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“The answer was Yes. The question: Could you hijack my yacht? Now, the rest of the story: I had just finished telling a conference audience how we brought down an drone with a specialized attack against its GPS sensor. A distinguished-looking man with a British accent handed me his card. “I don’t suppose you could […]

“A hobbyist using a remote-control airplane mounted with a digital camera just happened to capture images last year of a Dallas creek running red with pig’s blood. It led to a nearby meatpacking plant being fined for illegal dumping and two of its leaders being indicted on water pollution charges.” Continue reading the New York Times

“Visions of the future don’t just have to come from science fiction. There’s very real technology today giving us clues about how our future lives might be transformed. So what might our future look like? And what does it take for an idea about the future to become a reality? In this hour, TED speakers

“Anyone who has used a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator has seen the system’s ability to tell you precisely where you are — and, most likely, has faced frustration when the device just doesn’t work. Yet for the military — which uses GPS data for such mission-critical applications as target tracking, missile guidance, and simply

Austin, TX—Zak Kassas won the best paper presentation award in the Estimation Session of the AIAA Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) conference, 2012 for his paper entitled “Observability Analysis of Opportunistic Navigation with Pseudorange Measurements“. The awards were announced during the 2013 GNC conference. Zak’s research focuses on devising novel techniques for opportunistic and collaborative navigation.

“University of Texas researchers recently tricked the navigation system of an $80 million yacht and sent the ship off course in an experiment that showed how any device with civilian GPS technology is vulnerable to a practice called spoofing. Led by GPS expert Todd Humphreys, the researchers used a handheld device they built for about

“With all great innovations comes the potential for mischief. With so much of our social, commercial, and government infrastructure already online, it’s highly likely that we’ve all been targeted by cyber-attacks, even if we haven’t directly felt their results. Cars, computer cams, ATMs, databases, and power grids can be hacked.  In a recent high profile

“In June, a 213-foot luxury yacht sailed off the southern coast of Italy, when, suddenly, it veered off course. But this was no sinister act worthy of a spy flick. Instead, a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin had deliberately coerced the $80 million vessel from its track, without physically taking

“It must be pretty cool to be one of Todd Humphreys’ engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin. Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dared them to hack into a drone. (Which they did.) And this year, Humphreys and his students went to the Mediterranean to see if they could hijack an $80

“In a startling experiment a research team from the University of Texas successfully spoofed a ship’s GPS-based navigation system sending the 213-foot yacht hundreds of yards off course — without raising alarms or triggering a hint of the course change on the onboard monitors. Led by assistant professor Todd Humphreys, the group used equipment what