There's a certain oversized quality to a Las Vegas conference center that makes you feel like a child monarch: simultaneously powerful and helpless. Presumably, the rooms and corridors are cavernous because space is cheap in the desert, but the overall effect somehow manages to be stifling. It feels suspiciously big, as if you're never meant to leave. The trappings of a conference do nothing to dispel this feeling: everything is arranged -- your room, your food, your schedule -- and hey, look! They even have robots handing out snacks!

Another Chinese tech giant is now at the center of national security concerns raised by the U.S. Senate. DJI, a Chinese company that dominates the commercial drone market in the U.S., published an 1800-word letter on Monday striking back against mounting concerns on Capitol Hill over spying, following the recent ban on the Chinese telecom giant Huawei. "The security of a company's products depends on the safeguards it employs, not where its headquarters is located," the Shenzhen-based drone maker said in an open letter to Senators on Monday. During a hearing hosted by Transportation Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee last week, some of the experts testified that they believe that DJI has the potential to send data back to China, which poses serious risks. "American geospatial information is flown to Chinese data centers at an unprecedented level. This literally gives a Chinese company a view from above of our nation. DJI says that American data is safe, but its use of proprietary software networks means how would we know?" said Harry Wingo, Chair of the Cyber Security Department from the National Defense University.

Yamato Transport and Rakuten are among a group of companies set to partner with the Japanese government to test unmanned delivery robots on public roads. The government will set up a council of officials from the public and private sectors next week to identify potential issues, including liability in the event of accidents and how to maintain safety. The group will also examine operating rules that could eventually be added to the Road Traffic Act. It is hoped that the robots will alleviate the labor shortage in Japan's logistics sector, as well as create new business opportunities. The robots are equipped with cameras and GPS to deliver goods without human intervention.

Eight years ago, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, which together make up more than 97% of the global market for payment services, cut off funding to WikiLeaks (you could still donate to the Ku Klux Klan, the English Defence League or Americans for Truth about Homosexuality). The blockade, backed by Republican senators, was political: WikiLeaks had published Chelsea Manning's material documenting US military drone strikes and civilian killings in Iraq; stopping inflowing cash silenced Julian Assange's outfit, albeit temporarily. Perhaps it was time for a cryptocurrency to stride from the proverbial phone booth, underpants over its tights, and save the day? After all, bitcoin's philosophy was that it would cut out the middleman, whether state functionary or corporate lackey, and realise a radical future in which, for instance, Afghan women, prohibited from opening bank accounts, might work and get paid in bitcoin. Certainly, in December 2010 there was much enthusiasm from cypherpunks for WikiLeaks to link to bitcoin on their website for donations.

TEHRAN - Iran said Tuesday it will further free itself from the 2015 nuclear deal in defiance of new American sanctions as U.S. President Donald Trump warned the Islamic republic of "overwhelming" retaliation for any attacks. Tensions between Iran and the U.S. have spiraled since last year when Trump withdrew the United States from the deal under which Tehran was to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. The two arch-rivals have been locked in an escalating war of words since Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in what it said was its own airspace, a claim the US vehemently denies. On Monday, Washington stepped up pressure by blacklisting Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top military chiefs, saying it would also sanction Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif later in the week. Tehran was defiant on Tuesday, saying the new US sanctions against Iran showed Washington was "lying" about an offer of talks.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held talks Monday with the Saudi king and crown prince about countering the military threat from Iran by building a broad, global coalition that includes Asian and European countries. Pompeo is likely to face a tough sell in Europe and Asia, particularly from those nations still committed to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that President Donald Trump repudiated last year. With tensions running high in the region after Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone on June 20 and Trump said he aborted a retaliatory strike, Iran's naval commander warned that his forces won't hesitate to down more U.S. drones that violate its airspace. The U.S. has been building up its military presence in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. announced additional sanctions Monday on Iran aimed at pressuring the Iranian leadership into talks.

An estimated 7 million drones will be flying in the skies by 2020; Claudia Cowan reports on the new technology being developed to keep airports safe. But some people either don't care or use drones to intentionally disrupt airport operations. Last December, drone sightings at London's Gatwick Airport forced a three-day shutdown, and canceled flights left thousands of stranded passengers scrambling. No one has been arrested in the case, and this past April, investigators said it could have been an inside job. In recent months, suspected or confirmed drone activity has grounded flights in Dubai, New Zealand, Israel, and at Newark Airport in New Jersey.

TEHRAN - Iran said on Sunday a "spy drone" had encroached its airspace in May, about a month before it downed an American drone as part of a series of escalatory incidents between Tehran and Washington. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted a map saying the U.S.-made MQ9 Reaper drone -- also widely used for carrying out military strikes -- had entered his country's airspace on May 26. Iran shot down a U.S. Global Hawk drone Thursday, saying it had violated its airspace near the strategic Strait of Hormuz -- a claim the United States denies. U.S. President Donald Trump called off a planned retaliatory military strike Friday, saying the response would not have been "proportionate," with Tehran warning any attack would see Washington's interests across the Middle East go up in flames. On Sunday U.S. national security adviser John Bolton cautioned Iran against misinterpreting the last-minute cancellation.

It has always been a research hotspot to use geographic information to assist the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, a road-network-based localization method is proposed. We match roads in the measurement images to the reference road vector map, and realize successful localization on areas as large as a whole city. The road network matching problem is treated as a point cloud registration problem under two-dimensional projective transformation, and solved under a hypothesise-and-test framework. To deal with the projective point cloud registration problem, a global projective invariant feature is proposed, which consists of two road intersections augmented with the information of their tangents. We call it two road intersections tuple. We deduce the closed-form solution for determining the alignment transformation from a pair of matching two road intersections tuples. In addition, we propose the necessary conditions for the tuples to match. This can reduce the candidate matching tuples, thus accelerating the search to a great extent. We test all the candidate matching tuples under a hypothesise-and-test framework to search for the best match. The experiments show that our method can localize the target area over an area of 400 within 1 second on a single cpu.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - One person was killed and seven others were wounded in an attack by Iranian-allied Yemeni rebels on an airport in the kingdom Sunday evening as U.S. Secretary of State was on his way to the country for talks on Iran, Saudi Arabia said. Regional tensions have flared in recent days, The U.S. abruptly called off military strikes against Iran in response to the shooting down of an unmanned American surveillance drone. The Trump administration has vowed to combine a "maximum pressure" campaign of economic sanctions with a buildup of American forces in the region, following the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. A new set of U.S. sanctions on Iran are expected to be announced Monday. The Sunday attack by the Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, targeted the Saudi airport in Abha.