How to build cheaper smart weapons

A million dollars up in smoke

ON APRIL 7th a salvo of missiles fired by American warships in the Mediterranean scored direct hits on several Syrian aircraft shelters from hundreds of miles away, demonstrating once more the effectiveness of precision, or “smart”, weapons. At $1.3m apiece such missiles are usually reserved for important targets like parked aircraft. They are too pricey to be expended on lightly armed insurgents. (As George Bush junior once memorably put it, he was not prepared to “fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt”.)

Frank Fresconi, who works at the Army Research Laboratory’s Aeromechanics and Flight Control Group, in Maryland, hopes to change that. He is working on something called the Collaborative Cooperative Engagement (CCOE) programme, which hopes to provide the advantages of smart weapons at a fraction of the cost. A new generation of cut-price precision munitions could change the way America’s…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The exploits of bug hunters

TO HELP shield their products from ransomware like the recent worldwide WannaCry attack, most big software-makers pay “bug bounties” to those who report vulnerabilities in their products that need to be patched. Payouts of up to $20,000 are common. Google’s bounties reach $200,000, says Billy Rios, a former member of that firm’s award panel. This may sound like good money for finding a programming oversight, but it is actually “ridiculously low” according to Chaouki Bekrar, boss of Zerodium, a firm in Washington, DC, that is a dealer in “exploits”, as programs which take advantage of vulnerabilities are known.

Last September Zerodium’s payment rates for exploits that hack iPhones tripled, from $500,000 to $1.5m. Yuriy Gurkin, the boss of Gleg, an exploit-broker in Moscow, tells a similar story. Mundane exploits for web browsers, which might, a few years ago, have fetched $5,000 or so, are now, he says, worth “several dozen thousand”. Unsurprisingly, Zerodium and Gleg…Continue reading
Source: Economist

WannaCry should make people treat cyber-crime seriously

IN 1933 Britain’s parliament was considering the Banditry bill—the government’s response to a crime wave. The problem was that criminals were using a newfangled invention, the motor car, to carry out robberies faster than the police could respond. The bill’s proposed answer to these “smash-and-grab” raids was to create new powers to search cars and to construct road blocks.

In the end, the Banditry bill was not enacted. Its powers were too controversial. But the problem did not go away; what the bill proposed was eventually permitted, and now seems normal. Since then, the technology of theft has not stood still. Indeed, just as in the 1930s, it remains one step ahead of the authorities.

On May 12th, for instance, security companies noticed that a piece of malicious software known as WannaCry was spreading across the internet, first in Britain and Spain, and then around the world. It would reach 230,000 computers in 48 hours, an unprecedented scale of infection…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A way to make water potable using carbon dioxide

THE world’s thirst for clean drinking water is vast and growing. It is also unslaked, particularly in poor countries. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 660m people rely on what it calls “unimproved” water sources. A quarter of this is untreated surface water. Moreover, even water that has undergone at least some treatment may not be potable. Across the planet, 1.8bn human beings drink water contaminated with faeces. All this polluted water spreads diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid. Every year, more than half a million people die from waterborne diarrhoea alone. As they describe in a paper in Nature Communications, however, Howard Stone of Princeton University and his colleagues have an idea for a new and cheap way to clean water up by mixing it with a substance normally regarded as a pollutant in its own right—carbon dioxide.

There are many existing ways to make water safe to drink, but each has drawbacks. The…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How the eggshell got its spots

Unscrambled eggs

COLLECTING wild birds’ eggs is a hobby, once popular, that is frowned on today. In some countries, it is illegal. That, though, makes past collections the more valuable. And one of them, assembled by the splendidly named John Colebrook-Robjent and bequeathed by him, in 2008, to the Natural History Museum’s outpost at Tring, north-west of London, has recently been pressed into service. Its job was to answer questions about the arms races that go on between some birds and the nest parasites (cuckoos and so forth) that attempt to trick them into raising the parasites’ young.

That this behaviour causes parasites’ eggs to evolve to look like those of their hosts, and the hosts’ eggs to evolve not to look like those of parasites, is well established. But Eleanor Caves of Cambridge University and her colleagues wondered if there was more to it. They noted that some nest parasites have sub-groups, known as races, which specialise on different…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Cheap illumination’s benefits in remote areas may be limited

But will it help him learn?

FOR sunny places not connected to the electricity grid, the falling price of solar panels and LED lighting promises a bright future. No more smoky, lung-damaging kerosene lamps. Greater security and safety. More ways to connect with the world—even if that involves only something as simple as being able to charge a mobile phone. And, above all, the chance to work or study into the evening and thus improve both a family’s immediate economic circumstances and its children’s future prospects. It is a tale of hope. But as a study just published in Science Advances, by Michaël Aklin of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues, shows, these potentially glowing benefits can in some cases amount to not very much at all.

More than 1bn people around the world have no access to electricity. Providing them with off-grid solar power is something almost all development experts agree is A Good Thing. Yet the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A large-scale cyber attack highlights the structural dilemma of the NSA

IN BRITAIN, doctors could neither gain access their patients’ files nor make appointments to see those patients. In Russia, hundreds of the interior ministry’s workers sat idle. In China, students were locked out of their theses. As the latest cyber attack rippled around the globe, infecting at least 45,000 computers in 74 countries, according to Kaspersky Labs, a Russian cyber-security firm, it seemed for a moment that the world was facing digital apocalypse. In the event, catastrophe was averted when somebody found a kill switch, which stopped the malicious software involved spreading further. The attackers will still make a pretty penny, however, and untold hours will have to be spent cleaning up the mess. What is more galling than that is that all of this was entirely avoidable.

From the victims’ perspective, the Great Cyber Attack of May 12th was a typical, if widespread, example of extortion by “ransomware”, to which users of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A large-scale cyber-attack highlights the structural dilemma of the NSA

IN BRITAIN, doctors could neither access their patients’ files nor make appointments to see those patients. In Russia, hundreds of the interior ministry’s workers sat idle. In China, students were locked out of their theses. As the latest cyber-attack rippled around the globe, infecting at least 45,000 computers in 74 countries, according to Kaspersky Labs, a Russian cyber-security firm, it seemed for a moment that the world was facing digital apocalypse. In the event, catastrophe was averted when somebody found a kill switch, which stopped the malicious software involved spreading further. The attackers will still make a pretty penny, however, and untold hours will have to be spent cleaning up the mess. What is more galling than that is that all of this was entirely avoidable.

From the victims’ perspective, the Great Cyber Attack of May 12th was a typical, if widespread, example of extortion by “ransomware”, to which users of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Modern violins are better than 300-year-old ones

Goodbye to old times?

FOR a work of art by a genius, $16m might not seem an outrageous price. And that is what is believed to have been paid, in 2012, for the Vieuxtemps Guarneri—a violin made in the 18th century, in Cremona, Italy, which thus became the most expensive fiddle in the world. The Vieuxtemps’s owner remains anonymous, but he or she has made it available for life to Anne Akiko Meyers, an American violinist pictured playing it.

Violins crafted by members of the Guarneri family and their Cremonese contemporaries, the Stradivari and the Amati, regularly fetch millions, because players like Ms Meyers value them so highly. But a violin is not, by itself, a work of art. It is, rather, a means of creating one—in other words, a piece of technology. An instrument. And for an instrument to be worth that much, it had better be the best in its class.

Unfortunately for the shades of Cremona’s master luthiers, evidence is growing that their…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Why AI researchers like video games

LAST year Artur Filipowicz, a computer scientist at Princeton University, had a stop-sign problem. Dr Filipowicz is teaching cars how to see and interpret the world, with a view to them being able to drive themselves around unaided. One quality they will need is an ability to recognise stop signs. To that end, he was trying to train an appropriate algorithm. Such training meant showing this algorithm (or, rather, the computer running it) lots of pictures of lots of stop signs in lots of different circumstances: old signs and new signs; clean signs and dirty signs; signs partly obscured by lorries or buildings; signs in sunny places, in rainy places and in foggy ones; signs in the day, at dusk and at night.

Obtaining all these images from photo libraries would have been hard. Going out into the world and shooting them in person would have been tedious. Instead, Dr Filipowicz turned to “Grand Theft Auto V”, the most recent release of a well-known series of video games. “Grand Theft…Continue reading
Source: Economist