High Tech's black humor:"brain of its own","Runaway Drones:fr War Zones to School Zones","Spyware'd trigger Google Glass camera"

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The Navy's Newest Destroyer Is a Drone, the first ship with a brain of its own
Among the high-tech features included on the USS Zumwalt—cannons that fire rocket-propelled, GPS-guided rounds and stealth design that gives the 610-foot ship the radar signature of a small fishing vessel—there’s also a computer intelligence capable of preparing the ship for battle and engaging enemy targets on its own. Think of it as a gigantic floating drone: “Most UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] are a few million dollars,” says Wade Knudson, who heads the Zumwalt project for Raytheon (RTN), which made most of the ship’s computer systems. “This is a $5 billion UAV.”

In an age of rampant hacking and password pilfering, you don’t have to be clinically paranoid to find something worrying in the prospect of a highly automated warship that can be controlled by anyone who has the right login information. Asked how the ship will be guarded against hackers, Knudson replies: “It’s the same ways that we protect information in classified networks, through having processes and procedures to make sure the password is sophisticated. It’s incumbent on the captain not to share it with anybody. Everyone’s got to protect their password, and it can’t be ‘password.’” Even if an impostor did succeed in tricking the ship into thinking he was the captain, it’s unlikely a hacker could fire the weapons—that process involves more than one person. Of course, not all hackers work alone.

Runaway Drones: From War Zones to School Zones [Video]
A 375-pound military drone used for training exercises crashed near an elementary school.

"serves thieves well": Car thieves 'attached tracker devices to luxury cars'
A gang of car thieves targeted luxury vehicles at airport car parks and fitted them with tracking devices so they could steal them when the owners had returned home, a court heard.

The thieves used sophisticated cloning devices to replicate "contactless" keys at the airport car parks. Weeks, sometimes months later, the gang would use the tracker to locate the cars and steal them from the owners’ home, leaving police "scratching their heads", the jury was told.

Spyware could trigger Google Glass camera
I first saw Google Glass Intenet-connected eyewear demonstrated at a conference over a year ago and was impressed with the technology.

But as someone who wears trifocals, I thought it’s potential was limited — would you want to be in a car driven by someone who could be reading Web pages, even if both hands are on the wheels?

It didn’t occur to me that like anything connected to the Internet someone would want to create malware to exploit it. This week researchers at a California university created proof-of-concept spyware that uses the device’s camera to quietly snap shots when the display is off.

As a story in Forbes points out, Google’s developer terms of service bans apps from using the camera when the display is powered down. But the researchers discovered there’s nothing to prevent it.

It likely wouldn’t make it to the Google App store.

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Image courtesy General Dynamics Photo / US Navy, privatedetective.co.uk, and quellichetelefonano.it