About 120 thousand passengers turned out to be blocked at the London Gatwick airport for more than one day. The only runway of the airfield was closed on the evening of December 19 after two unmanned aerial vehicles were noticed in the sky above it.
Police and military are trying to find the person who launches drones over the airport. The perpetrator of this incident will face up to 5 years in prison because UK laws prohibit unmanned aircraft from approaching the airport at a distance of less than one kilometer. Authorities fear that drones may collide with airplanes, for example, hitting a jet engine or windshield. The police believe that the aircraft invaded the territory of the airport to thwart flights during the peak period before Christmas and New Year.
In recent years, pilots have repeatedly reported close encounters with drones. In 2017, Gatwick Airport was closed for a short time due to a flying drone. In 2016, the Dubai International Airport was temporarily closed due to a drone.
Although the police still have no reason to assume that this accident is related to terrorism, it is already becoming clear that a new type of terrorism has been born – drone terrorism. Not in the sense of delivering explosives by a drone, but in the sense of disrupting the normal life of people, as in the case of telephone terrorism, when there are no victims, but concerts are frustrated, shopping centers or office buildings are evacuated. As in the case of telephone terrorism, prohibited items are not used, but the lives of many thousands of people are effectively disturbed: in the Gatwick incident, Christmas plans of many people were broken because of the little drone. I do not want to think about what example was given to many people who enjoy destroying the lives of others.
From this very moment, we can say with confidence that technology progress now is available not only for people but also for our smaller brothers, for pets.
It is not a secret that many animals in cities are suffering from the noise pollution around them and they have a real reason for that. For example, dogs have a much wider range of hearing than humans, and noises that don’t bother us can give them a very rough time. Fireworks are especially tough on many pups, and also hard on owners who have to calm their panicking pets.
Suddenly, a solution to this problem was proposed by the automaker Ford that showed the concept of soundproof kennel. According to the company, it will help animals that are scared of fireworks and other loud sounds.
It is also very interesting to know that noise reduction technology that Ford used to create a doghouse is the same as in Ford’s Edge and Fusion vehicles, which protects the driver and passengers from engine noise.
“We wondered how the technologies we use in our cars could help people in other situations. Making sure dogs and their owners could enjoy a stress-free New Year’s Eve seemed like the perfect application for our Active Noise Control system,” said Ford content manager in Europe, Lyn West, in a statement.
By, the way Ford’s noise-canceling kennel also have a very good design and interior. The doghouse is packed with noise-absorbing materials, including high-density cork panels, anti-vibration risers, and soundproofed ventilation. There’s even an automatic sliding glass door on what is a very stylish-looking unit.
As Ford reported, for now it is just a prototype and it won’t be released in the market in case of insufficient interest. But you can bet there will be countless dog lovers lining up to buy one, even if it is very expensive.
A long-standing goal of an interaction between humans and computers has been to enable people to have a free conversation with machines, as they would with each other. In recent years, we have witnessed a revolution in the ability of computers to understand and to generate natural speech, especially with the application of deep neural networks.
One of the inventions in this area was Google Duplex. As you probably know, Duplex is a technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine. For example, Duplex can automatically reserve a table for you in a restaurant, using a phone call to a manager.
While Google is still testing and developing their new system on a small amount of Pixel phone Users, another giant tech company Alibaba already has a working model. It is used not for restaurants, but for an even narrower niche – the delivery of goods. At an annual AI research gathering, the e-commerce giant demoed a sample conversation where the voice-assistant was tasked to ask a customer where the package should be delivered.
The most amazing thing is that Alibaba’s voice assistant was able to deal with some controversial situations during the dialog such as interruption (pauses), nonlinear conversation (customer starts a new line of inquiry), and implicit intent (customer doesn’t explicitly says what he actually means). It is an amazing new which also once again underlines the superiority of China in the field of artificial intelligence, by the way. Currently, the agent is used only to coordinate package deliveries, but it could also be expanded to handle other topics.
For the first time, information that Google is developing a censored search engine codenamed Dragonfly was revealed in the late summer of this year. It was reported by The Intercept with reference to internal leaks. And, as it turned out, an aura of secrecy has been around the project for several years.
This is not unusual for new movies, games, services, and so on. However, in this case the situation was different. The task of Dragonfly was monitoring and filtering information because the customer was the Chinese government.
Inside the company, about the project became known in February 2017, although some top managers were discussing this issue since 2016. Top executives told the engineers that the search engine infrastructure would depend on a Chinese partner company with data centers in Beijing or Shanghai. The latter means that the Chinese government could receive any data from these servers. In addition, the system must associate user’s requests with their phone numbers. And considering a fact that in China exists a database with telephone numbers of all people, this means an unequivocal identification of all users.
One of the participants in the Dragonfly was Yonatan Zunger, who was offered to work on a search engine secret project. But after some time, he declared to management that such a system is unacceptable and would violate human rights in China. In response to these claims, the head of the “Chinese” direction, Scott Beaumont, did everything so that Zunger and other dissenters no longer participated in the project and knew nothing about it.
In the same 2017, Zunger left the company but three of his followers are still working there and agreed to disclose some new details, of course, on conditions of anonymity. In particular, according to them, the participants and developers of Dragonfly held meetings with a high secrecy regime. There were no written notes or other open communication. At the same time, out of 88,000 Google employees, only a few people knew about the essence of the project. Some were threatened with dismissal if they discussed the essence of their work with colleagues. According to one of the company’s employee, management took all measures to minimize data leaks.
After disclosing information, some human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch openly condemned the project and said that the company could become an accomplice in human rights violations in China. Later, the US Senate joined the case, and Vice President Michael Pence demanded that Google stop developing Dragonfly.
However, despite the internal and external resistance, the project was launched. And recently, the company officially confirmed the fact of development. Google executive director Sundar Pichai said that the corporation is considering the possibility of returning to the Chinese market, from which the company was forced to left in 2006 due to a number of blockings.
At the same time, according to The Intercept, co-founder Sergey Brin was personally interested in returning to Chinese territory, as Beaumont said. Allegedly, the co-founder of the company met with high-ranking Chinese officials to discuss the return. At the same time, Brin himself had previously denied the possibility of censorship and claimed that he had learned about Dragonfly only from the media.
One way or another, but the situation around the “censor” search engine has split Google. Recently, a number of employees signed an open petition against it. It is not clear how this story will end, but it can seriously shake Google’s market position.
Yesterday, famous multinational hospitality organization Marriott joined the company of Facebook, Uber and some other large corporations who failed to protect their users’ data privacy. As Marriott reported, the records of 500 million guests of its Starwood division were compromised by an unauthorized party and involved in a data breach.
Starwood’s hotel brands include W Hotels, Sheraton, Le Méridien and Four Points by Sheraton. Marriott branded hotels were not injured as they use separate reservation system.
According to the results of internal investigation, it was found out that hackers had access to the system since 2014 which gave them many opportunities to learn more about the system weaknesses or simply understand where the valuable data is. Stolen information includes some combinations of:
name
address
phone number
email address
passport number
account information
date of birth
gender
arrival and departure information
Some credit card numbers were also stolen as a part of the breach. Marriott says that this part of information was encrypted but attackers may have also compromised the decryption keys needed to unlock the data. This revelation marks one of the biggest corporate data breaches in history. It is the second behind one involving Yahoo.
Beginning Friday, Marriott is sending notification emails to impacted customers, warning them that criminals could send spam to their emails. It has also established a call center and breach notification website. Although, Marriott is trying to help all victims, there is still one unanswered question.
Marriott International management admitted that they were discovered the breach after an internal security tool alerted them in September. Why did it take them so long to figure out what data was accessed and why did they wait another two weeks before informing those affected? Unfortunately, it is a common problem when big companies try to hide such failures and do not reveal them as long as possible. Such irresponsibility must be accompanied by huge fines such as Uber was fined for concealing data breaches some days ago.
Marriott will continue its investigation but it is already clear that the problem of data protection is becoming one of the most important in the 21st century and needs serious actions from states and organizations.
Since the first manned flight was accomplished by the Wright brothers more than 100 years ago, literally every aircraft in the sky has flown only with the help of moving parts such as propellers, turbine blades and fans, which are powered by the combustion of fossil fuels or by battery packs that produce a persistent and annoying noise. We could only dream about futuristic shuttle crafts that effortlessly skimmed through the air, with seemingly no moving parts and hardly any noise or exhaust.
But it seems that science fiction is becoming a reality. In paper, published in Nature journal, MIT researchers, who was inspired by the Star Trek movie, reported that they have created and flown the first plane without any moving parts. It became possible thanks to the concept known as “ionic wind” – the wind is generated in the air between two electrodes when current goes between them. When enough voltage is applied, a thrust can be produced with the “ionic wind” to power a small plane without the need for any moving parts. The idea was first introduced in the 1920s but never widely spread and was successfully applied only in avionics.
MIT’s magic plane flies without fuel or moving parts
Application of this technology would give us many opportunities in the future such as safety, low noise levels, maintenance, and environmental benefits over traditional planes. But this idea also entails many challenges for scientists that they will have to solve. Prospective aircrafts powered by “ionic wind” would require sustainable supply of electricity in order to create sufficient voltage to propel the plane. A small 2,45 kilograms MIT’s plane model needs around 40.000 volts to get off the ground and scaling it up to the size of commercial aircraft will create huge weight problems that the design would need to overcome.
Obviously, there is still long way to make this concept widely used but some things may become possible in the foreseeable future. Not talking about using this technology for drones, it also creates some prospects for hybrid planes. Steven Barret, MIT professor and one of the plane creators, believes that this technology could be used in conjunction with jet engines to make the overall craft more fuel efficient by re energizing the air that passes over the aircraft and eliminating drag.
The First steps to create our future are done. Now, looking forward to the continuation of the story.
