U-2 Spy Plane With AI Equipped ARTUµ Co-Pilot

New technology emerged to tackle the need to have a co-pilot on U-2 Spy Plane. Before this any U-2 spy plane needs to have 2 man operating it. One's is piloting it while the others will manage all the electronics and reconnaissance services.

Now.. things have changes.

The United States Air Force just hit a major milestone involving the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-controlled flight. A mission yesterday with a U-2 spy plane out of California saw an onboard AI system working together with a pilot. 

The Air Force said in a statement that this partnership represents the very first moment that AI has served as “a working aircrew member onboard a military aircraft.” The AI system, which the Air Force calls ARTUµ, handled the operation of a sensor, while the pilot did other duties. “During this flight, ARTUµ was responsible for sensor employment and tactical navigation, while the pilot flew the aircraft and coordinated with the AI on sensor operation,” the Air Force said. 

The military notes that the AI that controlled the sensor had trained by learning from data that represented more than 500,000 “simulated training iterations.” Its goal was to look for missile launchers using the radar.

U-2 spy planes are known as complex crafts to fly—the aviators within them must wear spacesuits—and if the AI performed well, it would mean that a busy pilot would have fewer tasks to do while operating the high-altitude, intelligence-gathering aircraft.

Making Money Out Of Thin Air

In early 2010, Nish Bhalla sat down at his computer with one objective: steal a huge amount of money from a bank.

real ATM printed receipt

It wasn't a typical heist. Bhalla is the chief executive of Security Compass, a company that tests security systems at banks, retailers, energy companies and other organizations with sensitive data. His clients -- including the bank branch in the United States that he targeted in his 2010 attack -- pay him to break into their systems.

It can be easier than most people think. The alleged thieves who made headlines last week for their $45 million bank heist used a similar type of attack that "created" money out of nowhere.

Bhalla talked and explained his caper.

Here, in four easy steps, is how he made himself into a millionaire.

Step one, get access. Bhalla had one big advantage on actual thieves: His client gave him access to the bank's internal network. For real-world crooks, there are some surprisingly easy ways to get in.

It's possible, Bhalla said, to gain access in some places simply by logging on to the bank's wireless network -- an amenity more and more banks are providing as a service to customers. Once you're on the bank's Wi-Fi, the internal and external networks are frequently not segregated enough. It can be possible to fool the bank's other computers into thinking that your computer is a bank computer, a process known as "arp spoofing."

Another on-ramp: Someone posing as a janitor could insert a thumb drive into a teller's system and reboot it using a new operating system, which would enable them to access the hard drive of the teller's system. From there, user names and passwords are often readable. Because he could simply log straight into his client's network, Bhalla and his assistants skipped the "get physical access" step and dove straight into finding the money.

Step two, start exploring. Bhalla used "sniffer" software, available online for free, to map out which of the bank's systems were connected to each other.

Then he "flooded" switches -- small boxes that direct data traffic -- to overwhelm the bank's internal network with data. That kind of attack turns the switch into a "hub" that broadcasts data out indiscriminately.

The machines that the tellers use quickly became Bhalla's prime target. Again, the sniffer software was deployed to look for login information and passwords in the data flood. Eventually, one hit. He was inside a teller's machine.

Step three, move up the ranks. Amazingly, the information being sent between the tellers' computers and the branch's main database was not encrypted. This meant passwords and bank account numbers were all out in the open.

Step four, cash in. Rather than steal money from depositors' accounts, Bhalla just invented a new account for himself.

"We went into the database where the accounts are and set up an account with $14 million," Bhalla explained. "We just created $14 million out of thin air."

If he wanted to, he could have walked into any bank branch, transferred the money to an offshore account, and never have had to work again. Instead, he went to an ATM to print out a record of his ill-gotten wealth.

"The bank executives were extremely surprised," Bhalla said. "Their faces were shocked."

The bank promptly deleted Bhalla's bounty, he said, and took steps to shore up its network.

In the heist that came to light last week, federal officials say the thieves hacked into networks at firms that process transactions for pre-paid debt cards and created accounts with high spending limits. From there, it was just a matter of making physical debt cards for those accounts and going around to ATMs to withdraw the cash.

"They just updated the database with that debit-card information," Bhalla said. "That's how simple it was."

In many cyber bank heists, including the recent $45 million scam, it's hard to pin down who is ultimately liable for any losses. It's typically not individual customers. U.S. law protects consumer checking and savings accounts from losses stemming from fraud. Business accounts, though, have fewer protections.

Bhalla said some financial institutions have insurance to cover the losses -- but he noted that insurance companies are reluctant to issue policies with high coverage limits because the risks in this area area still poorly understood.

In the end, he said the losses are likely born by a combination of the company, insurance firms and governments.

@ Global Info Center

Netbook Is Dead

Although the slow death of the PC has been widely discussed by technology pundits recently, there is also another, lesser known victim of Apple’s iPad market dominance.

The netbook, which was originally intended to fill the low-cost niche between fully loaded laptops and smart phones, is dying an even quicker death than the PC according to IHS iSuppli market research statistics via Electronista.

Netbooks debuted in 2007 and were an immediately a popular product “because they were optimized for low cost, delivering what many consumers believed as acceptable computer performance,” states IHS senior principal analyst Craig Stice via the Los Angeles Times. According to the IHS statistics, netbook sales were at their height in 2010, with 32.14 million units shipped reports Electronista.

Last year the number of units shipped dropped to 14.3 million. The IHS report predicts that a total of 3.97 million netbooks will ship in 2013, which is a 72 percent decline from the previous year. However, the bad news for the netbook market doesn’t stop there. The market research firm forecasts a paltry 264,000 netbooks shipped in 2014, followed by the complete disappearance of the netbook by 2015.

As the IHS analyst points out via the Los Angeles Times, “netbooks began their descent to oblivion with the introduction in 2010 of Apple’s iPad.” However, netbook sales have declined even faster than PCs since the devices are being made obsolete by multiple types of products. Netbooks are being squeezed out of the market by higher-priced tablets, as well as lower-priced smart phones.

Perhaps Steve Jobs said it best when he introduced the iPad in 2010. As quoted by Electronista, Jobs stated, “The problem is: netbooks aren’t better at anything. They’re slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky, old PC software.”

Apple shipped 22.9 million iPads in the quarter that ended last December and claimed 51 percent of the global tablet market in 2012 according to IDC statistics cited by Bloomberg.

@ Global Info Center

Will Windows 8 Be The End Of Microsoft

With mobile technology often seen as the future of computing, investors and consumers everywhere have waited anxiously for news on Microsoft's recently launched Windows 8 platform.

Although numbers have been hard to track down, some of the data points that have emerged about Microsoft's big bet on mobile haven't been as encouraging as some had hoped. In the following video, our tech analyst, Andrew Tonner, sits down with Brendan Byrnes to break down how investors should look at these numbers amid a struggling PC market.

It's been a frustrating path for Microsoft investors, who've watched the company fail to capitalize on the incredible growth in mobile over the past decade. However, with the release of its own tablet, along with the widely anticipated Windows 8 operating system, the company is looking to make a splash in this booming market.

Will Windows 8 be the end of Microsoft?

Intel Israel Business Is Going Good

For those who are anti-Semitics, do you own any Intel based computer? So now do you still wanted to boycott Israel?

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Intel's Israeli subsidiary more than doubled its exports in 2012 to $4.6 billion and is seeking to bring manufacturing of the company's next generation of chips to Israel.

Intel's exports, which rose 109 percent from $2.2 billion in 2011, were boosted by the start of production of chips using 22 nanometer technology at its Kiryat Gat plant in southern Israel, which is now operating at full capacity.

Intel, the world's No. 1 chipmaker, will build chips over the next two to three years with features measuring just 14 nm in Ireland and the United States but the company is already thinking about where it will produce 10 nm chips. The narrower the features, the more transistors can fit on a single chip, improving performance. Intel Israel executives said they would like to see 10 nm production in Israel.

"The average life of a technology is two to six years so we need to be busy to get the next technology, 10 nanometer," Maxine Fassberg, general manager of Intel Israel, told a news conference on Sunday. "We need to get a decision far enough in advance to be able to upgrade the plant. So for 10 nanometer, decisions will need to be made this year."

Fassberg said upgrading the existing Fab 28 plant in Israel would require a lower investment than building a new plant but would still involve several billion dollars.

Intel Israel has in the past received government grants to help with the costs of its investments and Fassberg told Reuters the company was "constantly in talks with the government".

Intel has invested $10.5 billion in Israel in the past decade, including $1.1 billion in 2012, and has received $1.3 billion in government grants. The company accounted for 20 percent of Israel's high-tech exports last year and 10 percent of its industrial exports, excluding diamonds.

"If Intel had not increased its exports, Israel's high-tech exports would have shrunk by 10 percent," Intel Israel President Mooly Eden said.

Most of Intel Israel's exports - $3.5 billion - came from its chip manufacturing activities.

Intel is Israel's largest private employer, with 8,542 workers, up 10 percent from 2011. The company has two plants - in Jerusalem and Kiryat Gat - as well as four research and development centers.

Eden said Intel was also committed to investing in start-ups, having invested in 64 Israeli companies since 1996. In July its global investment arm Intel Capital said it would expand its operations in Israel.