Put down your shotgun, folks. There won’t be any drone-hunting happening until next spring or later – at least if you’re in the small town of Deer Trail, Colorado, where one man’s mission to make it legal to shoot down quadrocopters and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been delayed until April 2014.
Deer Trail local Phillip Steel launched an effort earlier this year to create official “drone-hunting licenses” that would allow purchasers to blow away UAVs that infiltrate the airspace above Deer Trail, and even collect bounties for handing over decimated drone parts.
Unfortunately for Steel, a recent Deer Trail Board of Trustees vote (captured by the Colbert Report for a November segment) ended in a tie, sending the vote to the community’s 523 residents, reports the Daily Beast. The vote was set to take place today, December 10; however, Deer Trail resident Jessica Stoumbaugh protested the vote, forcing a judge to delay any action on Steel’s drone-hunting ordinance until next year.
The problem with drones, writes Steel on his Drone Shooters website, is that they will give the U.S. government the power to “control all.”
“Forget about States’ Rights. Do you like to shoot? Hunt? Play softball?” asks Steel. “Do you want to build a house or barn? The federal government will control all. Our federal overseers will rule us and tax all. We will serve a ruling elite who has already exempted themselves from any laws that they may pass.”
Steel’s hatred of drones is fueled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s forthcoming rules to allow commercial drones into U.S. airspace in larger numbers – as many as 15,000 or so within the next five to 10 years, according to FAA estimates. When Amazon announced its plans to introduce a delivery service that uses drones, called Prime Air, Steel’s drone-killing efforts struck a chord with Web users who were appalled at the idea of swarms of flying robots taking over the skies.
While Deer Trail has yet to approve any form of drone-hunting licenses, Steel won’t be stopped by technicalities like votes and laws. Instead, he has begun selling drone-hunting licenses himself, through his website, for $25 a pop – and people have actually bought them. Say what you will about Phillip Steel – we think he may be an evil genius.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.