When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last September, it ravaged the island’s electrical grid and communications systems. For weeks, many of the approximately 5 million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland U.S. were unable to reach their loved ones. While recovery groups worked to restore power and deliver aid, cell providers scrambled to repair their networks. To get its service back up and running, AT&T tried something new: the Flying COW, a tethered drone that beamed mobile-data signals up to 40 miles in all directions.
“As soon as we turned it on, people just started connecting to it instantly,” says Art Pregler, AT&T’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems program director. His team operated the Flying COW, short for “cell on wheels,” from the parking lot of a Walmart on the island, which provided the Internet connection for the airborne cell tower.
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Wendi Weiner likes to start her day with a workout. After waking up at 6:30 a.m., she has a quick breakfast with coffee and changes into a tank top and capris from Old Navy before taking a 45-minute cycling class. Weiner, a 40-year-old writer and attorney who lives in Florida, had a particularly memorable ride on a Friday morning this past January. The instructor blared Weiner’s favorite songs and offered strong motivational cues to the entire class. Weiner watched the calorie count on her stationary bike skyrocket and found her name rising on the leaderboard that tracks participants’ performances. As she stepped off the bike drenched in sweat, the “incredible” sense of pride she felt set the tone for the rest of her day.
That arc of accomplishment is precisely why many people pay hefty fees at boutique studios instead of exercising at traditional gyms. But Weiner wasn’t at SoulCycle or Flywheel, two popular indoor-cycling studios with locations around the country. She was at home, in her dining room, cranking away on Peloton’s high-end, high-tech stationary bike equipped with a massive 22-in. touchscreen positioned between the handlebars. The device streams live and on-demand classes to hundreds of thousands of cyclists at home. After some debate, she purchased the bike last Thanksgiving weekend mostly for convenience’s sake. “It’s not the standard piece of gym equipment that [becomes] a clothes hanger and collects dust,” Weiner says. “You feel like you’re actually in the studio.”
Becoming a “member,” as Peloton’s CEO John Foley refers to customers, isn’t cheap. Bikes cost $1,995, and if you want to ride along to classes, you have to pay a $39 monthly fee. But that hasn’t stopped the company, which was founded in 2012, from building a fervent following that includes ordinary folks like Weiner as well as celebrities like Leslie Jones and Kate Hudson. In fact, Peloton has been so successful that it’s joined the unicorn club–a moniker given to startups valued at $1 billion or higher–and in the fall, it will release a $3,995 treadmill with an even larger touchscreen called the Tread.
Peloton is just one–albeit very popular–example of the latest revamp of the home gym, so crowded with the evidence of previous trends and the best intentions: old-school stationary bikes, treadmills and heavy bags. The bet this time is that the famously permeable interface between technology and human will goad fitness enthusiasts to forgo studios for workouts they can follow online. Fitness companies and exercise gurus have launched a wide range of at-home options, and most don’t require large up-front costs. A business called FORTË films classes and streams them to smartphones, laptops and TVs for $39 per month or $288 per year. Training apps such as Booya Fitness and Beachbody have cultlike followings, and studios across the country from Nicole Winhoffer’s NW Method in New York and Los Angeles to Mary Helen Bowers’ New York–based Ballet Beautiful offer streaming and on-demand classes too. Even large apparel companies like Nike and gym chains like Gold’s Gym have launched workout routines that play in the palm of your hand.
Bryan Derballa for TIME Peloton’s production technicians Samantha Pirrello, left, and Joe Palagonia edit a live stream of Arzon’s cycling class in New York City for riders at home
Some 82% of health-club clients also work out at home, and 63% of them do so using apps or other digital platforms, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA), citing data from workout provider Les Mills. The American College of Sports Medicine doesn’t have exact figures on this rising movement yet, but its president Walter Thompson says, “Because the popularity of these programs has increased, we can only assume that more people are actually using them.”
As anyone who’s ever owned a Tae Bo VHS knows, exercise fads can fade quickly. But if streaming workouts are in their infancy, they seem to have one thing going for them: ubiquity. For every glitzy option like Peloton, there’s a dozen free or low-cost apps trying to do the same thing. And, if the true believers are to be believed, that could mean a revolution in the way we exercise.
First among those true believers: the fitness trainers who have become social-media stars, thanks to the boom in at-home workouts. Part of the reason Weiner says she was able to push herself so hard during that workout in January was Robin Arzon, a popular Peloton trainer and the company’s vice president of fitness programming. Arzon has more than 135,000 followers on Instagram and receives thousands of messages from fans each week. “Whether it’s a weight-loss journey, recovering from an illness or dealing with a divorce, the most impactful stories are when people rise above,” Arzon says of her interactions with her followers. “And they use the bike and our instructors as tools for that.”
Already famous health-and-wellness gurus have benefited too. Tracy Anderson, renowned for training celebrities, has established a particularly loyal following online, thanks to her streaming program TA Online Studio. Searching Instagram for #TArealtime results in tens of thousands of posts from devotees sharing their workouts. Although Anderson–who has over 350,000 followers on Instagram–may be best known for her high-end clubs in New York and California that cost $900 to $1,000 per month to join, she says her streaming services are the “most profitable revenue stream” of her business. “It’s me doing the work that I do every day with a camera filming.”
Social community is a large part of the reason Rachael Lawton, a 38-year-old finance director based in Columbus, Ohio, has been taking Anderson’s classes virtually for almost a year. With two children and a full-time job, Lawton found that streaming made maintaining a regular fitness routine feasible. She started sharing her workout experiences online to help other parents in similar situations. “They need to know that there is another mom out there that gets everything done and makes time to work out,” she says. “It is possible.”
Kayla Itsines of the SWEAT app has more than 9 million followers on Instagram. Like Peloton’s founders, she was one of the first to realize the potential of offering at-home workouts built around an online community. Her wildly popular Bikini Body Guide program, which costs $19.99 per month, has catapulted Itsines to superstar status; she sold out a stadium with her live boot-camp workout session in 2016 and has released books based on her program. Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl praised the BBG program on Instagram for helping her get back into shape after giving birth in 2016. “I found a fantastic app called #sweat that features several different #bbg programs you can choose from and makes it incredibly easy to do anywhere, which for me means in my bedroom,” Heigl wrote.
Bryan Derballa for TIMECamille MacFadyen works out in her living room to Tracy Anderson’s weekly streaming fitness class. Since having her daughter, MacFadyen has been doing more exercise at her home in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. CREDIT: Bryan Derballa for TIME
That working out at home is cheaper than signing up for a studio membership may be the most obvious benefit of streaming, besides convenience. On average, the monthly fees for fitness studios range between $76.41 and $118.13, according to the IHRSA. That’s why Foley doesn’t see his equipment as being unreasonably priced, especially if you’re splitting the costs with a spouse. Financing the Tread for $150 per month, or $110 if you already own a bike, plus the $39 subscription fee for classes, breaks down to either $74.50 or $94.50 per person when split between two people. A single class at SoulCycle, for example, costs $28 to $40, depending on where you live. If you attend more than a few classes a week, the costs quickly surpass the monthly expense of owning a Peloton bike.
But those savings may come at a different cost, according to Josh Leve, founder and CEO of the Association of Fitness Studios, who says some aspects of studio classes simply can’t be replicated digitally. “You lose that ability to really engage and speak with the [studio] owners and feel that sense of ‘Together we can accomplish anything,’” says Leve. “For some people [streaming classes] works incredibly well, but for so many others who crave that attention, it’s not a market for them.”
Lauren Kleban, the founder of LEKfit, a dance-inspired fitness method based in Los Angeles, started streaming classes in 2016 to reach more clients. Her studio counts I Feel Pretty’s Busy Philipps and Shameless star Emmy Rossum as fans, and scouring social media for #lekfit returns sweaty selfies from users at home. Kleban’s $19.99-per-month service is so important to her business that her new flagship studio is being built with streaming in mind. “Everything will be designed around camera placement, client placement, and of course sound and lighting are playing an even bigger role than they would have normally,” she says. Still, Kleban takes pains to make sure that she properly connects with her streamers by holding weekly Instagram chats and attempting to learn as many of their names as possible. “As an instructor, I was always taught that people want to be acknowledged for what they’re doing,” she says.
There are also safety concerns to consider when taking classes at home, since participants risk incurring injuries without a professional present to coach them on their form, Thompson warns. To avoid this, he suggests being cautious when choosing home workout programs. “Pick a class that’s appropriate for you, and make the changes as you go along,” he says. “Monitor yourself and make sure you’re physically capable of doing it.”
Those hoping to stay in shape on a budget also have an increasing number of options, due to the rise of budget gyms like the $10-per-month Planet Fitness or Blink Fitness, which offers access to dozens of gyms for $26 a month depending on the location. More than two-thirds of health-club members reported paying less than $50 per month for memberships, according to the IHRSA’s most recent trend report.
Whether streaming becomes one of the ways–or even the main way–people work out remains to be seen. Fitness programs that surged in popularity–Zumba, Jazzercise, Buns of Steel–only to be unceremoniously replaced by the next hot trend abound. For Thompson, the proliferation of streaming services is just the latest iteration of the at-home workout obsession started by actor turned fitness maven Jane Fonda and others. “We’ve kind of morphed into this contemporary delivery mechanism,” he says. “But it’s not a whole lot different than it was back in the 1970s and 1980s; it’s just now that we’ve got more access.” For many, services like those offered by Peloton, Anderson and Itsines may never fully replace a fitness-club membership or in-person classes. Foley, no surprise, has already deemed traditional workouts obsolete: “Going to the gym,” he says, “feels like such a dated concept.”
TIME’s cover this week is unlike any in the magazine’s 95-year history.
Working with Intel, the cover was made by using 958 of the company’s Shooting Star™ drones to create the iconic TIME logo and red border in midair over California.
Intel’s drones, which you may have seen during the Winter Olympics, appear as dots in the sky and can be pre-programmed to create all manner of recognizable shapes and designs.
This is also the first TIME cover to feature an image made by a drone. It was captured by a specialized drone used for commercial and film cinematography that recorded the light show from start to finish.
In the video above, watch as the TIME all-drones cover is assembled in midair in just a few minutes.
Around the time Leonardo Da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa, he was also writing his Codex on the Flight of Birds, a roughly 35,000-word exploration of the ways in which man might take to the air. His illustrations included diagrams positing pre-Newtonian theories of physics, a rudimentary plan for a flying machine and many, many sketches of birds in flight. The Mona Lisa, with her secretive smile, is a universe of intimacy captured on a relatively small panel of wood. But the landscape behind his captivating subject shows the world as you would see it from atop a tall hill—or from the vantage point you would get if you had hitched a ride on the back of a giant bird. Even as da Vinci was perfecting one way of seeing a face, he was dreaming of other ways of looking. No wonder he wanted to fly, perhaps less for the physical rush than for the thrill of seeing the world from above.
That’s the pleasure drones give us: they send eyes where our bodies can’t easily go unencumbered. A GoPro camera attached to a bird of prey shows us where the bird wants to go, which clues us in to what it’s thinking. Drones, as of now operable only by humans, tell us what humans find visually interesting. Drones are practical, but like any tool wielded by humans—pencil or paintbrush or maestro’s baton—there’s poetry in them too. Because of this, more and more, drones are finding their way into the art world.
“If you think about traditional art and Renaissance perspective, the ideal viewer was on the ground with a stable horizon line,” says Matthew Biro, a professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan. “And the drone takes us off that. It takes us out of our body in a certain way, kind of giving us an overlaid perspective.”
Some artists, like photographer Trevor Paglen—also a geographer and writer—have depicted drones directly as a means of questioning their role in government surveillance and warfare. In some of Paglen’s works, drones are seen as nothing more than a dark speck against a backdrop of becalming gray or sun-gold clouds, a way of denoting their possibly sinister near invisibility in our world. But as humans in general are seeing less malevolent possibilities in robotic aircraft, people who make art are finding inventive ways to use it.
Graffiti and fine artist Katsu was the first person credited with using a drone in the tagging of a billboard, as a way of disrupting the order of our everyday landscape. In New York City in 2015, he used a small, customized drone, outfitted with a paint sprayer, to mark a billboard image of the model Kendall Jenner with shaky yet adamant red stripes. The YouTube footage of the event—it took place under the cover of night—shows the drone flitting around Jenner’s larger-than-life visage like a pesky mosquito, taunting the image’s manicured perfection. The footage of the drone in action, more so than the marks that would be visible to passersby the next day, is the key to understanding how drones can shift human perspective. A drone has no mind of its own, but its movements—as guided by its operator—make us think about how we process images, where our eyes linger and what they skim over. It’s little wonder that Katsu’s drone never strays far from Jenner’s gaze. Instead, it meets her eye-to-eye in a mechanical confrontation that’s somewhat ghostly, like an out-of-body experience.
Katsu has since moved on to creating paintings with drones. He guides them before the canvas, and while he has a degree of control over their movement, he can’t maintain strict aim. The paint they fling hits the surface in unpredictable ways, resulting in splattery webs and clouds of varying density. There’s a hushed naiveté to the paintings. They’re spontaneous rather than accomplished—but accomplishment isn’t the aim. They’re more about discovery. “It’s kind of a dance between the flight computer and wind turbulence, and then my decisions,” Katsu explains. “So it creates an unexpected result.”
The otherworldly photographs of Reuben Wu represent another kind of exploration. Inspired by 19th century romantic painting, science fiction and notions of interplanetary exploration, Wu has made a series of landscape photographs lit by custom-modified drones. The results, featuring vivid, Maxfield Parrish–like tones of orange, mauve and teal, are hypnotic and transportive, surreal and naturalistic at once. These are places you could visit in real life, though they wouldn’t look anything like these photographs. Wu’s drone lighting renders the natural world in the visual language of dreams.
Reuben WA landscape by Reuben Wu, who achieves otherworldly lighting effects in his photographs by using custom-modified drones
The casual observer’s understanding of what drones can do is mostly informed by the way they’re used to make movies, television shows and commercials. Since 2014, when the use of drones in filmmaking became legal (it is still highly regulated by the FAA), aerial footage captured by drones has become so common that we barely notice it. In the early days of drone use, filmmakers quickly realized how useful these nimble devices were for close-up action shots. Drones proved especially handy for filming chase scenes, like the opening motorcycle sequence of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. In Martin Scorsese’s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street, drones were used to shoot a raucous party scene from above, allowing audiences to peer voyeuristically into characters’ lives. Cinematographers are finding increasingly creative ways to use drone technology: in the 2015 Jurassic World, a drone-mounted camera swoops low over a crowd of people who are being attacked by pterosaurs to mimic the movement of the flying reptiles. But if drones are becoming ubiquitous, they’re also still somewhat controversial, and some filmmakers are turning their cameras on the machines themselves. On an episode of the sci-fi show Black Mirror, for example, characters lose their privacy when a blackmailer films them with a drone. The audience sees the scene through both regular cameras and through the drone’s lens, underscoring the ways in which these devices make us vulnerable.
Although drones can be extremely cost effective for certain applications—in place of, or in combination with, dollies and jibs, for example—when it comes to aerial views, they haven’t fully vanquished the use of helicopters and cranes. Their limited battery life still makes some uses impractical, and they can be flown legally only at relatively low altitudes. But when they can be used, the savings are significant. Tony Carmean, a founding partner of drone cinematography company Aerial MOB, estimates that a helicopter can cost a filmmaker from $20,000 to $40,000 for a 10-hour day shoot. Aerial MOB can supply a drone for $4,500 to $13,000 a day, including crew, equipment and insurance.
The more drones are used, the more likely we are to take elaborate drone shots for granted. Yet these machines are still finding ways to wow us. Looking for a moment of zen at work? Join the more than 2 million people who have watched a particularly soothing YouTube video, the work of aerial photographer Tim Whittaker. In it a flock of New Zealand sheep, flanked by tiny moving dots that are actually running dogs, undulate in and out of formation—they’re disorderly, fat white molecules that eventually succumb to sanity and order as they squeeze through a fence opening and into the next field. Viewed from above, they’re a lyrical representation of chaos and resolution, a piece of woolly free jazz that ultimately lands on the most calming note.
The aerial perspective—of sheep or anything—is liberating precisely because it’s destabilizing, Biro says. “Drone vision allows us to see that there are multiple ways of seeing ourselves and seeing the rest of the world. We step out of ourselves to some extent. That’s its positive potential.”
Today’s store-bought drones are remarkably easy to fly, thanks to features like self-stabilization technology, obstacle avoidance sensors and so on. You could walk out of a shop, charge up your batteries and be airborne for the first time all within a single afternoon.
But as the video compilation above shows, it’s probably still a good idea to get some practice in before attempting any particularly tricky stunts. Even if drones have all sorts of high-tech features designed to keep them airborne, they aren’t impervious to the constant pull of earth’s gravity, the branches of an unseen tree, or even the grasp of a curious animal.
Watch the video above to see a selection of drone crashes from the aircraft’s perspective. And remember: Get some practice in before you try your best Maverick impression.
Last fourth of July, as fireworks burst across the night sky near the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, S.C., convicted kidnapper Jimmy Causey tucked a lifelike dummy into his bed, sneaked out of his prison cell and completed a daring escape. It wasn’t until three days later, when Texas Rangers found Causey holed up 1,200 miles away, that authorities offered an explanation for how he had obtained the equipment for the breakout, including a pair of wire cutters used to snip through four fences that encircle the maximum security prison. “We believe a drone was used to fly in the tools that allowed him to escape,” Bryan Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, told reporters at a news conference.
A lengthy investigation confirmed that an accessory role was played by a small, off-the-shelf drone. And with that, law-enforcement and national security officials added “prison breaks” to the potential ill uses lurking in a technology widely available at retailers including Amazon and Walmart. Unlike military drones that can cost more than $15 million and look like small airplanes, mini quadcopters can be obtained for a few hundred dollars—and their capabilities are exciting the imaginations of bad guys. Criminals have used drones to drop drugs into prisons. Mexican smugglers have flown them above the border to spy on the movement of patrolling federal officers. ISIS used them to drop crude bombs on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Syria.
It is the widespread availability of commercial drones that poses the largest threat. Almost everybody who uses a drone in the U.S.—and the Federal Aviation Administration has licensed more than a million operators—flies by the rules. But not everyone, and perhaps the major lesson of 9/11 was to look for threats from unexpected places, especially overhead. Yet on drones, the federal response has been largely haphazard and behind the curve. The Pentagon is working to develop and deploy technologies to defeat drones and intends to spend $401.2 million on counter-drone initiatives this fiscal year, according to a study by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. “We know that terrorists are using drones overseas to advance plots and attacks, and we’ve already seen criminals use them along and within our borders for illicit purposes,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tells TIME. “We are working with Congress for the authorities needed to ensure we can better protect the American people against emerging drone threats.”
Lucien Lung—Riva Press/ReduxAn Iraqi fighter notices a drone circling over their position, unsure if it is flown by an ally or a foe. West Mosul on April 12th 2017.
Part of the problem is that our laws and regulations aren’t designed for this new kind of threat. Current electronic eavesdropping laws preclude government officials from disabling drones midair with electromagnetic signals. A bipartisan group of Senators has introduced a bill that would give the Trump Administration the power to electronically jam drones that get too close to federal facilities; it is expected to pass before the end of the year. Agencies across government are now forbidden to identify and shoot down drones because of decades-old regulations that treat the robotic aircraft as if they were passenger jets.
Officials say they’re in a race against time. “It’s not if these devices will be weaponized in the homeland but when,” an Administration official told TIME. A White House fact sheet put out in support of the new measures says criminals could “drop explosive payloads, deliver harmful substances and conduct reconnaissance” using quadcopters. In November, authorities arrested a 55-year-old Sacramento man who flew a drone that dropped leaflets featuring a rant against television-news outlets inside Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., during an NFL game. No one was harmed, but officials with DHS and outside analysts took it as a warning: What if the drone’s payload were an explosive or a harmful chemical? He was cited for flying the drone in prohibited airspace, a misdemeanor.
One reason the U.S. government fears drone warfare is that it knows the power of remotely controlled air power. Since 2001, the CIA and Air Force have deployed the multimillion-dollar fixed wing MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones, which are the size of small fighter jets and can deliver Hellfire missiles and 500-lb. bombs. These drones, mostly operated remotely from Nevada, have killed thousands of militants across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. They have also been responsible for 751 to 1,555 civilian deaths, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks drone strike data.
The Obama Administration struggled to balance the strategic advantages of drones with the humanitarian costs. Over years of internal debate and external pressure, it developed a legal and policy framework underlying the controversial practice of targeted killing with drones. Critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, said the extrajudicial system enabled a sitting President to be “judge, jury and executioner.” The Trump Administration has continued operating under the Obama rules. It has loosened constraints on who can be targeted on the basis of the threat they pose.
Most of the danger from the commercial drone boom here at home has been in the category of nuisance offenses. Under current law, hobbyists and commercial users must keep unmanned aircraft below 400 ft. and avoid flying within five miles of an airport to avoid endangering commercial aircraft. Even small drones could disable a passenger jet by getting sucked into and destroying a jet’s engine.
Still, recreational drone users often ignore the law. On Sept. 30, 2017, alone, there were eight dangerous drone incidents, according to the FAA: an airline pilot reported spotting a drone at 4,000 ft. as the passenger jet came in for a landing at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago; a pilot leaving Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport spotted a drone about 100 yd. off his left wing, hovering at 6,500 ft.; and others had close calls in Long Beach, Calif.; Burbank, Calif.; Newark, N.J.; McAlester, Okla.; Hollywood, Fla.; and San Antonio. In the first nine months of 2017 there were 1,696 drone sightings, according to the FAA’s most recent data, compared with 238 in all of 2014, the first year the data were tracked. The FAA expects the problem will get worse as the number of drones is estimated to triple to 3.5 million by 2021.
The risk of small drones’ flying into sensitive facilities first came into public view in 2015 when a hobbyist lost control of a drone that crashed on the southeast side of the 18-acre secure zone around White House grounds at about 3 a.m., triggering a Secret Service lockdown of the compound. Drones are off-limits in the airspace in the 15-mile radius around Washington and also over places like the Hoover Dam, the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. The drone that crashed near the White House, called a DJI Phantom, caused no damage, but it flew in undetected.
That highlights one of the greatest challenges to tracking and countering drones deployed by bad actors. Existing radar systems are designed to detect much bigger threats. Most commercial drones are constructed of plastic and are difficult to spot electronically because they’re small, fly low to the ground and don’t carry a transponder to signal their positions. “It’s only a matter of time before the threat manifests in a violent way,” Defense Secretary James Mattis told a Senate panel in May.
The military has already faced the drone danger abroad. As American Special Operations commandos fought to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS in the fall of 2016, they faced a threat that American ground forces hadn’t dealt with: attack from the air. Desperate to break the American-led siege of the city, ISIS militants sent fleets of small drones, often several at a time, carrying grenades and miniaturized explosives, scattering troops and driving them to seek cover. “At one point there were 12 killer bees, if you will, right overhead,” General Raymond Thomas, head of Special Operations Command, said last year, adding that the fighting nearly came to a “screeching halt.” The drones were too small for a fighter pilot or a tank gunner to pursue, which meant the troops’ only defense was to try to shoot the aircraft out of the sky with their rifles. Thomas said the small drones were the “most daunting” threat his commandos faced during the house-to-house campaign in Mosul. No U.S. casualties were reported. No American forces have been killed by an air attack since the Korean War.
America’s defensive tactics against drone strikes are rudimentary. ISIS has launched drone attacks on ground forces for the past two years. American commanders rushed electronic jammers to the war zone, but there were spotty examples of success. The Pentagon is working to develop two ways to combat terrorist drones: “hard kill” solutions that involve physically disabling drones, and “soft kill” ones that bring them down electronically. Much of the work falls to the military’s Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization, or JIDO, which was formed to combat roadside bombs during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lieut. General Michael Shields, JIDO’s director, says the goal isn’t to find a “silver bullet” to take drones down but to have an arsenal of both hard-kill and soft-kill capabilities.
JIDO has tried different approaches. It has developed small drones to patrol the skies and shoot a net to snag enemy drones. The so-called Negation of Improvised Non-State Joint Aerial threats system, or NINJA project, outfits drones with electronics that commandeer enemy drones by sending false GPS signals to trick the aircraft’s receivers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing a program that relies on a network of sensors to provide wide-area surveillance of all drones operating below 1,000 ft. in a city. DARPA has chosen defense giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, along with the University of Washington, to test their new technologies at various sites this year under contracts totaling $13 million.
There has been a boom market for counter-measures. Guard From Above, a Dutch company, trains eagles to intercept drones in midair. Britain-based OpenWorks Engineering designed the SkyWall bazooka that fires a net-carrying canister to capture drones and bring them to the ground. DroneShield, based in Sydney and Virginia, builds devices that use radar, acoustic and thermal sensors to detect drones in flight and send an alert if they fly near a stadium, prison or other restricted property. The company also makes jamming devices for roofs and porches that erect virtual walls drones can’t fly through.
A February study by Bard’s Center for the Study of the Drone identified 230 products designed by 155 manufacturers in 33 countries to subvert malicious drones. Back in South Carolina, where Jimmy Causey is back behind bars, law enforcement is already getting into the game. On May 24, corrections officials showed reporters a new tool to prevent contraband from entering the state’s 21 prison yards: small drones remotely piloted by two military veterans.
If you’re a six-foot human standing on a paddleboard, it’s just as well you don’t know that a 60-foot, 40-ton humpback whale with 16-foot flippers is surfacing directly beneath you. The only thing more unsettling would be if there were four 60-ft., 40-ton humpback whales with 16-foot flippers doing the same.
Just such a don’t-look-down moment played out off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2016. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of experience that the paddleboarder—who came through unharmed—would have described to his friends with a helpless “You should’ve seen it.” As it happens though, his friends did see it, as did more than 200 million people so far on Facebook, YouTube and uncounted other websites around the world.
It was thanks to Jordan Lerma, a self-taught marine scientist and drone pilot living in Hawaii, that the encounter was preserved at all. In the past few years, Lerma has captured a lot more scenes like that one, building a following on Instagram and elsewhere both as a photographer and videographer with a keen eye for nature, and as a pioneer in the use of drones to study whales and to protect them from extinction.
“The work takes patience,” he says. “You have to be able to predict the behavior of the whales and of the drones, but it’s worth the effort.”
Lerma, 26, who was born in Hawaii and briefly worked in finance in San Francisco before moving back home, tumbled for drones before he tumbled for whales. But when you’re living in the middle of the Pacific in the direct path of whale migration routes, it’s not hard to put the two together. The problem was, while there are long-established techniques for photographing birds and chimps and big cats in the wild, there wasn’t much of a manual for using a new technology to capture an extremely elusive quarry. So Lerma worked out his own.
Jordan Lerma
He begins by studying depth charts made available by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and comparing them to known whale behavior, looking for the likeliest places particular types of whales might congregate. Then comes the part that requires the patience: he stands on shore, drone at the ready, scanning the water with binoculars. Whales, as it happens, are not shy about coming close to land, which is a good thing. The range of a typical drone is only two to three miles, but Federal Aviation Administration rules require pilots to maintain visual contact with their flying bots at all times—and line of sight, even with binoculars, is limited to only about 1.5 miles.
When Lerma spots the telltale spouting or breaching of a whale, he launches his drone in a hurry. But he waits until he actually reaches the animals before he decides whether or not to swoop down and film them. Solo whales he leaves alone. “This is usually a traveling behavior and the whales will surface only every 10 to 20 minutes,” Lerma says.
Groups of whales spend more time at the surface and make for much more dramatic imagery. Mothers and calves make for the best footage of all. “The calves are extremely playful,” Lerma says. “And the mothers are very serious, constantly looking for danger.”
To make sure the whales do not see him as one of those dangers, Lerma never flies lower than about 100 ft. That minimizes any risk of contact between whale and drone, and reduces the likelihood that the whales will be disturbed or alarmed by the buzzing overhead. Multiple analyses of video recordings conducted by the U.S. government as well as by researchers in Canada, Switzerland and elsewhere seem to establish that marine animals do not notice drone noise. One clip did appear to show a dolphin reacting to the presence of a drone, but the problem may have been the aircraft’s shadow, not the sound it made.
Much more practically — if much less aesthetically — scientists have also begun using drones to perform a whole new kind of health checkup on whales. It’s awfully hard to dive into the ocean and draw a bit of blood or take a tissue sample from a passing whale. But it’s also unnecessary, because whales give away more than enough biological samples of themselves all the time. Every time they breach and spout, they’re spraying not just sea water into the air, but a generous helping of whale mucus.
Jordan Lerma
The ocean advocacy group Parley, working with Intel, has developed a drone equipped with petri dishes that flies through such whale spray, collects whatever samples it can get, and brings them back to a research vessel for analysis. Called the Parley SnotBot (because, really, what else would you call it?), the drone, in combination with Intel’s data analysis software, allows investigators to examine the whales’ hormonal makeup, the level of contaminants like mercury and chromium in their systems, and even whether they have borne young. Intel’s machine learning and modified facial recognition software also allow the drone to recognize a particular whale’s fluke print, a pattern of nicks and other imperfections in a tail fin that are as personal as a human’s fingerprint. That in turn provides new insights into whale population counts and migration routes.
Parley is not the only group that sees power in SnotBot science. Lerma is now a full time employee with the Cascadia Research Collective, a nonprofit ocean conservation group that is looking to acquire similar technology to expand its own studies. “We are moving towards using drones with false killer whales,” Lerma says. “These animals are critically endangered in Hawaii and we are excited to see what insights we can unlock with this new view.”
Whales, like tigers and pandas and eagles and gorillas, have always had an edge over other endangered animals. As so-called “charismatic mega-fauna,” they already have our attention and affection. Humans are a very visual species, however, and animals we can see are animals we care for even more. When it comes to whales, drones and the people who pilot them are helping provide us that vision.
A video game that allowed players to assume the role of a school shooter is being pulled following harsh criticism from families of victims and survivors of mass shootings.
Active Shooter was set to debut on June 6, until public outcry and an online petition forced the video-game developer Valve Corp. to remove the game from its Steam online store, Deadline reports. Active Shooter reportedly enabled players to move through a school as a SWAT officer or gunman and simulate killing police and civilians with an assault rifle.
Valve Corp. has also removed the game’s publisher, ACID, and its developer, Revived Games, the company said in a statement to Deadline. The statement said the publisher, who returned to the platform under a new name, “is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.”
“We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve,” the statement said.
The decision followed outrage on social media, including from family members of victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., which killed 17 people in February.
“It’s disgusting that Valve Corp. is trying to profit from the glamorization of tragedies affecting our schools across the country,” Ryan Petty, the father of a 14-year-old girl killed in the shooting, said on Facebook. “Keeping our kids safe is a real issue affecting our communities and is in no way a ‘game.’”
“I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life. This game may be one of the worst,” wrote Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was also killed in the Parkland shooting.
I have seen and heard many horrific things over the past few months since my daughter was the victim of a school shooting and is now dead in real life. This game may be one of the worst.
The European Union’s much-vaunted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force this week. But Europe isn’t the only entity trying to balance digital freedoms with citizens’ privacy rights.
These five facts look at the state of data privacy laws around the world.
What is GDPR?
GDPR is the updated replacement to Europe’s 1995 Data Protection Directive, one that’s taken almost a decade to get across the finish line.
At its heart, GDPR provides European citizens with the tools they need to better control the data collected about them. Under the law, from May 25 onwards, firms anywhere in the world that collect data on E.U. citizens need to offer users the option to see the information collected about them, and to move or delete that information. Firms will also be required to report any data breaches within 72 hours.
There are numerous other GDPR regulations that companies will need to comply with as well. But the basic idea behind the law is to orient companies toward “privacy by default” and put people in charge of their personal data.
The penalty for violating GPDR are significant — the maximum fine can be up to $23.5 million or 4 percent of the firm’s revenue, whichever is larger. Even if you’re Amazon, a $7 billion fine is going to smart.
Europe’s approach to privacy
Europeans were well ahead of the data privacy curve long before Cambridge Analytica came onto the scene. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2014 that European citizens have a “right to be forgotten” and can have material stricken from search engines if it is determined to be “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive for the purpose of the data processing,” a ruling enshrined in GDPR as well. In the eyes of Brussels, data privacy is an intrinsic human right, and therefore should be under the control of the individual user. GDPR is a critical step in that direction.
And because GDPR applies to companies doing business in Europe rather than just those based there, plenty of folks around the world will also be at least partially covered by GDPR as companies shift to comply with it. Firms like Facebook have already vowed to operate in accordance with GDPR across their global user base—both because it’s easier for Facebook and because it generates good press on the privacy front.
The American approach to privacy
That’s especially good news for the 61 percent of Americans who would like to do more to protect their privacy, and the 68 percent who say current data privacy laws aren’t stringent enough. To be fair, Congress is now mulling the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act of 2018, a bipartisan proposal that in many ways resembles GDPR. If voted into law, it would require websites to give users a readout of all the data that a firm has on them, in addition to a list of who has had access to that data and how it’s being used. It’s not as far-reaching as GDPR, but it’s better than nothing.
The most interesting element of this idea is its timing; the bill was proposed in the wake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Capitol Hill amid the Cambridge Analytica fallout. Whereas Europe has spent seven years shepherding GDPR along, it took a massive privacy scandal to force Congress to even consider acting. This is in line with the U.S.’s general (and riskier) approach to data privacy: relying on tech companies to police themselves and only considering regulatory remedies once data breaches have already occurred. Some say this freedom afforded to tech companies is the triumph of the free market; others argue it’s the failure of that same free market. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
China’s approach to digital privacy
While Europe believes the responsibility of data privacy belongs to individual users and the U.S. believes it’s the responsibility of tech companies, China starts from a different framework altogether: it’s the government’s responsibility to protect users from having their personal data used to commit fraud or for other illegal purposes. To that end, Beijing has been building a “personal information and important data protection system” as a standard to govern user data privacy.
In many ways, China’s approach to data privacy is even stricter than Europe’s GDPR. It has a broader definition of “personal data” than the European variant, considering any type of personal information that could harm individuals, property, mental health or reputations as falling under its mandate. Under GDPR, it’s still possible for firms to share data with third-parties for “legitimate” reasons without a user’s explicit consent; not so in China.
But Beijing is less inclined to place restrictions on the use of personal data in other ways—for example, to improve medical diagnoses through training artificial intelligence algorithms. After all, for Beijing, technology is the future, and AI research is a critical component of that future and of its national security strategy. But if you take a step back, you see that over the last couple of years Chinese authorities responsible for cybersecurity have moved closer to the European model. It’s the U.S. that’s falling behind.
The Russian approach to privacy
Russia has taken a different tack when it comes to data privacy. History matters here; Russians are used to the idea of state surveillance. There was the entirety of the Soviet experience, and the SORM monitoring system has been attached to phone boxes and servers since the 1990s, an effective way for the Kremlin to supervise what Russians do online. But up until five years ago, Russians faced relatively little internet regulation; the Kremlin tries to assert its power in the cyber sphere without making Russians feel that they are being cut off from the world, an admittedly difficult feat.
Russia does data privacy rules its own way, but Kremlin policymakers look to global developments for cues. There’s a version of the “right to be forgotten” law in Russia, for instance. The first data localization law that came into effect in 2015 was described as a personal data protection measure, and it introduced rules requiring companies to take down personal data following a request process. The Kremlin frames data privacy and state surveillance as two sides of the same coin—the state asserts the right to protect citizens’ personal data from each other or from other actors, but retains its own oversight powers. Russia wants to promote this concept as a global norm—that the state, not the user, is the basic actor online. As politics grow more chaotic in both the physical and cyber spheres, it is an approach that could become more appealing elsewhere, particularly in struggling emerging markets.
(DETROIT) — The autonomous Uber SUV that struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian in March spotted the woman about six seconds before hitting her, but did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled, according to federal investigators.
In a preliminary report on the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that emergency braking is not enabled while Uber’s cars are under computer control, “to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior.”
Instead, Uber relies on a human backup driver to intervene. The system, however, is not designed to alert the driver.
In the crash, the driver began steering less than a second before impact but didn’t brake until less than a second after impact, according to the preliminary report, which does not determine fault.
A video of the crash showed the driver looking down just before the vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona.
Uber said in a company release that it has worked closely with the NTSB and is doing an internal review of its self-driving vehicle program. The company also has brought in former NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart “to advise us on our overall safety culture, and we look forward to sharing more on the changes we’ll make in the coming weeks.”
The NTSB report comes a day after Uber pulled its self-driving cars out of Arizona, eliminating the jobs of about 300 people who served as backup drivers and performed other jobs connected to the vehicles. Uber had suspended testing of its self-driving vehicles in Arizona, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto while regulators investigated the cause of the March 18 crash.
Sensors on the fully autonomous Volvo XC-90 SUV spotted Herzberg while the car was traveling 43 miles per hour and determined that braking was needed 1.3 seconds before impact, according to the report.
Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across a boulevard in the darkness when the crash occurred on a part of the road that had no crosswalk and was not lighted, the report said.
She was wearing dark clothing and did not look in the direction of the vehicle until just before impact. A toxicology report showed that she tested positive for methamphetamine and marijuana, according to the NTSB.
Also, the bicycle had no side reflectors and the front and back reflectors were perpendicular to the Uber SUV.
Uber also disabled the Volvo’s factory-equipped automatic emergency braking system when the vehicle is in autonomous mode, the report said.
In an interview with the NTSB, Uber’s backup driver said she had been monitoring the “self-driving interface.” While her personal and business telephones were in the vehicle, she said neither was in use at the time of the crash.
The NTSB said that all other aspects of the SUV’s self-driving system were running normally at the time, and there were no faults or diagnostic trouble messages.
The agency, which can make safety recommendations to other federal agencies, said information in the preliminary report can change as the investigation progresses and that no conclusions should be drawn from the report.
The NTSB preliminary report doesn’t provide “any decisive findings or conclusions,” said Daniel Scarpinato, spokesman for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. “We await the more thorough and final investigative report. Uber’s self-driving vehicle suspension remains in place.”
Separately, the Tempe Police Department said it has submitted a report on its investigation to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, but would not release any information about it until a review of the report by the office is completed. The county attorney is the main prosecution agency for most of the Phoenix area.
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