occupyallstreets:

A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government. With just around $1,000 in parts, Humphreys’ team took control of an unmanned aerial vehicle owned by the college, all in front of the US Department of Homeland Security.

After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into a drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that.

Humphrey tells Fox News that for a few hundreds dollar his team was able to “spoof” the GPS system on board the drone, a technique that involves mimicking the actual signals sent to the global positioning device and then eventually tricking the target into following a new set of commands. And, for just $1,000, Humphreys says the spoofer his team assembled was the most advanced one ever built.

“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s airspace.

“In five or ten years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he tells Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”

Domestic drones are already being used by the DHS and other governmental agencies, and several small-time law enforcement groups have accumulated UAVs of their own as they await clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration. Indeed, by 2020 there expects to be tens of thousands of drones diving and dipping through US airspace. With that futuristic reality only a few years away, Humphreys’ experiment suggests that the FAA may have their work cut out for them if they think it’s as easy as just approving domestic use anytime soon. After all, reports Newser, domestic drones are likely to use the same unencrypted GPS signals provided to civilians, allowing seemingly anyone with $1,000 and the right research to hack into the system and harness a UAV for their own personal use.

“What if you could take down one of these drones delivering FedEx packages and use that as your missile?” Humphreys asks. “That’s the same mentality the 9-11 attackers had.”

(via thisinfiniteevening)

Source: occupyallstreets

via rgbd:

We’re making progress on the 3D printed camera + sensor mounts! 

I still remember the very first time I saw the combining of filmic SLR lenses with the then-common miniDV tapes used in most midlevel camcorders, the short film was titled Marla, based on the character of the same name from Fight Club; snd I couldn’t stop reading everything I could get my hands on regarding, what was quickly becoming known as, mini35. 

The rig was simple: a SD Canon GL2 strapped down to a small wooden board, with a gutted out Nikon SLR body positioned several inches ahead of the lens. To prevent light-leak the team covered the gap with a thick piece of black card-stock; then zooming in the GL2 until the focusing area of the Nikon SLR filled up the entire video frame and that was it! The crew could use any compatible Nikon SLR lens they wanted, and everything was captured on cheap miniDV tape thanks to the GL2. It was so simple - but the look was truly impossible to achieve at that time any other way, outside of using actual film cameras, of course. 

It wasn’t long until SLR-adapter rigs started showing up for purchase; there was the SGblade, the Redrock, there were others… an entire industry came and went. Shortly thereafter, dSLR cameras began to record video, SD video at first, then 720 video, 1080p video, now the line is blurred between what is primarily a still camera and what is primarily a video camera; resolution is moving closer and closer to 2k, 3k, even 4k. 

The above photos remind me of that same feeling - the feeling I had when I first watched Marla. When Marla was released, I could have probably counted the number of people making films with homemade mini35 rigs on one hand, and I think I could say the same for storytellers using dSLR cameras + Kinect rigs today; I don’t mean people doing experiments and short examples, but people actually producing short-to-long form documentaries with this combination of camera and depth sensor.

I do feel that this is the start of a new kind of storytelling - a new way to accomplish visuals that otherwise would require enormous manpower and budgets to accomplish. 

I’m going to make a statement here - one that might come back to embarrase me 5 years from now, but I’ll make it all the same - 3D films as we understand them today will die-off, the kind of 3D that requires cheap plastic glasses is outdated and underwhelming in its approach of faking depth; side-by-side 2D images do not add up to 3D, they produce an illusion of depth; an unimpressive one, in my opinion.

The kind of 3D storytelling that will emerge in the next several years will involve true depth, depth that can be explored from any angle, depth that can be moved in and out of modeling programs and 3D printers. The iPhone I keep in my jeans-pocket will soon capture point cloud information in addition to any videos I record or still I take. First, more likely than not, depth sensors will be used in phones for touch-less interfacing, instead of swiping your finger across the surface of your screen, it will become only necessary to swipe just above the screen, keeping it smudge-free whenever possible; but inevitability, these depth sensors will become faster, extremely accurate, and easier to match up with stills and video captured with the phone’s built-in camera. 

Many people reading this probably have very, very little interest or even experience in 3D anything; if I can help it, I always choose to see a film in 2D vs 3D, and I haven’t built anything in Maya since the 12th grade. I don’t hope that this is the future of filmmaking because of wishful thinking on a personal level; I don’t have much invested in this world. But, in the same way that I take for granted GPS and metadata information for any photo I take with my iPhone - in the same way that apps now take advantage of gyroscope-positioning for everything from photo-stitching to gameplay - peripheral point cloud data will become another important layer that can either be used or ignored.

But when a person does happen to use that available depth data, they’ll be able to share the most incredible and visually-unique stories. 

photo by Mike Ambs - hiking with @funshine to the hollywood sign :) After posting the above photo near the back-side of the Hollywood sign, Erica and I ended up noticing a small trail just behind on a chain-link fence, we followed that small trail for another mile and hiked way above the Hollywood sign; there was an beautiful lone-tree at the far-end of the mountain path, but neither of us had eaten much and we figured we’d better save that for another day. The view though was amazing! 
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photo by Mike Ambs - hiking with @funshine to the hollywood sign :)

After posting the above photo near the back-side of the Hollywood sign, Erica and I ended up noticing a small trail just behind on a chain-link fence, we followed that small trail for another mile and hiked way above the Hollywood sign; there was an beautiful lone-tree at the far-end of the mountain path, but neither of us had eaten much and we figured we’d better save that for another day. The view though was amazing! 

Government Good: GPS

rickwebb:

governmentgood:

In late 1983 the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines 747 over the North Pacific Ocean. Through a series of errors both human and machine, compounding one another, commercial jetliner had strayed off its course while flying from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul, South Korea. This was at the height of the cold war, and the Soviet Union shot down the jet, claiming that the jet, so obviously in Soviet airspace, must have been on a reconnaissance mission. Two hundred and sixty nine people were killed.

Not long after, in early 1984, Ronald Reagan publicly announced, with great media attention, that a forthcoming US Government funded navigation and timing system, known as NAVSTAR-GPS would be available to not only the US Government, and not only to Americans, but to the entire world, for free. 

Entry #2 in Government Good. Got a good list of examples going (THANK YOU). Gonna try and do at least one a week, hopefully more. The research can be pretty intense, though. But I shall persevere! Please follow! 

Source: governmentgood

Lost City Revealed

Though it’s long been known to locals that something — something big — is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it’s only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures.

It’s stories like these that leave me feeling as though I’m in the wrong line of work - what I wouldn’t give to spend the next 6 years digging and carefully piecing together the lives of a lost civilization buried under several feet of jungle… so many secrets. 

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