Government
Jihad: Islamic State reverse engineering training lab plan driverless car bombs in the West
ISIS has created training videos to teach millions of aspiring muslims who dream of becoming'heroic' mujahideens how they can turn cats into self-driving bomb machines and create missiles from shells to shoot down passenger planes โ and all from basic materials that can be acquired and purchased anywhere. Put this into perspective: the EU has deliberately sent navy ships to import 1.3 million muslims from the coast of Libya and Turkey of which a massive majority support and endorse jihad according to polls, to now walk the streets all across Europe. In addition, the EU has rewarded Turkey for their willing participation in infiltrating jihad into Syria and Europe by promising to offer them 3bn euros and quicker EU-entry rather than penalizing Turkey. Obama has opened the door to over 100,000 of the same jihad aspiring muslims per year to walk American streets, hating Americans, aspiring for their death and destruction. Meanwhile both the Obama administration ( 46.6 billion for fiscal 2015) and the EU memberstates (over 3.3bn euros in 2010) have been selling military equipment and weapons to muslim countries which are then quickly funneled by these governments to their jihad'heroes' around the world fighting for Allah.
WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 28 March (Wired UK)
Today, Facebook has apologised for a Safety Check error that led to people around the world being texted in the wake of the Sunday's bombing in Lahore, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite has lost communication with Earth, Microsoft has issued a formal explanation for the actions of its short-lived machine learning chatbot, Tay, and more. Get WIRED Awake sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning by 8am. Click here to sign up to the WIRED Awake newsletter. In the wake of a suicide bombing that left at least 69 people dead in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday, Facebook has apologised for an error in its Safety Check disaster response system that saw people around the world being asked to check in as safe (The Guardian). Users in areas as geographically diverse as Australia, Egypt and Belgium received text messages asking if they'd been affected by the explosion, without any information on where the incident had occurred.
DARPA starts speed testing its submarine-hunting drone ship
DARPA's 130-foot unmanned ship is almost ready to take on rogue submarines. Its christening isn't slated to take place until April 7th, but it's now in the water near its construction site in Portland, Oregon -- the agency has even begun conducting speed tests. The drone called ACTUV or Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel has successfully reached the top speed its creators were expecting (31mph) during the preliminary tests. It was, however, designed to do much more than traverse the oceans at 31mph. ACTUV has the capability to use long/short-range sonar to detect foreign submarines, even stealthy diesel electric ones that don't make noise.
DARPA thinks spectrum allocation challenges can be addressed through machine learning
Last week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced its latest "grand challenge," which asks teams to develop smart systems that leverage machine learning to optimize available wireless spectrum. With a finite amount of spectrum and a growing number of connected devices, the public and private sector are experiencing a crunch to utilize under-used spectrum and share the available spectrum. "The agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge will reward teams for developing smart systems that collaboratively, rather than competitively, adapt in real time to today's fast-changing, congested spectrum environment โ redefining the conventional spectrum management roles of humans and machines in order to maximize the flow of radio frequency signals," said DARPA in an announcement Wednesday. The agency unveiled the challenge before some 8000 people at the International Wireless Communications Expo in Las Vegas. The DARPA competition aims to provide an alternative approach to the traditional spectrum allocation process, which pre-assigns exclusive access to designated frequencies.
Obama says U.S. drone strikes killed civilians 'that shouldn't have been'
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a conference at Buenos Aires' Town Hall, March 23, 2016. WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that "civilians were killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but said the administration is now "very cautious" about striking where women or children are present. Obama was asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in drone strikes against extremists in Libya, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. "In the past, there was legitimate criticism that the legal architecture around the use of drone strikes wasn't as precise as it should have been," Obama said. "There's no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn't have been."
10 Remarkable But Scary Developments In Artificial Intelligence - Listverse
Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have something in common, and it's not wealth or intelligence. They' re all terrified of the AI takeover. Also called the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover is a hypothetical scenario where artificially intelligent machines become the dominant life-form on Earth. It could be that robots rise and become our overlords, or worse, they exterminate mankind and claim Earth as their own. But can the AI Apocalypse really happen?
Drone: Inside the CIA's Secret Drone War
In 2001, the White House concluded that it was legal to use armed drones to kill senior al-Qaeda leaders. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, then-US President George W Bush signed off on an order which authorised the Central Intelligency Agency (CIA) to capture and kill al-Qaeda operatives. For some, drones are the greatest weapon ever to be developed by the CIA; for others, they present a constant, deadly and terrifying threat. I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world. I was like'Oh man, I get to play a video game all day!'
Machine Learning In Security: Seeing the Nth Dimension in Signatures
Second in a series of two articles about the history of signature-based detections and how the methodology has evolved to identify different types of cybersecurity threats. Many security vendors are now applying increasingly sophisticated machine learning elements into their cloud-based analysis and classification systems, and into their products. All of these techniques have already proven their value in Internet search, targeted advertising and social networking business arenas. For example, supervised learning models lie at the heart of ensuring that the best and most applicable results are returned when searching for the phrase "never going to give you up." In the information security world, supervised learning models are a natural progression of the one, two, and multi-dimensional signature systems discussed in my earlier article.
Bots Could Permanently Change the Military Chain of Command
Everyone on the internet had a great time with Tay, Microsoft's Twitter robot that became a racist Holocaust denier in a matter of a few hours (then came back and did it again). The company had created a public relations flap -- more incident than a disaster -- while giving the public an object lesson on the pros and cons of machine learning: Automation can harness patterns to fascinating effect at speed, but the results will be predictably hard to predict. As is often the case, the military is an early adopter of automation technology. It is -- at one time -- leading the charge toward machine learning and also trying desperately to keep up. One of the main areas of focus for the Pentagon is autonomous robots and how they will team with humans โ a R2D2-style robot wingman, for instance. But this week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work outlined another task for A.I.: open-source data crunching.
Cameron warns ISIS could use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities - Obama, leaders urge more action on nuclear security, terror
Britain Prime Minister David Cameron warned Western leaders Friday the Islamic State plans to use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities. The UK Daily Telegraph reported that there is growing concerns among world leaders that extremists are looking to buy commercial drones to launch a dirty bomb attack over major metropolitan cities, which could kill thousands. Cameron warned the dangers of ISIS getting hold of nuclear material were "only too real." He met with leaders from the U.S., France and China to plan out a reaction response to such an attack, the newspaper reported. US officials reportedly fear that extremists could steal radioactive material from a medical facility and sold through the "dark web." Cameron said he would deploy counterterrorism police and the UK Border Force while British leaders hold a Cobra meeting.