Month: May 2016

FBI Director James Comey is upping the ante on the government's war on encryption. During a news conference Wednesday, Comey not only said he expected more litigation over the issue, but he claimed that encryption was an "essential tradecraft" of terror groups like ISIS.

The director's comments come as the nation finds itself in a crossroads over the encryption debate. Two high-ranking senators have proposed legislation that mandates the tech sector build backdoors into their products—harkening back to the days of the clipper chip proposal during the President Bill Clinton administration. All the while, the government is content on jailing people indefinitely who won't unlock their phones for the authorities.

When the director talked about more litigation, he was referencing the FBI-Apple fight in which the agency obtained a court order demanding that Apple write code to assist the authorities in unlocking the encrypted phone of one of the San Bernardino, California shooters. The government eventually dropped the plan because it said it cracked the phone with the help of an outside party.

Comey took issue with other technology, too. He claimed the YouTube society was thwarting police officers in the field and might be the reason for an increase in violent crime in 40 cities. According to the New York Times, which attended Comey's news conference:

James Comey, the director, said that while he could offer no statistical proof, he believed after speaking with a number of police officials that a “viral video effect”—with officers wary of confronting suspects for fear of ending up on a video—“could well be at the heart” of a spike in violent crime in some cities.
“There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime—the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” he told reporters.

The director said that "lots and lots of police officers" may not be policing as hard out of fear of being the next officer in a viral online video. And that "could well be an important factor" in explaining an uptick in violent crime, he said.

The lesson here, it seems, is that it's OK for the authorities to surveil the populace. But it's not OK when the citizenry surveils the authorities because it chills their activities.

During hours of unrelenting cross-examination today, Andy Rubin, Google’s former Android chief, was on the stand in the Oracle v. Google trial defending how he built the mobile OS.

Rubin’s testimony began yesterday. He's another one of the star witnesses in this second courtroom showdown between the two software giants in which Oracle has said it will seek up to $9 billion in damages for Google's use of certain Java APIs in the Android operating system. Since an appeals court decided that APIs can be copyrighted, Google's only remaining defense in this case is that its use of those APIs constitutes "fair use."

After selling his earlier company, "Danger," Rubin said he founded Android in 2003. It was acquired by Google in 2005. Rubin stayed on as Google’s point man in charge of the company’s most ambitious project since search—creating an open source mobile operating system that could power smartphones around the world. It was a mission with incredible urgency, especially after Apple launched the iPhone to great fanfare in 2007.

Oracle attorney Annette Hurst questioned Rubin for more than four hours, asking Rubin about the timing of the Android launch, whether a license was needed, and his compensation.

Hurst's cross was the most aggressive questioning yet of a Google witness. As she asked questions, she paced back and forth in the small space between the lawyers' podium and the table at which Oracle's team of lawyers sat. Her style contrasted with that of Rubin, who has grown a beard and a Fu Manchu-style mustache since leaving Google. Rubin answered in a slow and quiet tone and never lost his cool, although he sometimes seemed exasperated.

"You were under incredible schedule pressure, weren't you?" Hurst asked early on in her questioning.

"Yes," Rubin said. "I wanted to win."

"And, you were under [Google founder] Larry Page?" she asked.

"I never felt any pressure from Larry," Rubin said. "That wasn't his management style."

Big rewards, big risks?

Rubin had a huge financial stake in Android's success, and Hurst zeroed in on it. When Android was acquired by Google, he held stock worth about $2.6 million, and members of his family had small amounts of stock as well.

Then she showed Rubin's contract with Google, detailing four "milestones" that would give him huge bonuses. The beginning milestone was when the first working smartphone was shipped within a certain time frame—worth $8 million to Rubin. The next milestones came when 5 million, 10 million, and 50 million phones were shipped, respectively; they would earn Rubin $10 million, $15 million, and $27 million, respectively.

Hurst: Wasn't all of that $60 million riding on you meeting that first milestone?
Rubin: It wasn’t just me, we had a team.
Hurst: Isn’t it true that all that $60M would be forfeited if you didn’t meet that first milestone?
Rubin: That’s what the contract stated. Whether it would have happened or not is another thing.
Hurst: So you don’t believe in honoring contracts, Mr. Rubin?
Rubin: I absolutely do believe in honoring contracts.

Rubin's team used three different terms to refer to early ideas about their phones. One was the "dream"—the dream phone they wanted to ship—and then there was the "sooner" version and the "later" version. After they saw the iPhone unveiled in 2007, they threw out the idea of shipping "sooner," presumably because it wouldn't have been any match for the Apple product.

Building up the core libraries, the heart of the programming in Android, was a huge task. Under Hurst's questions, Rubin said he did try to get libraries elsewhere, from IBM and others.

"I was constantly looking for ways to speed up the effort, and getting people to contribute to the open source project was part of that," he acknowledged.

"Didn't you testify on direct there was a 'clean room' implementation of the core libraries?" Hurst asked.

"A clean room means you don't copy stuff out of someone else's book, right, Mr. Rubin?" Hurst said, nearly shouting. She picked up a book of the Java language on Oracle's table.

"That depends," said Rubin. "There are books about open source software."

"So you don't even know if there's a clean room or not?" Hurst asked, throwing her arms up.

Google's lawyer objected. The judge sustained.

"A clean room has to be done without copying someone’s specifications, isn’t that true?" Hurst asked.

"It depends whether the specification is open or not," Rubin answered. "There are some specifications that don’t taint a clean room. For example, Apache Harmony, I didn't think that tainted anything."

"So you thought it was okay to take Sun's stuff if it was in Apache Harmony?" asked Hurst. (Sun created the Java language and APIs and was acquired by Oracle in 2010.)

Rubin remained stoic. That wasn't what he had said.

Looking for a cover-up

Finally, Hurst turned to an e-mail that has come up many times during both the earlier trial and this one. The 2010 e-mail, from engineer Tim Lindholm, informs Rubin that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked him for "technical alternatives to Java."

"We've been over a bunch of these, and we think they all suck," Lindholm wrote. "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for java under the terms we need."

Rubin acknowledged that he'd seen that e-mail.

"He didn't write, 'we don't need a license because of Jonathan Schwartz's blog,' did he?" shot Hurst. Google again objected to her question as argumentative and was sustained.

In another e-mail exchange, Rubin was asked about another company's plan to use Java.

"Wish them luck," Rubin wrote. "Java.lang.apis are copyrighted. and sun [sic] gets to say who they license the tck to," Rubin wrote.

Hurst pulled up another set of e-mail exchanges that had to do with a UK engineer who had been quoted in a 2007 Computerworld article about Android. The engineer said Google had its own APIs and "a better flavor of Java."

"PR Team—can you make sure that only authorized speakers speak to the press?" Rubin wrote after seeing the article. "This is really important, and a legal issue."

On re-direct, Rubin had the same explanation for avoiding the term Java that other Google witnesses had: the company didn't have a license to use the trademark, which required payment. He saw that separately from the copyright issue.

"The basis for your belief that APIs were not copyrightable was folklore and industry stories, isn’t that true?" Hurst asked, closing her cross-examination after more than four hours.

"No," Rubin started. "I think—"

Yes or no, Mr Rubin," Hurst said. "Folklore and industry stories?

"No," said Rubin.

Rubin was off the stand in the afternoon. US District Judge William Alsup warned both sides they've each been allotted 900 minutes of time in front of the jury, and they were burning through it, with Google having used 275 minutes and Oracle having used 380 in its cross-examinations.

Argumentative questioning like Hurst's—objections to her style had been sustained repeatedly—wasted those minutes, he noted. "I do not plan to enlarge the time," said Alsup.

Testimony will resume tomorrow morning.

The Asus Zenbook UX305 line of laptops, are thin, light, and surprisingly cheap when you look at their spec sheets.

Asus launched the first model in early 2015, offering a 2.7 pound laptop with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of solid state storage, and an Intel Core M processor for just $699. It certainly wasn’t the most powerful notebook available, but I was impressed enough with the design, build quality, and performance to call the original Zenbook UX305 a laptop that almost felt like a no-compromise machine.

Continue reading Asus Zenbook UX305UA laptop review (Core i5 Skylake model) at Liliputing.

Playing old console games through browser-based emulators and spin-offs is a niche pastime of many dedicated gamers.

However, keeping these fan-made games online is quite a challenge. This is what Josh Goldberg learned the hard way when his browser version of Nintendo’s 1985 Super Mario Bros was pulled offline in 2013.

The “Full Screen Mario” browser game was unique in several aspects. It not only allowed people to play the original 32 levels, but also included a random map generator and level editor, features Nintendo later released in its own “Mario Maker” game.

After welcoming 2.7 million unique visitors, Goldberg received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo which made him decide to pull the plug. However, the code remained widely available on Github and was actively developed in recent years.

This allowed people to play the game on their local machines, or host a copy on their own servers. But now, after more than two years, Nintendo has decided to pull the GitHub repository offline as well.

“Nintendo recently became aware that certain material posted on the web page located at [GitHub] infringes copyrights owned by Nintendo,” reads a DMCA notice that was sent to GitHub a few hours ago.

“Nintendo requests that GitHub disable public access to the web page […] which provides access to software files that make unauthorized use of Nintendo of America Inc.’s copyrighted material from its Super Mario Bros. videogame, in violation of Nintendo’s exclusive rights,” the notice adds.

As a result, GitHub has taken the entire repository down, replacing it with a message pointing to Nintendo’s DMCA takedown request.

Full Screen Mario

Interestingly the takedown comes a few hours after Goldberg, who now works as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, highlighted Full Screen Mario’s success in an interview with Microsoft + Open Source.

Interesting timing, just like the release of “Mario Maker” which came out a few months after “Full Screen Mario” was taken down. According to the developer, his game may in fact have inspired the Nintendo release.

“I think it’s too much of a coincidence that in the fall they take down a fan site that was too popular for them, then in the spring and summer they release a trailer for this product,” he previously told The Washington Post in an interview.

“It has the same user interface I had in development, just way better, and it’s something I wish I could have made,” he added, noting that Nintendo never contacted him personally.

Now, roughly three years after Full Screen Mario was born, the project appears to have come to an end. While there’s a possibility that the project may respawn elsewhere, as there are still some forks floating around, it’s game over for the official repository.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Looks like gamers didn’t have to wait long after the fall of British studio Lionhead to get a behind-the-scenes tell-all. Only two months after the maker of Fable was shuttered, the staff at Eurogamer has pieced together a massive feature recounting stories from multiple sources, on the record and anonymous, about the good, the bad, and the “shit” of its entire history.

All of the company’s big misses are on show here, particularly those of Milo and Kate and Fable Legends, but the feature is even-handed about spreading both blame and compliments as needed. Microsoft is given knocks for corporate-minded complaints yet is praised for fostering the company’s creative spirit and mostly staying out of the way of the game development process during and after its Fable 2 peak, while studio founder Peter Molyneux is cast as both an over-promising, under-delivering dreamer and as a genius producer and game director who got the most out of his team (and protected devs from MS’ prying eyes).

Molyneux, to his credit, participated fully in the feature and minced no words about himself: "I'm a complete twat... There were many times my huge mouth got in the way of common sense." Former Microsoft employees went on the record, as well, while Microsoft itself declined to comment.

Among the feature’s many highlights:

Not free-to-make: By the time the free-to-play co-op game Fable Legends was canceled, it’d burnt through a lot of money. An unnamed source pegged the total at roughly $75 million. Yes, we said dollars, not pounds (which would be about £50 million), which makes us think Eurogamer got that tally from a Redmond, Washington, source as opposed to one from Lionhead's former Guildford, UK, office.

"Legends should have been dirt cheap to produce, that's the whole point of a free-to-play game," an unnamed source told Eurogamer. "If people don't like the game, you take a small cut. If they do, you build more of what the people want. Legends cost a large amount of money and was delayed countless times so we could show off some other piece of Microsoft tech."

Canceled games: Microsoft's 2012 insistence on a free-to-play game from Lionhead, as opposed to another offline, single-player adventure, meant hopes for a sprawling new Fable 4, set in a steampunk-esque London, were squashed. "You've had three shots [at a single-player Fable] and you've only tripled the money," Lionhead Art Director John McCormack told Eurogamer when paraphrasing Microsoft's thoughts on a sequel.

Lionhead was also toying with a three-part game, code-named Project Opal, that would connect players on PC, Xbox, and mobile with different games on each. The mobile fishing game and Xbox combat-adventure game would complement a PC world-building game, but the project was only in development for six months, and it was shuttered soon after Molyneux left Lionhead to form a new studio and confuse the public with a pair of weird games.

Smoke and mirrors: Lionhead reps went on the record to say what many in the public had long assumed and asserted: that Milo and Kate's first reveal was made up of wholly pre-rendered content, and that version was predicated on a higher-powered version of Kinect that never came to be. By the time the project was canned, it had dwindled from its initial promise of a fully responsive virtual-child relationship game. Instead, it only allowed players to engage in mini-games like moving objects around the titular boy's bedroom—all to distract him while his parents could be heard (but not seen) getting into arguments. This, the developers told Eurogamer, meant that worries of the game working as a "pedophile simulator" would have been squashed if people had seen how rudimentary the game actually turned out.

"The disaster that struck was everybody realized just how much it would cost to make a Kinect that had the field of view and the depth and the precision that would be necessary to give very fine motor control," Molyneux told Eurogamer. "The specs of the Kinect went lower and lower and lower and lower and lower, until eventually it was a fraction of what Milo and Kate had been designed for.

Box art battle: In addition to complaints about Microsoft's corporate training regimen and an alleged tying of Metacritic review scores to developer pay bonuses, Fable Art Director John McCormack recounted an ongoing struggle with Fable 2's marketing team.

"The marketing was shit," McCormack told Eurogamer, explaining that Lionhead had been stuck with an outside-of-Microsoft marketing firm. "They were going, what are you making? An RPG? Right, dragons and shit. And that was their advert. And we were like, no, ours is a Monty Python-esque comedy. And they went, look, we know how to market RPGs. And they opened the RPG marketing drawer and pulled out a picture of a dragon that wasn't even in the game and went there you go. That's your market.”

McCormack also faced off against that marketing group over the game’s box art. His push to put a black woman on the cover—and to emphasize progressive features in the game like gay marriage—were rejected by a marketing team that insisted on “the usual white guy with a sword on the front.” The marketing team asked McCormack what the least successful Disney film up until that point had been. “They went, ‘Princess and the Frog. Work it out.’ I was like, ‘Fuck you, man.’ I hated it.”

These are but a few of the many anecdotes and nuggets in Eurogamer's feature, which pointed out a constant problem for game development at Lionhead: that the studio would spend years working on titles that had tons of features but felt aimless and often rushed. This feature, appropriately, feels the same, with many disjointed stories sewn together by little more than their place in a timeline, but it's an astounding read that any fan—or hater—of Peter Molyneux should carve out some time to peruse.

Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had completed rules that will regulate methane and other emissions from new natural gas and oil drilling sites. The rules, which have already received extensive public and industry comment, are focused on methane due to its potency as a greenhouse gas, but they'll also limit emissions of toxic chemicals and pollutants that contribute to ground-level ozone. In making the announcement, the EPA also issued a call for data regarding existing hardware; it intends to eventually regulate the emissions from that, as well.

The new rules cover any new or updated hardware for oil and natural gas wells, as well as sites that collect, process, and compress natural gas for distribution. Formulated under the Clean Air Act, they had already gone extensive public comment. In response, the EPA tightened a few cases; low production wells will now have to be monitored, and the frequency of monitoring at compressor stations was increased.

The rule is focused on methane emissions, and the EPA estimates that it will cut the greenhouse equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (out of the US' roughly 5.3 billion). But as a side benefit, release of various organic toxins, including benzene, toluene, and xylene, will also be cut, as will emissions of ozone-forming chemicals. The Agency hasn't quantified the value of the ensuing health benefits, but it figures the climate benefits by 2025 ($690 million) will significantly outweigh the implementation costs ($530 million).

The limited emissions cuts are at least in part due to the fact that the rules are focused on new and upgraded hardware; they don't touch existing equipment. But that should change. The Obama administration has set a goal of reducing methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industries by 40 percent in 2025. And in announcing the new rules, the EPA stated, "EPA is also starting the process to control emissions from existing sources by issuing for public comment an Information Collection Request that requires companies to provide the information that will be necessary for EPA to reduce methane emissions from existing oil and gas sources."

Charter Communications prevented customers from using their own modems for two years beginning in 2012, and as punishment, the company will have to pay a $640,000 fine and complete a three-year compliance plan.

The Federal Communications Commission entered into a consent decree with Charter to settle the commission’s investigation into the matter, and it released the decree on Tuesday.

Charter’s actions were no secret—see this DSLReports article describing the modem ban in June 2012. But Charter—which just got FCC approval to complete a merger that will make it the nation’s second largest cable company—got away with it until the FCC stepped in.

The FCC’s Media Bureau began an investigation in July 2015 after modem maker Zoom Telephonics asked the commission to take action. Zoom also petitioned the FCC in October 2015  to reject Charter’s purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks.

“The Bureau’s investigation found that for a period of approximately two years beginning in 2012, Charter informed subscribers that they would no longer be permitted to attach new customer-owned modems,” the FCC said. “Charter later provided a list of authorized customer-owned modems, but new modems were only added to the list after passing a number of tests, many of which did not relate to harm to the network or theft of service.” (Charter customers who already used third-party modems before the policy went into place were allowed to keep using them.)

Because of the FCC investigation, Charter is shortening its modem testing period to three weeks. The $640,000 fine will be paid to the US Treasury.

Charter will have to file compliance reports every six months detailing its efforts to let customers attach their own modems. It won’t be a total free-for-all, though. For example, Charter can still prohibit attachment of modems that don’t support version 3.0 or higher of DOCSIS, the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. Charter will have to notify the FCC each time it prohibits the attachment of a specific modem and explain why.

Charter doesn’t charge a separate modem rental fee—the cost of a Charter-supplied modem is included in a customer’s monthly bill. Thus, using a third-party modem with Charter doesn’t save a customer any money. But regardless of whether cable companies charge a rental fee, FCC rules prohibit providers from preventing the use of modems except when they cause “electronic or physical harm” or are used for “the unauthorized receipt of service.”

Charter began preventing use of customer-owned modems when it launched new pricing and packages that included the modem at no additional cost. “As a result, we will no longer provision customer owned modems on our network when a customer signs up for Charter Internet service,” a company representative said at the time in a DSLReports thread. “If you are an existing Charter Internet customer and own your own modem, and you are content to stay in your current package and pricing, you can continue to use your modem. If you decide you would like to come to the new pricing, at that point, we will issue you a new Charter modem.”

Charter said it enforced the policy because it wanted to make sure every customer gets “the best online experience possible.” To make that happen, Charter said it needed to provide the modems itself and make sure they all have the most up-to-date firmware.

While Charter finally relented in 2014 and allowed use of third-party modems, the company’s testing program resulted in few options, according to Zoom’s petition to deny the Charter/TWC/Bright House merger. (The merger got the final required approval from California regulators today and is expected to be completed next week.)

“Most of the 22 Charter-certified modem models are unavailable at major brick and mortar retailers, and others are not easily available,” Zoom wrote. “Only three have wireless functionality, and none of them employ the 802.11ac standard.”

The Charter website currently lists 25 approved modems.

This wasn’t the only case of a cable company allegedly preventing attachment of customer-owned devices. A class-action lawsuit against Cablevision accused that company of requiring cable TV subscribers to rent a set-top box in order to receive certain video services. While Cablevision denied the allegations, it agreed to a settlement that offers customers one-time bill credits or payments of $20 to $40, or services valued at up to $140. Current or former Cablevision customers have until September 23 to request bill credits or cash payments.

Disclosure: Bright House is owned by the Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica. Advance/Newhouse will own 13 percent of Charter after the proposed transactions are completed.

Last year Chinese device maker Cube launched a 10.6 inch Windows tablet with a Core M Broadwell processor, a Wacom digitizer, pen support, and 4GB of RAM.

Now the company has a new model with a more powerful processor and a USB 3.1 Type-C connector.

The Cube i16 Tablet is up for order from AliExpress for $514.

The tablet features a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, an Intel Core M3-6Y30 Skylake processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage plus a microSD card slot.

Continue reading Cube i16: A $515 Windows tablet with full HD screen, Core M3 Skylake, pen support, 4GB RAM at Liliputing.

The problem with being a safety-conscious, responsible drone operator is that it's much easier to actually fly the drone than it is to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules. If we're ever going to have instant Amazon Prime Air deliveries, Domino's Pizza drones, and other flying robot helpers, complying with those rules needs to get easier—it also needs to get automated.

At the recent Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Xponential conference in New Orleans, Amazon Prime Air Vice President Gur Kimchi outlined Amazon's vision for how that might look. Kimchi and Amazon propose an approach that uses "federated" traffic control—the sharing of information between air traffic control systems, operators, and drones themselves to enable a safer yet more crowded sky. The groundwork for such a system is already being laid—in part thanks to software developed by a Santa Monica, California, company called AirMap.

AirMap has released an application for Apple iOS that could make drone operations safer by directly connecting drone operators to airport operators and air traffic controllers. The app is built atop an Internet application interface that is also being used by drone manufacturers like DJI, 3D Robotics, Yuneec, and the commercial and military small UAS manufacturer Aeryon Labs. This setup allows users to integrate the same services directly into the software used to fly drones.

AirMap has already brought 75 airports onboard with the application, which gives airport managers a "dashboard" from which they can grant or withhold permission to fly and set specific automated policies for certain areas near their airports. Eventually, the software will let drone operators see each other as well as data about crewed aircraft on courses that might conflict.

The drone phone tree

Today, if you want to fly a drone in compliance with FAA rules, it's relatively easy—that is, as long as you're flying far from civilization, in visual line of sight, below controlled airspace, and nowhere above people or cars. Fly one anywhere else, and things get complicated.

Odds are that there's an FAA-designated airfield near you, whether it's an actual airport or the helipad at a local hospital. "In 2012," explained AirMap CEO and co-founder Ben Marcus, "congress passed a law—Section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act—which requires recreational operators of drones to give notice to airports and air traffic control when flying within five miles of an airport. So to give notice, you would pick up a telephone or knock on the airport manager's door and say, 'Hey, I'm going to fly over the 7-Eleven down the street.'"

Technically, the regulations apply even if you're flying a kite. (By the way, if you're flying your kite more than 150 feet up without proper lighting, this is also an FAA rule violation). At the park near my house, that means contacting 10 different entities—seven hospitals, a city water filtration plant, city police headquarters, and a hotel that occasionally allows helicopters to land on the roof of its parking garage. I know this mostly because of an "app" released by the FAA earlier this year called B4UFLY, intended to help drone owners become aware of things like temporary flight restrictions and the restricted airspace near airports. But B4UFLY doesn’t provide any way for would-be drone pilots to reach airports to get permission (not even phone numbers). All the app gives is a latitude and longitude for the location of the airports nearby.

The current system of contacting airports also ignores another important part of drone safety. While the FAA's air traffic control system may eventually provide data to other organizations, "in the interim there's a whole lot of other public safety entities that have an interest in drone safety," Marcus explained. He's not just referring to airports, but local police and other organizations need to be aware of what's in the air, who's flying it, and where it's flying. Currently there's also no easy way for drone operators to know when there's a change in the situation while they're flying—such as an emergency service helicopter barreling into their flight path.

So while the FAA's B4UFLY app and the collaborative program with AUVSI and the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) that spawned it are giving drone operators some very basic information, they're not exactly making the skies safe on their own. Drone safety, Marcus said, "starts with awareness for operators—giving them something that's easy to understand about where they can and can't fly safely, that's dynamic. It's similar to the B4UFLY concept, but we asked, 'How do we make that really useful?' That's how we started… we decided to look at how we go about building a safe and efficient operating environment for drones. The first element of that is awareness. And it's not just about how you display things on a map, but how you get that information into the hands of the operator."

There's an app (and an API) for that

The AirMap iOS application is available on iPhones and also has an Apple Watch add-on. It allows a drone pilot to create a profile, including a "library" of aircraft and contact information, to be used to send notifications of flights. The app collects geolocation data, gives a color-coded message about flight restrictions, and offers the drone pilot the ability to notify airports within five miles of flight plans simply through a tap on the screen.

more images in gallery

Everything that's in AirMap's iOS app is also available in the AirMap application programming interface and software developer kit. The goal, Marcus said, is that "you don't need to open another app—you can see the information with the app you're already using to fly your drone. So if you attempt to take off within five miles of an airport, you get a pop-up message asking if you'd like to provide notice."

AirMap's app for iOS.

On the other end, airport operations centers can plug into the AirMap system, called the Digital Notice and Awareness System (D-NAS). These groups will use a "dashboard" application that allows them to see all of the notifications within their operating area. "We launched that program with the American Association of Airport Executives recently," Marcus said. In total, 75 airports signed up as of the first week of May—and more are in the pipeline. The airports already using the system include Los Angeles International, Houston George Bush Intercontinental, Denver International, and a host of regional and small airports. "We're also trying to figure out how to make the dashboard useful for heliports as well—more for the helicopter pilots who are landing than for a tower," Marcus added.

more images in gallery

The dashboard gives airport operators "a realtime map of where notices have been provided" by drone pilots, Marcus explained. "They can also, as the airport operator, click on any of those flights to get information on the type of drone and the altitude it's flying at, and [they] can send an SMS message to the operator from the dash." That SMS message can be manually typed in or automated.

Additionally, the dashboard allows airport managers to set geo-fence-based rules that can automatically set an area as more permissive of drone flights or explicitly exclude drones from flying in the area (such as the approach paths being used for landing aircraft). On the drone operator side, that means the SMS messages approving flying can be used as a handy way to show police that, yes, they have permission to be flying.

Within the next month, AirMap will add traffic alerts to the iOS app and the API. These alerts are based on aircraft transponder data and other sources, and they will warn drone operators of aircraft that are coming into the airspace they're using. For airports and helipads currently not enrolled in the service, AirMap pulls contact data (including phone numbers) from the FAA's database—ironically, something the FAA neglected to do with its own app.

While AirMap has partnered with specific drone manufacturers, the API is available to anyone building their own drone. The iOS application (which will be followed shortly by an Android app) is intended largely to demonstrate the features of the API—which includes map tiling and other geo-spatial data independent of what's built into iOS or Android, Marcus said. "The second reason is so that we can allow people who do not have a drone built by one of these manufacturers to also participate in the system—if you're building a drone in your garage or flying something rudimentary, maybe even without GPS—you can still participate with the digital notice."

In robots we trust

While the AirMap app addresses operations within line of sight, future drones flying autonomously will need a whole additional layer of communication to operate safely. In particular, these devices will need drone-to-drone communication to help "deconflict" any potential collisions in more crowded skies. Again, Kimchi outlined Amazon's proposal for how this would work—a system in which services like AirMap would be part of a larger "federated" traffic control system, providing both rules for general drone traffic flow and automated alerts and responses to potentially dangerous situations.

These sorts of federated services are something Internet service developers like Amazon are already familiar with. But such setups are currently far outside the FAA's comfort zone, and this would require a cultural change in how the aviation industry views automation.

Kimchi remarked on the irony of how the aviation industry currently uses autopilots to land aircraft in foggy conditions when pilots can't see the runway, yet they don't trust the systems in good weather when the risk is lower. "We already trust the automation in the worst possible conditions, why don’t we trust it the rest of the time?” he told the AUVSI conference crowd. So when drones can both sense and avoid hazards and share data amongst themselves about such hazards, organizations like AirMap and Amazon believe UAVs will be able to fly safely in public airspace—doing so in much greater numbers.

This week, Walmart sued Visa in New York State Court, saying it wanted to be able to require PIN authorizations on all EMV debit card transactions. Although many debit card transactions already require a PIN to authorize purchases or withdrawals on that card, Visa makes its merchants give Visa card holders the option to authorize with a signature. Walmart is arguing that this puts its customers at risk for fraud.

Visa, Mastercard, and other card networks set an October 2015 deadline for merchants and card issuers in the US to shift to the chip-based EMV standard (which is eponymous for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, the three groups that developed the standard). The transition was meant to replace the magnetic stripe cards that persisted for years in the US, even after other countries quickly made the transition to the more secure chip-based cards. Walmart made the transition early last year, becoming one of the first national retailers to buy new terminals that accepted EMV cards, the Wall Street Journal reports.

But even though the EMV standard accepts PIN authorization on all cards, the major card networks said they would allow signature authorization to persist in the US and not require PIN authorization, claiming that it would minimize confusion among customers who might have trouble adapting to the new standard. Others objected to the authorization leniency, arguing that signature authorization does nothing to prevent fraud against a card holder if their card is physically stolen.

In a statement to the WSJ, Walmart said that the suit was about “protecting our customers’ bank accounts when they use their debit cards at Walmart.” Still, the paper notes that there's a monetary side to Walmart's legal salvo as well—for every signature-authorized transaction, Walmart must pay Visa five cents more than it does on a PIN-authorized transaction. According to the WSJ, about 10 percent of Visa debit-card-using customers at Walmart will ask to override the PIN authorization prompt at the checkout counter in favor of authorizing the transaction with a signature.

Mastercard, on the other hand, lets retailers choose how they will allow customers to authorize transactions.

Walmart has fought against card networks and issuers for years. One of its most recent battles involved leading a consortium of retailers to create the Merchant Customer Exchange, known as MCX, which tried and failed to launch CurrentC, a system that would authorize payments to the store directly from a customer's checking account with the help of a QR code on the customer's phone, essentially circumventing the interchange fees paid by the retailer to the credit card companies. When CurrentC failed, Walmart launched Walmart Pay in a continued attempt to wrest control from mobile payment systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay.