One kid’s toy is another man’s drug mule. Over the last five years, prisoners have tried to smuggle illegal contraband into prisons more than a dozen times, according to documents USA Today obtained from the Department of Justice.
Porn, cell phones, tobacco, and drugs are among the items people have tried to sneak into prison since 2012. That was the same year Congress began opening up the skies for hobbyist drones by passing a bill allowing them to fly over U.S. territories. The bill also made it easier for average people to get licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly drones. When you let almost anyone fly drones, almost anything can happen.
Contraband smuggling may not have been Congress’ intention when it passed the bill, but prisoners have been taking advantage, no matter how secure the prison is. According to the DOJ’s documents, an inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Victorville, California was able to get someone to smuggle two cell phones into the high-security prison using a drone in March 2015. The officials at the jail did not know it happened for five months.
The documents also reveal how a released prisoner and two other people used a drone to smuggle drugs and porn into Maryland’s Western Correctional Institution. The trio performed numerous nighttime sessions and made $6,000 per drop off. The three were eventually convicted of their crimes.
There have been efforts at thwarting drones that may border on science fiction. In May, a British prison installed a 2,000-foot high “drone shield” called Sky Fence, designed to detect and block drones that fly close to the prison’s perimeter. It does this by incorporating numerous signal disruptors placed around and on the prison grounds, and jamming the signal between the drone and the pilot when it detects one approaching.
Keep a look out in the sky. You never know where that drone may be headed.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
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.