Dan Jones

An unmanned 27-foot harbor security boat from Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored demonstration of swarmboat technology held on the James River in Newport News, Va. John F. Williams/U.S. Navy

Navy ships are at their most vulnerable when they’re resupplying in port or navigating narrow straits or rivers. They tricky to maneuver in tight quarters and vulnerable to attack. The attack 14 years ago on the USS Cole as it refueled while berthed Yemen, an attack that killed 17 American sailors, reiterated the need to protect warships in port.

To counter asymmetric attacks—the 505-foot Cole was attacked by a small craft packed with explosives that ripped 40-foot gash in the destroyer—the Navy uses small patrol craft for close-quarters defense. And that means placing sailors in the line of fire. That’s got the Office of Naval Research developing autonomous technology for small “swarmboats” that could be used for risky jobs.

These vessels would, much like the autonomous minesweepers the Army is testing, act as a force multiplier, allowing one sailor to do the work of several, from a safe location.

The technology, called Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS), essentially is an autopilot on steroids that can be installed on nearly any boat. During a test in August on the James River in Newport News, Virginia, Navy researchers used 13 rigid-hulled inflatable boats equipped with the technology to escort a “high-value” ship and swarm an “enemy” vessel. The boats decide on their own where to go, when to steer, and when to apply the throttle. A human operator, who can be in another ship, a helicopter, or well away from the action, uses a laptop to tell the swarmboats which craft are to be protected and which are to be attacked. Think of it as an officer giving his (robotic) sailors a mission (protect this guy, attack that one) and letting them determine how best to fulfill it.

The Navy wouldn’t say much about how the technology works, but it appears similar to what is used in other autonomous vehicles, including passenger cars. Hardware turns the wheel, adjusts the throttle, and so forth, while computers and radar detect other boats and decide where to go and what to do.

The ships in August’s test didn’t open fire, but the Navy is getting there—though it says robots will not decide when or whom to attack. “If there is any kind of designation, any kind of targeting,” says Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, Chief of Naval Research, “there is always a human in the loop.” If a boat loses communication with its human captain, who may be halfway around the world, it goes dead in the water.

The Costume History of the Avengers Infographic

 

1. One small thing Apple could do: when alerting the user that there isn’t enough space to install the update, they could provide a link to this support article — “Resolve issues with an over-the-air iOS update” — which is actually quite helpful. ↩

Best Unicode Fonts for Programing (updated)

Since 2009, Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been trying to make the Internet more secure.

His goal--getting companies to add a layer of encryption to their websites, turning HTTP to HTTPS--might not sound like much. After all, what’s one letter on a URL?

But that extra letter, it turns out, is all it takes to make government surveillance, censorship attempts by authoritative regimes, and attacks by ill-intentioned hackers more difficult to pull off.

Soghoian has been wielding both the carrot and the stick on a near daily basis, until recently offering bottles of whiskey to companies that implemented HTTPS, and getting into public Twitter spats with companies such as Symantec, and the Internet company Akamai, which haven’t welcomed to his overtures. “I use whatever argument works,” Soghoian says. “I will ask. I will beg. I will offer to bribe. And then I will threaten. I will use every technique at my disposal.”

And he’s not alone. A group of increasingly vocal Internet companies, activists, lawyers, and privacy experts have been working to have all traffic on the Internet encrypted by default. And while the connection between your web browser and (amazing) places like Fast Company’s website aren’t always encrypted by default, chances are they won’t stay that way for long. Because, according to Soghoian, the HTTPS crowd is “slowly winning”--though not without a few snags along the way.

What’s the big deal? You’re probably familiar with HTTPS as the lock icon in your browser’s address bar that appears when you log in to your bank’s website, or check your email. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS, is the encrypted version of plaintext HTTP, the protocol over which most Internet traffic has traditionally been sent. It’s HTTP traffic with either Transport Layer Security (TLS) or it’s predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) beneath. Though traditionally used, primarily, to protect usernames and passwords and online transactions, the argument goes that we should be using it for everything, the mundane stuff, too.

The reason is that anything sent via regular old HTTP is done in the clear--in other words, in unencrypted plaintext for all to see. The person next to you at a coffee shop or the government that controls your ISP can see what articles you’re reading online, or what videos you’re watching on YouTube. And, “The articles that you read in a newspaper are very, very sensitive, because they reveal an awful a lot about what you’re interested in,” Soghoian says. “If you’re looking at the website of an abortion clinic, or a suicide hotline or self-help group for alcoholism, I think that’s super, super sensitive as well. But very few sites in those areas use encryption.”

HTTPS also ensures the integrity of the data you request. Think of it as a fact checker, asking, “Is what the user asked for what they’re getting?” Without it, someone on the network could tamper with the data you request before it is sent back to your device, all without you knowing--for example, by modifying a YouTube video, as The Intercept reported earlier this year, to secretly deliver malware. And because there’s no server authentication when you request a site via unencrypted HTTP, you also can’t know for sure whether the Fast Company you’re reading this article on is the real Fast Company (we hope it is!), or just a clever copy designed to compromise your computer or phone.

Yan Zhu, now a security engineer at Yahoo!, and Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a talk in July at the Hackers On Planet Earth Conference (HOPE X) bluntly called “HTTP Must Die.” Services such as Facebook, Tumblr, and WordPress have made HTTPS the default over the past year. But in August, Google fired perhaps the biggest salvo thus far. The search giant announced that it had begun considering HTTPS as a ranking signal in its search results--lightly at first, but increasing the importance Google places on sites with HTTPS versus HTTP over time.

In other words, sites with HTTPS would come first.

Yet, beyond some of the Internet’s bigger players, there are still a number of factors that have been holding more widespread HTTPS adoption back. Some websites don’t realize that the mere act of visiting their website might be sensitive, or that a user’s connection can be hijacked along the way, and thus don’t see a reason to encrypt. Others aren’t savvy enough to implement HTTPS themselves. Ad networks, many of which still serve ads over plaintext HTTP, are often cited by news websites as a reason they’ve been slow to encrypt. “Aligning many parties with certificates so that errors are not thrown to users isn’t trivial,” wrote Scott Cunningham, vice president of technology and ad operations at the Interactive Advertising Bureau in an email. “The effort, and cost of that effort, is primarily why it hasn’t occurred.”

Cost is something that Soghoian says makes it especially difficult for customers of Akamai, the Internet’s largest content delivery network (CDNs), to go HTTPS by default. CDN services are used by most websites and services to distribute their content across servers in multiple locations, so that, among other things, pages load quickly no matter where you are in the world. Some of today’s largest companies rely on Akamai, including IBM, Yahoo, Verizon, and Fox. But they’re also alleged to charge a premium for customers who want encryption by default. For Reddit to encrypt its traffic without paying a lot of money, it actually meant leaving Akamai altogether. “So convincing people to ditch Akamai is basically now part of my job,” Soghoian says, ”I don’t really care who they ditch them for. But as long as Akamai is gouging their customers on SSL, that’s going to be part of the pitch.”

Akamai, in an emailed statement, said that the company “makes decisions on how to offer services, such as SSL delivery, based on our customers’ requirements. We have many customers that have opted for SSL delivery of their sites, while others have not. SSL is included as a built-in option to many of our product offerings. For those that do not include it, it can easily be added as an option.” (The company doesn’t disclose pricing.)

But Akamai’s competitors are changing with the times. A CDN and Internet security company called CloudFlare announced on Monday a feature called Universal SSL, which would enable HTTPS on all of its websites by default, for free--including for the 2 million users who use CloudFlare’s basic service at no cost.

“Philosophically we believe that you shouldn’t have to pay to be secure online,” CloudFlare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince said. “By making the mundane safe, it actually makes the things that need to be safe a little bit safer.”

It may be time to put that whiskey in the mail.

Any visitor to Hong Kong will tell you that umbrellas are already a fixture of life in the city, essential not only for keeping yourself dry during the rainy spring and summer but also providing much-needed shade from the sun. The "world's most expensive umbrella," made of American ox-hide and using antique German frame, was made there in Hong Kong in 1994, and single-use umbrellas can be bought from vending machines in subway stations, adding only further to the item's ubiquity.

Perhaps it makes sense, then, that when pro-democracy activists came out on the streets to joing the "Occupy Central" protests, many brought umbrellas with them. Many of these activists, driven to protest by what they saw as the inability of Hong Kong's leaders to stand up to Beijing, probably brought their umbrellas to provide shelter from the late September sun.

As the situation became volatile, however, the umbrellas served a second purpose: To protect their owners from pepper spray.

A protester protects himself with an umbrella, after police used pepper spray against activists attempting to break into the legislative building, during a demonstration in Hong Kong, early on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Protesters used whatever they could get their hands on for protection: Some images even show people using plastic wrapping to cover themselves. The use of the umbrellas as protection was striking, however, and media outlets picked up on it, dubbing it the "Umbrella Revolution." A search of Twitter appears to show that the term has been around since at least last Friday:

Some protesters painted messages on top of their umbrellas, and artists began incorporating umbrellas into logos designed for Occupy Central. "I was inspired by seeing people defend themselves with domestic props," Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong told the BBC. "The contrast was so marked. On the one side there was police brutality and on the other side there were these poor umbrellas."  According to the Associated Press, umbrellas are now being donated to replace those destroyed by the police.

Pro-democracy protesters gather outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, on the second day of the mass civil disobedience campaign Occupy Central, Central District, Hong Kong, China, 29 September 2014.EPA/ALEX HOFFORD

For outside observers, the umbrella is something easy to latch on to: An ordinary object used to fight against state security apparatus. It helped those far from Hong Kong understand a conflict driven by a wide variety of factors including Hong Kong's complicated colonial history and tradition of democratic protests.

For some, the images coming out of Hong Kong are reminiscent of those coming out of Beijing more than 25 years ago. Now "umbrella man" has been compared to "tank man," the unknown civilian who blocked the path of tanks during the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989.

However, other observers may be reminded of something else: China's economic might. According to one widely cited statistic, some 70 percent of the world's umbrellas are produced in China.

A protester raises a placard that reads "Occupy Central" between riot police and protesters outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong, Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014.  (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.