The skies are about to get substantially more populated with drones. They won't deliver packages to your doorstep anytime soon, but a large menu of other kinds of commercial drone missions will become legal on Monday thanks to new federal rules. The guidelines also make it much simpler to become a commercial drone pilot, lowering the barrier of entry for people and companies to use unmanned aircraft commercially. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's new drone regulations limit commercial operations to relatively low-risk scenarios. The aircraft must weigh less than 55 pounds, remain below 400 feet, and cannot fly beyond the operator's visual line of sight, at night, or directly over crowds of people.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Newfound enthusiasm for the latest technologies, such as drones and smartphones, to improve the way aid is provided to people in disasters may be overblown, experts warn. The annual World Risk Report from the United Nations University (UNU) highlights the growing interest in new technologies to improve emergency response -- from drones that can survey crisis-hit areas to social media networks that allow survivors to communicate with the wider world. These can provide important information to the logisticians who organize aid delivery or health workers trying to track deadly diseases like Ebola in no-go areas, the report said. But Matthiasƒ Garschagen, a risk management expert with the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), said it could not substitute for the basic infrastructure some countries have lacked for decades. "Too many people see technology as the main panacea for solving all the problems you have after disasters strike," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. There has been a huge amount of change in the drone market since this started as a hobby scratchpad for me back in 2007. We helped created a whole new industry, but it also moved from DIY to plug-and-play at light speed. The technologies, such as advanced IMUs, optical flow and cameras with computer vision, that we were first hacking together with parts from Sparkfun and Adafruit a few years ago are now standard on consumer drones that you can buy at Wal-Mart. As drones become more sophisticated and autonomous (always the intention of this site), the hobbyists who just wanted to fly cool things shifted to FPV racing (called "drone racing" although by a strict definition they're not drones since their manually piloted).

The revelation that a private company has been conducting secret aerial surveillance on behalf of the Baltimore Police Department -- collecting and storing footage from city neighborhoods in the process -- sparked confusion and outrage Wednesday among elected officials and civil liberties advocates. Some demanded an immediate halt to the program pending a full, public accounting of its capabilities and its use in the city to date, including in the prosecution of criminal defendants. Some called it "astounding" in its ability to intrude on individual privacy rights, and legally questionable in terms of constitutional law. Others did not fault the program but said it should have been disclosed publicly before it began in January. The program -- in which Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems has for months been testing sophisticated surveillance cameras aboard a small Cessna airplane flying high above the city -- was first disclosed by Bloomberg Businessweek.

A rash of fires this summer has destroyed homes, subjected residents to evacuation orders and disrupted activities at Hearst Castle. Here are some of the fires now burning in California (numbers updated Tuesday, Aug. 23): The Clayton fire in Lake County destroyed scores of home and carved a path of destruction through Lower Lake's downtown area. New drone footage shows the aftermath of the fire. KRON-TV said it used the drone after air restrictions were lifted by firefighters. A Lake County man has been charged with intentionally setting the fire.

The world's most prestigious startup school launched 48 companies today at part 2 of its Summer 2016 Demo Day. Nanoparticle analytics and delivery robots were amongst the products revealed in the B2B, biotech, enterprise, edtech, fintech, and hardware verticals. You can check out our write-ups of all 44 startups that launched yesterday, and TechCrunch's picks for the top 7 from the batch. Trying to distill trends from the hodgepodge of startups at Demo day can be futile, because the real winners are the ones ahead of the trends. For example, TechCrunch thought Airware's drone operating system was a little too early in 2013. It turned out to be smartly ahead of the curve. Now you see lots of drone startups in YC, but many are chasing Airware which has gone on to raise 70 million. Y Combinator president Sam Altman explains "The best company at any given Demo Day is not the one that fits the theme of that Demo Day. Altman cites the Alan Kay quote that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", adding "I think short of that, the future is basically unknowable. What I like about YC is the companies get to invent the future. They don't have to guess." One important development is that 30% of this batch's companies were founded outside the US, a bigger portion than in the past. YC partner Justin Kan credits that to the program being around long enough that it's funded successful companies from tons of countries.

The new prototype drone from Amazon takes off vertically like a helicopter but flies from place to place horizontally, like an airplane. Flying machines are hard secrets to keep. By their very nature, they soar into the heavens, above the heads of those below. America's military tends to keep its secret planes secret by only flying them in vast swathes of empty desert, until they're ready for public debut. But that's not really an option for Amazon, which is testing delivery drones in the United Kingdom (while it attempts to weave its way through U.S. regulations).

You might think of drones as friendly things, like the DJI Phantom you fly yourself or those Amazon drones that could soon be delivering your groceries. Think again when it comes to military drones. An MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle with a 66-foot wingspan can loiter 50,000 feet above the Earth for a day at a time, poised to hit a target with a devastating 3,800 pounds of Hellfire missile payload. But as with all weapons, the awesome firepower of a drone needs to be aimed accurately. "It's less about technology than about strategy, about the way it's deployed," said Gavin Hood, director of drone drama "Eye in the Sky," out now on DVD and Blu-ray.

"They tirelessly patrol outside your property around the clock, and actively deter crime by establishing physical presence at the site," the San Francisco startup Aptonomy said on its website. "[Smart] drones live on your property, and get to know it well. In a live monitoring scenario, you can adjust the drone's viewpoint and move it around safety in real-time – even from hundreds of miles away." Special features of the security drone are a flight controller, day and night vision cameras, strobe lighting and loudspeakers built on top of the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter, the type most often used by movie-makers. The security drone's artificial intelligence hardware and navigational systems allow it to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments to detect human activity or faces.

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