Domestic Drones on Patrol

English: Merrifield Hall on the campus of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NYTimes.com:

Drones: A Booming Business?: Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, may soon become commercialized. In Grand Forks, N.D., people are preparing for a coming boom in drones-related business.

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: March 17, 2013

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards 

English: CBP Air and Marine officers control and watch images taken by Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) of the CBP. This surveillance provides information concerning illegal activities taking place in remote areas to Border Patrol agents. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.

To the pilot’s right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.

On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.

“There they are,” Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.

Seal of the University of North Dakota (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviation, the university is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.

“The sky’s going to be dark with these things,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter — about 7,500 — as the United States military flies in total. ...

privacy (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The rapidly expanding market has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers and privacy watchdogs. On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the privacy implications of drones like the ones being developed at Grand Forks.

English: Official photo of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said this year: “This fast-emerging technology is cheap and could pose a significant threat to the privacy and civil liberties of millions of Americans. It is another example of a fast-changing policy area on which we need to focus to make sure that modern technology is not used to erode Americans’ right to privacy.”

Some fans of the technology wince at the word “drone,” which implies that there is no pilot. And they have grown resentful about the alarms raised over privacy issues, noting that a few city and state governments have begun banning drones even where they do not yet operate.

Men perform pre-flight checks on an unmanned aerial vehicle before launch. (Photo credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery)

Tom K. Kenville, chairman of the North Dakota chapter of the trade association, Unmanned Applications Institute, International, said such bans would discourage technological progress. “I don’t think we had rules for the road before we had roads,” he said.

Back in the university lab, Rico Becker, a software developer with Corsair Engineering, which had written a program for the students, emphasized that the “missing persons” exercise was just one of many hypothetical missions that students would fly, and was purely theoretical. “We’re not training pilots to spot people camping in their backyards,” he said. ...

Volunteer fire departments in places like Grand Forks, Mr. Kenville said, would provide a clear market. An unmanned vehicle, he said, was “going to beat all the cars there,” to determine the scope of a problem.

“If it’s a chemical fire, it will tell us to stay away, or it’s just some hay bales, drive slower,” he said. ...

PhotonQ-Swarming Drones (Photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE)

“This is money,” said Matthew L. Opsahl, in another part of the University of North Dakota simulation lab, at a work station where an operator could coordinate the activities of several remotely operated planes. One person could handle six cargo planes at a time, he said, or direct ground-based crews of several remotely operated planes that were scanning a large-scale event, like a spreading forest fire. The operator could compare the aerial images with those from Google maps, identifying street names and addresses to forward to a 911 call center.

Mr. Opsahl, a former pilot on a regional jet, is now an instructor in the North Dakota program, where Mr. Regenhard, 21, a junior from Prescott, Wis., has a double major in commercial aviation and in unmanned aerial systems. Mr. Regenhard is also building a six-rotor helicopter that will beam pictures back to the ground, one that might inspect rooftop air-conditioners or offer a bird’s-eye view of a crime scene. ...

The unresolved question is how to avoid midair collisions, because the operator on the ground cannot see other traffic in the air. The F.A.A. plans to have a system ready by 2015 called “sense and avoid” in which each plane in the sky, manned or unmanned, uses GPS equipment to locate itself, and sends that information to a computer on the ground that draws a map showing all targets. The computer then rebroadcasts that map to every pilot in the air — or at a computer workstation on the ground, as the case may be.

The progress of electronics seems relentless. Mr. Anderson, of 3D Robotics, said that all the components in a drone — a fast processor, a good battery, a GPS receiver and microelectromechancial sensors — were present in an iPhone. ...

The field is embryonic. “We’re in the Wilbur Wright years of the U.A.S. industry,” said Bruce Gjovig, director of the Center for Innovation, a business incubator, at the University of North Dakota.

Benjamin M. Trapnell, an associate professor and a mainstay of the unmanned aircraft systems program here, ... said the trick was not just in learning to fly such vehicles, but also in designing them, including the cameras or other sensors they could carry, and the ground stations from which they can be controlled.

The technology seems so flexible and promising that even some companies involved in conventional aviation are interested. For example, at Applebee Aviation, which flies 11 helicopters out of Banks, Ore., mostly to spray crops, Warren Howe, the sales manager, said a remotely piloted vehicle might never replace a conventional one for that purpose. In a drone, he said, “you’re limited to looking with a camera; you wouldn’t be able to see necessarily the wind changes that control drift, or a spotted owl or something, or beehives in a neighboring yard.”

“You may not see that kid coming down the street to take a look because he thinks a helicopter is really cool,” Mr. Howe said.

But at the same time, he said, his light helicopters cost $1,100 an hour to charter, and a lot of survey work could be done with a drone instead, mapping out what a manned helicopter would be needed for.

Mr. Anderson, in contrast, said that later this year, his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000. “That’s not per hour, that’s for the helicopter,” he said.

'via Blog this'

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Ten Tips That Could Prevent Cyber Criminals from Hijacking Client Data

WealthManagement.com:

Feb. 1, 2013Megan Leonhardt

Image via CrunchBase

As tablet ownership continues to grow—doubling since 2011—and more than half of U.S. consumers owning a smartphone, according to a 2013 Forrester Research report, advisors need to be more vigilant about data security now more than ever. Below are 10 easily implemented safeguards that could prevent advisors becoming an easy target for cyber thieves.

Spicy Stories (July 1929) -- Don't Show Everything !! ... Americans still lax with Wi-Fi security: survey -- "Anyone can see everything you are doing," Whitman finished her sentence. (November 7, 2011) ... (Photo credit: marsmet463)

1. Nothing Is Free—Avoid using public Wi-Fi whenever possible, warned financial services
technology expert, Bill Winterberg. Using a smartphone’s cellular network ... is more secure, he advised, saying that using a cellular network is going to make it more difficult for hackers to “snoop.”

English: How doses work a VPN ? Français : Comment fonctionne un VPN ? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2. Look Into VPN Options—VPNs, or virtual private networks, act like a tunnel through the Internet, remotely connecting your computer to a secure server. Using a VPN connection ensures that all Internet communication is encrypted and protected against unwanted probing. 

Many companies offer employee access to an internal VPN, but advisors can also check out independent services including TorVPN and Private Internet Access. ...

3. Stay Logged On At Your Peril—... [Not] logging out means that cyber crooks intent on accessing your unprotected Internet sessions could stay on longer, increasing the potential danger, Winterberg says.  ...

4. Keep Up-To-Date—Advisors should be updating their software and apps as often as possible, especially when those updates that include security improvements. ...

5. Forewarned Is Forearmed—A security system is only as good as its weakest link, says John Sileo, founder of Silio.com and a speaker on privacy and data security. Advisors should train staff to use best data security practices and recognize potential threats such as spear phishing attacks—emails that may deliver malware software to your computer or mobile devices.

 “The number one way we see data stolen is that someone inside his organization is socially engineered out of the data,” Sileo says. Plus, staff training is comparatively cheaper than the estimated $300 per record lost in an average data breach.

6. Triple Check—Even with staff training, advisors should have redundancies in place to keep cyber thieves from impersonating clients, says Adam Levin, former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs and co-founder of Credit.com and Identity Theft 911. Although many clients use email—which Leven calls an “inherently unsecure conduit”—to regularly communicate [with] their advisor, there should be a system in place to verify the identity of a client, including follow-up phone calls or in-person meetings. ...

Harris Interactive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

7. Responsible Safeguards—...Envision a “scorched earth” policy when it comes to password protection, as in, no device is exempt, including personal phones and tablets. Approximately 81 percent of employees use at least one personal device such as a tablet or smartphone for business use, according to a 2012 Harris Interactive survey. ...

8. Solid Defenses—Not only should advisors use passwords, they also need to use passwords that are long—generally at least six to nine characters—without having personal details such as birthday, age or social security numbers worked in.

Go beyond the typical 4-digit automatic password option available on smartphones, says Winterberg. While it’s inconvenient to have a long password, the 4-digit approach does not provide enough defense against a “brute force” attack.

9. Think Disposable—At the end of the day, smartphones and to some extent, tablet devices, should be treated as throwaway devices. All information stored on the device needs to be backed up in case something should happen, including loss and theft.

“The most important thing is that people need to look at their mobile device and realize that it is not a communication device, it’s a data storage device,” Levin says.

10. Wipe It Clean—While the Find My iPhone app is designed for iPhone users, there are also similar Android versions on the market. Every data security interviewed for this article recommended that advisors have a version on their mobile devices.

Not only can the app help find the phone or tablet if it’s activated, but the app has a “destroy after reading”-like capability that erase all data on the device in case of emergency.

“You can never be too safe,” Levin said, adding that cyber attacks are only going to become more sophisticated and more damaging as technology improves.       

'via Blog this'

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Scientists measure brain waves to figure out personal information

The Emotiv Epoc is one way that users can give commands to devices using only thoughts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Upstart Business Journal

by Amora McDaniel , Reporter August 28, 2012  |  10:39am EDT

Scientists used a commercially-available gaming headset to hack a person’s brain and identify his address, PIN numbers and bank information, according to the UK's Daily Mail.

English: The Daily Mail clock, just off Kensington High Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The scientists from the University of California, University of Oxford, and University of Geneva took an everyday Emotiv brain-computer interface—a $300 commercial-grade headset—and showed the subjects pictures of images of familiar objects such as banks, people, and PIN numbers. They then tracked the person’s P300 brain wave, the signal that activates when
a person recognizes meaningful information.

Image via CrunchBase

The results were pretty scary. The Daily Mail reports the team was able to figure out where the person lived 60 percent of the time and determined the first number of the subject’s PIN number 40 percent of the time.
TechCrunch adds the scientists could also determine the person’s birth month 60 percent of the time and the bank branch of their ATM with 30 percent accuracy.

Scientists said the benefit of this brain-hacking technology would be for police interrogation. Maybe so, but the information they gleaned from the subject's brains was more information than a hacker would need to change someone's password over the phone. This technology has the potential to be really awesome or really dangerous.

Amora McDaniel

Reporter - Upstart Business Journal

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How to Spend Too Much for Stuff You Don’t Need

Oh, you’re doing that already? And you’re wasting time managing accounts payable every day, tracking down approvals for purchases you don’t understand? Here’s how small companies can tackle purchasing inefficiencies.

CFO.com
David Rosenbaum

Image via CrunchBase

… When [Mark Verbeck] started working at Blade Network Technologies as CFO in 2008, the company, … was a 50-person operation. Like many smaller businesses, it relied on tribal knowledge to manage its spending: everyone knew (or believed they knew) what everyone else was doing, and when anyone bought anything, everyone knew (or thought they knew) whether it made business sense.

…Because the company was small, it had little leverage with vendors and limited ability to negotiate for lower prices or early-payer discounts. Therefore, focusing attention on processes and spend — for supplies, services, and the like — didn’t seem worth the bother; it wouldn’t much affect the bottom line. So no one focused.

But by 2009, when Blade had tripled to about 150 full-time employees, its paper-based process — people throwing requisitions over Verbeck’s wall for approval — forced him to start asking questions and saying no more frequently. …

Image via CrunchBase

The growing problem at Blade, Verbeck says, was not so much that money was being misspent as that the work was burning up his and the finance department’s time. Requests and invoices piled up on his desk, distracting him from more valuable tasks, while employees were either waiting to purchase the stuff they needed to do their jobs or buying and expensing it.Verbeck looked for a better way to do things, and in 2009 found the Coupa Software purchasing and expense-management platform. Last January he became Coupa’s CFO.

Sweating the Small Stuff
When times are good, when credit easy to come by and everyone is fat, no one sweats the small stuff. …[Today] the small stuff looms large, especially in small businesses trying to grow at a time when investors and customers are wary.

The savings that can be retrieved by automating and rationalizing approval and purchasing processes are palpable (a 2009 Aberdeen Group study estimated that “improving the percentage of all non-payroll, tax, tariff, and fee-related spend” — that is, indirect, nonstrategic expenses — brought under the management of a dedicated group can help enterprises “achieve a 5% to 20% cost savings for each dollar brought under spend management”). But the real value, says Kristen Lampert, corporate-services manager at specialty-investment bank Ziegler, is de-risking organizational spending by making sure the approval chain has the right people weighing in on the right things.

Workflow/Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Lampert took over the corporate-services department at Ziegler in 2010 — a team responsible for managing logistics, purchasing, and events — she couldn’t afford to waste time and effort on inefficient processes: the unit had been downsized to three full-time employees. In addition, Ziegler’s approval and bill-paying processes were all paper-based. … There was no visibility across the firm, she says. Expenditures were authorized by the wrong people, and the company didn’t have a risk-management component in place.
She describes an invoice for a software service “that should have had oversight by the IT director,” but instead was approved by multiple, siloed business units. The lack of communication lead to the bank paying for some services that were supposed to have been cancelled.

Lampert established a work group to design a request-for-proposal for a software service to rationalize the company’s processes. Her argument was that if the company could save 1% of the $16.5 million she managed annually, getting all spending in one bucket, the return on investment would be positive.

The group began by defining the organization’s must-haves: something easy to use …; the ability to manage contracts; an easy-to-configure approval chain; supplier network capability, and electronic links from Ziegler’s system to its suppliers’ e-commerce sites for electronic catalog purchasing (known as punch-out support). After researching 18 solutions, Ziegler chose [vendor], a software-as-a-service tool Lampert expects will be easy to integrate with the new general ledger the bank is in the process of picking.

English: Business Process Reengineering Cycle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ziegler implemented [vendor] last March, and Lampert says the bank has already recognized $42,000 in second-quarter savings because managers now reach out to multiple vendors to get multiple bids on goods and services. Besides saving money, the managers get recognition for renegotiation successes that previously “were lost in a million e-mails.” And the visibility the platform provides, says Lampert, helps the company manage risk. For audit purposes, she says, “We can now track every contract, point to who approved what, and better understand our contractual obligations.”

Navigating the Vendor Landscape
According to a 2011 Gartner report, the e-procurement vendor landscape is “fragmented and rapidly evolving,” so finance executives need to perform due diligence when choosing a vendor and service that fits their organization’s budget and needs. Vendors in the space include Ariba, with its relatively large-company clientele and broad supplier network; Basware; and Coupa, which grew up in the small-to-midsize business space, and ranked highly in Gartner’s study for ease of use and customer satisfaction. And that’s only the A-B-C of the list of 42 vendors Gartner analyzes.

Coupa’s Verbeck asserts that the company’s cloud-native DNA enables it to evolve rapidly and allows users a great degree of freedom in creating “dynamic approval processes.” “That’s hard to do in a paper-based world,” he says.

With paper processes, a staffer is more likely to just circumvent the procurement system, as did one manager Verbeck spoke to who, when he discovered the purchase of a stapler was going to the CFO for approval, just bought the item off-contract and expensed it.

“Part of the miracle of the SaaS model,” says Verbeck, is that users can extend the functionality of the software — configuring it to their needs — without having to rework the software’s base code. In practical terms, that means users can alter the approval chain as needed without calling in the vendor to redesign (at great expense) the software.

But software doesn’t solve business problems: people solve business problems. “I could have put Coupa in place and not solved the problem,” says Verbeck, recalling his Blade days. The software would have just “paved the cow path” (automated a business process without addressing whether it was efficient). Instead, he began by blowing up Blade’s existing processes.

“Instead of requisitions going through the management hierarchy, we created approval chains based on who was buying, what they were buying, who they were buying it for, how much they were spending, and whether the item had been bought before. This process ended up with people approving things they had knowledge about. I explained to the managers that in this new world, they were accountable. If something landed on my desk that I had to reject, that was their problem.”

And Verbeck was no longer the bad guy.

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The 5 price traps airlines set for flyers

The Business Journals
Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2012, 10:56am EDT

Joe Brancatelli Business Travel Columnist

A proposed settlement last week between banks and retailers has opened the door for credit-card surcharges. Guess which industry can't wait to ding you a few bucks for the privilege of using your Visa or MasterCard when you make a purchase?




business travel (Photo credit: buckshot.jones)

That's a trick question, of course. This is, after all, a column about business travel, and you probably already know that U.S. airlines have been salivating at the prospect of slapping you with another fee for the right to do business with them. …[They] already charge you more if you purchase a ticket over the phone or at an airport ticket counter. Most charge for checked baggage, for seat assignments, for meals, for early boarding, and for changing your reservations. Some even charge for carry-on bags and in-flight beverages. And credit-card surcharges are already commonly imposed by airlines based in Europe and Australia.

But here's the really bad news: … It's the gimmicks you don't know about that can hurt you and run up the final price of a business trip. Airlines, hotels, and third-party online-travel agencies are masters of the secret price bump, the unseen and unexpected add-on and, … shameless and sophisticated computerized biases that target you for extra costs.

Here are five all-too-common price traps to know about and how you can fight back and beat the travel industry at its own shell game.

The loyal-flyer upcharge



Delta Boeing 747-400 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Delta Air Lines was recently forced to admit that business travelers who logged into Delta.com with their Skymiles frequent-flyer account numbers were quoted higher fares than casual Web surfers. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Delta is alone. …

Whether you believe this loyal-flyer upcharge is a computer "glitch" … or part of the bizarre disdain carriers exhibit for their best customers, it's important not to be sucked into paying more. There is an easy, if somewhat time-consuming, defense: Before booking any ticket at an airline website, check the price against an independent fare-comparison site such as Kayak.com. Or make sure you check an airline website's quote both as a logged-in user and as what the carrier calls a "guest." If the fare quote is lower when you're a guest, book the ticket at the cheaper price. Then return to the reservation later and add your frequent flyer account number and other relevant details.

The code-share conundrum



Air Canada 777 (Photo credit: Simon_sees)

For decades, airlines have routinely slapped their "code"—a unique two-letter or letter-and-number identifier—on aircraft and flights operated by other carriers. But just because airlines share flights does not mean they charge the same fare ... One representative example: United Airlines puts its UA code on flights between Denver and Toronto that are actually operated by Air Canada. The fare at United.com for a Denver-Toronto flight today and a return next Wednesday: $1,598 roundtrip. The price on AirCanada.com for exactly the same flights: $1,068 roundtrip.

How do you avoid the code-share conundrum? …Whenever an airline quotes you a fare for a code-share flight operated by another carrier, don't book until you've checked the price offered by the operating carrier. Airlines are required by law to disclose code-share flights. Just look at the flight information section near the flight number and other operational details.

The Web-browser discriminator



Orbitz.com (Photo credit: afagen)

Orbitz.com was recently embarrassed when we discovered that the big online travel agency was serving up hotel choices based on the browsers and computers we use. Travelers using Apple Macs were routinely showed higher-priced properties than customers who surfed to Orbitz.com using a Windows-based machine. Orbitz's defense—Mac users are bigger spenders on average than Windows users—is officially called data mining, but a lot of us consider it Web-browser discrimination.

How to beat a site's assumption of what you are willing to spend on an airline ticket or hotel room? For starters, make sure you set any and all preferences to filter results by price. … And if your goal is always to see the lowest price, make sure you now use more than one computer and browser when you're preparing a trip.




The "don't-ask, don't-tell" trick



Bill Novelli, AARP (Photo credit: Civil Rights)

… The entire travel industry's economy is based on discounts off a usually phony "full retail price," so there are any number of deals you can find based on age, affinity groups (some as broad as the AAA or AARP), corporate rates and other factors. … If you don't know that you qualify for a special deal, the travel provider isn't likely to alert you.

How to circumvent the travel industry's don't-ask, don't-tell trickery? Frankly, you probably don't know all of the discounts for which you qualify, but start asking questions when you see a box that says "promo code" or "corporate ID." … Before booking, try a Google search for discount codes. The Web is chockablock with sites that publish the not-so-secret codes that will unlock substantial savings on your next trip.

The class-complexity caveat



Cabina Economica de Delta de un Boeing 757-200 (a recently modified 757-200 interior) Mtaylor848 ( talk ) 17:26, 7 October 2010 (UTC)) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

… This price gouge is so obscure that most top executives don't even know it exists. Yet it is fundamental to how carriers price their tickets.

When you think of the word class, you naturally think of first, coach, or business class. In other words, the types of in-flight services that an airline offers. But there is … the "fare class," industry jargon for the types of prices it charges and the purchase restrictions imposed. On any given flight, there are dozens of "fare classes" within each category of in-flight service. And here's the nasty reality: If you book a higher fare class on one leg of your journey, the computers will automatically default to the same fare class on all other segments of your trip—even if lower prices exist. This "mapping" may add hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars to a multiflight itinerary.

How do you overcome the class-complexity caveat? … One way is to price out each flight segment of a trip individually and compare the total price to the combined, all-in-one fare that the computer suggests you must pay for the journey. But that is time-consuming, and you're playing a … game … with airline pricing computers that are specifically programmed to outwit you. A better way is to rely on a savvy human travel agent to book your more complicated trips. They have ways of finessing the reservation computers and "forcing" them to generate the lowest price on each flight segment.

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