. It’s specifically for taking down moving and stationery targets with high-explosive shells, according to Russian news service Sputnik. “We managed to install a powerful gun on wheels," designer Denis Kirishev told Sputnik.

The medieval war machine can carry up to 80 rounds, and the turret can rotate through 360 degree. There’s also a bonus 12.7mm machine gun mounted on top of the truck, presumably to pick off any close-ranging infantry. The Phlox will likely see trials soon in Russia’s new proving grounds of the Crimea and Syria.

BFG-9000

Yes, indeed, the Big [REDACTED] Gun. One of the best video game weapons ever made a comforting return this year with the release of Doom (2016).

“The first person shooter’s first and best super weapon,” Motherboard’s Emanuel Maiberg said. “Press nine and click to make all your problems go away.”

It’s true. I spent many hours literally shitting myself through the original Doom as a seven-year-old lusting after the BFG, knowing it could help make all my problems disappear back to hell with a click of my finger. To see it make a comeback in 2016 was a pure joy. In the original Doom, the BFG9000 shot huge globules of green plasma that had were one-shot kill ANY adversary, pretty much. It’s also super useful for wiping out groups of monsters as plasma energy arcs off the main shot. Rest assured, the world would be a disaster if such a handheld gun existed in real life.

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This Drone Decorating A Christmas Tree Is So 2016

What could be more 2016 than this awful drone decorating a Christmas tree? What could be more in vogue, yet simultaneously so vile that I want to puke up my Christmas dinner before I’ve even caught whiff of it? This monstrosity, this absolutely loathsome self-masturbatory travesty—dreamt up by some flogged, tired, mince pie-addled PR department slowing crawling towards the Christmas holidays—really has topped off an entirely abysmal year with a colossal Christmas crap that will surely only be out-crapped when the real piece of crap starring in the upcoming 2017 full-length motion picture The Emoji Movie becomes a novelty plush toy.

We really have reached peak drone. What does a drone even do anymore? What does it mean to drone?

The truth is, no one is going to buy this drone to decorate their Christmas tree. Of course they’re not. The festive extras that come with this DJI Phantom 4 (a mistletoe attachment for the kiss cam, a confetti box) are simply gimmicks employed in the vain hope of getting people like me to write about it. Even the page URL shows that it’s called the Christmas PR drone.

Read more: ‘Game of Drones’ Is the Worst Headline

Has Motherboard been hoodwinked? Was this the plan all along, to utterly disgust journalists so much that they’re forced into creating some very unhappy holiday content to appease the masses who will then flock to dronesdirect.co.uk? Who knows? It’s December, dear reader, and our year is almost over. There are sure to be many drone stunts awaiting our scorn in 2017.

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Amazon Prime Air Drones Will Automatically Land If Shot At

Civilian drones are easy targets, even for hackers. While blasting them out of the sky may take small amounts of critical thinking, taking advantage of lapse cybersecurity credentials on flying drones has proven to be an effective and relatively straightforward method to ruin someone’s day.

Ergo, Amazon’s Prime Air plan to deliver consumer parcels via drone better come with some security, right?

The retailer received a US patent this week for anti-jamming technology that *should* safeguard its Prime Air drones and their packages from modern day hijackers.

The first area of the patent essentially relies on Amazon’s drone mesh communications network—the network established by a fleet of its delivery drones, or UAVs—to distribute information between each individual drone pertaining altitude, location, and heading.

"The first UAV may be directed to a safe location to land or park,"

“A first UAV may receive external data from a second UAV using the mesh network,” explains Amazon. “Disagreement between data generated by the first UAV with external data from the second UAV may result in the determination that the first UAV is compromised. Remedial actions may be taken, such as the first UAV may be directed to a safe location to land or park, may receive commands from another UAV, and so forth.”

Another safeguard for Prime Air drones, described in the patent, would be in analyzing the directionality of signals received by the UAVs. Antennas and optical directors on the drones can be configured to provide the direction, in relation to the drone, of a source of a signal. Using data about known signal sources, the drone could determine the correct direction friendly signals should be coming from. “Should the direction as received differ from the expected direction, a compromise may be determined,” reads the patent document. “For example, signals from a satellite navigation system may be expected to come from an overhead direction. Receipt of satellite navigation signals from below an aerial UAV in flight may result in a determination of a compromise, such as resulting from malicious or inadvertent jamming from a terrestrial radio transmitter.”

Even if a drone is compromised, Amazon also outlines how protective devices such as airbags and parachutes could protect the UAV in the event of a crash. “Autorotation of one or more rotors” in response to a compromised UAV is also mentioned. In fact, as per FOIA documents seen by Motherboard regarding Prime Air flights in the United Kingdom, Amazon already employs mechanisms that help a drone “land or intentionally cease flying in the event of disruption to or a failure of any of its control systems.”

Image: Amazon

But of course, no matter how advanced hackers get, there’s always the old-fashioned tried and tested method of disabling a drone: shooting at it. Amazon thinks it’s got this covered too, illustrating how a bow and arrow attack on a Prime Air drone would result in the UAV safely landing itself to get out of trouble. An example shows an attacker firing an arrow at an airborne drone, only for that arrow to miss. An onboard “compromise module”, explains Amazon, would detect the presence of the arrow and then activate a fail-safe module that would direct the UAV towards the ground. “In some implementations, the fail-safe module (figure 140, above) may be configured to direct the UAV (figure 102, above) to take evasive maneuvers, navigate to a safe landing or parking zone for inspection, and so forth.” Naturally, an arrow flies through the air much slower than a bullet fired from a gun, so it can be assumed Prime Air deliveries will still be vulnerable to small arms fire.

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