News

Yesterday we wrote an article where we described how a military drone could be hacked through the use of GPS spoofing. This morning we received an email from one of the people involved in the actual event with some clarifications. First despite original reports (and some addition information we were given) the drone that was used for the demonstration was not a military class drone. It was one that the University of Texas purchased. It is still fairly sophisticated and is the same kind used by law enforcement. The team did this to point out serious issues with commercial drones before there is a rewrite of the FAA rules governing this new class of vehicles. You can check out the original story about for more information on the hack.

**********UPDATE 7/1/2012 - We have heard from Both Vanguard Defense Industries and Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas. The Drone in quesstion was NOT purchased from Vanguard. The University of Texas declined to state how they did purchase it from, but commented that the vulnerability exists in any drone that uses Civil GPS systems. ******************

Microsoft knows that it cannot compete directly in the smart phone OS marketplace. If you need any real proof of this just look at the sales numbers and the adoption rates of iOS and Android over Windows Pone in the business market. The problem is that Microsoft did not innovate fast enough as the market shifted. They had the leading product, but once there was real competition in the form of iOS and Android they failed to capitalize on it and instead embarked on a series of products that hurt them very badly dropping them down to a low of just under 2% for market share.

Although the media world seems shocked by the news that the unmanned drones in use by the military are vulnerable to cyber-attacks we wonder exactly why. I mean come on how many security breaches of high-level “secured” sites have to happen before someone gets it? There really is no such thing as a secure system. This has been shown time and again going back to the first encryption methods. If you have some access to the system you can get in.

Activision is withdrawing into itself as they are closing another gaming studio. Yesterday we heard that they are closing Radical games (developers of some of the Crash Badicoot titles and also Prototype). Activision/Blizzard has been working to consolidate their development teams (including removing high profile members of some teams) although the exact reasoning behind this is not certain. We do know that although gamers recognize the publishing/distribution companies they also know the game studios that games come from. Without these attacked to new games (and with the reputation that Activision is giving themselves) there is a chance that Activision/Blizzard will end up like EA Games.