DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – Pakistani intelligence officials say a U.S. drone strike has hit a militant compound in a northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border, killing seven militants from the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network. The officials Friday said the strike took place a day earlier in the border village of Gorwak in North Waziristan, once a stronghold of local and foreign militants until the military cleared them out. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media. They said the target of Thursday's strike was the Haqqani network. Confirmation of the strike came shortly before Afghanistan Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai arrived in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials.

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Russian hackers may have stolen years' worth of competitive advantage by swiping secrets of United States' drone and other military technology after an Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed they targeted key contract workers into exposing their emails. It is uncertain what exactly may have been stolen, but Fancy Bear (the hackers who interfered in the U.S. election) targeted at least 87 people working on militarized drones, cloud-computing platforms, stealth fighter jets, rockets, missiles, and other sensitive technology, for companies like Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Co., Boeing Co., Airbus Group and General Atomics. Charles Sowell, a former senior adviser to the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and one of Fancy Bear's targets, told the AP: "The programs that they appear to target and the people who work on those programs are some of the most forward-leaning, advanced technologies." "And if those programs are compromised in any way, then our competitive advantage and our defense is compromised. That's what's really scary," Sowell, who reviewed the list for AP, added.

A second dataset featured 32,000 images captured from a GoPro on the handlecars of a bicycle. Stills from video recordings of the bike approaching objects were used to train the AI in collision avoidance.

The unrelenting threat of poaching has led to increased development of new technologies to combat it. One such example is the use of long wave thermal infrared cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) to spot poachers at night and report them to park rangers before they are able to harm animals. However, monitoring the live video stream from these conservation UAVs all night is an arduous task. Therefore, we build SPOT (Systematic POacher deTector), a novel application that augments conservation drones with the ability to automatically detect poachers and animals in near real time. SPOT illustrates the feasibility of building upon state-of-the-art AI techniques, such as Faster RCNN, to address the challenges of automatically detecting animals and poachers in infrared images. This paper reports (i) the design and architecture of SPOT, (ii) a series of efforts towards more robust and faster processing to make SPOT usable in the field and provide detections in near real time, and (iii) evaluation of SPOT based on both historical videos and a real-world test run by the end users in the field. The promising results from the test in the field have led to a plan for larger-scale deployment in a national park in Botswana. While SPOT is developed for conservation drones, its design and novel techniques have wider application for automated detection from UAV videos.

Lockheed Martin is developing a powerful new pair of cannons that can shoot down drones using high energy laser beams. Under a $150 million contract from the US Navy, the firm plans to develop, manufacture, and test the new weapons by 2020. The goal is to demonstrate one on land, and the second aboard an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, according to Motherboard. Under the new contract, Lockheed Martin will develop the laser weapons for land and for an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Lockheed Martin's newest weapons will come under a contract with the US Navy to build a High Energy Laser and Integrated Optical-dazzler with surveillance system, the Department of Defense says.

Thanks to their ever-improving camera specs, ever-shrinking size, and ever-expanding roster of aerial abilities, they're a blessing for tech fans bored of the same-old, same-old in the smartphone world. And no dronemaker is as interesting as DJI, the Shenzhen-based firm that's quickly earning the "Apple of drones" moniker. DJI's latest effort is the $799 Mavic Air, a foldable drone designed to be stuffed into a backpack and taken on all manner of adventures without sacrificing image and video quality. Unlike the cheaper and smaller DJI Spark, the Mavic Air can shoot 4K video and RAW images, stabilized by a three-axis gimbal. It's also more portable than the Mavic Pro, making it an ideal choice for hikers, travelers and others who want top-notch results without a cumbersome setup.

Days ago, South Korean authorities announced that they'd capture any drone that got too close to Olympics event facilities. If you have a DJI-made craft, you won't even be able to get close. The UAV maker is releasing a software patch that creates a no-fly zone around Olympic areas. For the duration of the games, DJI drones won't be able to fly through areas in the South Korean cities of Pyeongchang, Gangneung, Bongpyeong and Jeongseon. "Safety is DJI's top priority and we've always taken proactive steps to educate our customers to operate within the law and where appropriate, implement temporary no-fly zones during major events," the company said in a statement, according to TechCrunch.

At last year's CES, Cleo Robotics was showing prototypes of a palm-sized drone with a design unlike anything we'd ever seen. Shaped like a donut, the Cleo drone is essentially a ducted fan, with a pair of completely enclosed propellers (one on top of the other) and then a camera, battery, and electronics housed inside the shell. It's compact (95 mm in diameter, 33 mm thick, 90 grams), elegant, and inherently safe, since the nasty spinny bits are all tucked away. With fewer motors than conventional quadrotors, it promises to be more efficient as well, and quite possibly cheaper. But if you look closely at the picture, you'll probably end up with the same question that I did: How the heck does the Cleo drone steer?

SpaceX's three-core Falcon Heavy rocket fired up the afternoon sky over Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX's newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, lifted off Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018, on its first demonstration flight from Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A. CAPE CANAVERAL -- The only blemish in what otherwise appeared to be a flawless debut by SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket Tuesday was the demise of the first stage's center booster. After the rocket's 3:45 p.m. ET launch from Kennedy Space Center, two side boosters returned safely to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for nearly simultaneous, side-by-side landings that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described as "epic" and one of the most exciting things he's ever seen. But the middle booster missed the "drone ship" that was its landing target and hit the Atlantic Ocean at about 300 mph.