At a time when the entire U.S. surveillance community is under fire for snooping on everybody’s private business, you might think a little rebranding is in order. Something lovable and non-threatening – something cute and cuddly, like Whiskers the NSA Kitten. That could win people over, right? How can you be against kittens? You can’t, is the answer.
So, is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the agency that oversees the NSA – going to revamp its image with adorable snugglebombs? Ha! Who do you think protects this country from the world’s most fearsome terrorists, six-year-old girls? Buzzfeed editors? The moderators of /r/aww? Get real, you pansy.
No – ODNI has a much better mascot in mind: A giant, world-eating octopus!
This is a real thing: On the side of a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellite that launched on Thursday night, you’ll find the logo for NROL-39: an Earth-encompassing octopus along with the tagline “Nothing is beyond our reach.” Nothing!
In a statement given to Forbes’ Kashmir Hill, NRO spokeswoman Karen Furgerson defended the logo, saying “NROL-39 is represented by the octopus, a versatile, adaptive, and highly intelligent creature. Emblematically, enemies of the United States can be reached no matter where they choose to hide.” Furgerson added that the “Nothing is beyond our reach” line “defines our mission and the value it brings to our nation …”
The NROL-39 satellite is carrying a “classified payload,” Hill reports, so we can only imagine what this satellite will be used to do, specifically. But given all we now know about the NSA’s activities these days, one doesn’t need to strain too hard.
In addition to the giant octopus, NRO’s logo selection includes a bull, a dragon, a panther, a buffalo, and this:
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.