The Fenstar was built by Team MIRA, which includes students from England-based Warwick University and the Royal Grammar School Guildford. The British Ministry of Defense has already praised the innovation, pointing out that an aircraft that can “Look over walls or into compounds in Afghanistan will prove a real asset to the troops. The only problem so far is figuring out a way to minimize noise. Because, really, what good is a spy when everyone can hear it coming? That's some Get Smart tomfoolery. [Telegraph UK via Geekologie]

Now all it needs is a Tumbler-like mechanism to instantly eject the moto. [MotoPod via Oh Gizmo]

When downloaded to a computer, these shots will probably reveal that, among other things, it's very difficult to take pictures from 80 feet in the air with a kite. Still, it looks like a solid gift that can teach kids the value of extortion at a young age—if only you could capture exposed genitalia from the air without a proper zoom. [GadgetShop via GeekAlerts]

[DelFly via IEEE Spectrum Blog] Thanks, Erico!

According to Hayahi, the problem of up-skirt photography is so bad in Japan that most new cellphones have this feature (if you are a women) or bug (if you are a perv.) According to him, "some manufacturers have even put a louder shutter sound." The Japanese edition of the iPhone, however, just makes the normal one.

I really don't see the point of this measure however: the iPhone doesn't have a physical photo button, which really makes extremely difficult to take a clear up-skirt shot.

I mean, I can only guess that's the case.

Two things to Japanese pervs everywhere: fiber optics and video cameras.

Update: as readers have noticed, you can use Pwnage to jailbreak your iPhone and remove the sound. Why would you want to do this, I don't know.

The algorithms the team develops will allow hovering 'bots like STARMAC to navigate, deal with collisions or avoidance and even to work as a team, sharing info on their environment and navigating around each other.

That has all sorts of cool implications for things like future automated search and rescue drones, able to search large areas efficiently and quickly. But it also means spy 'bots. And when you've watched the video, you'll have to agree that the way the things move reminds you of the flying cameras in (insert name of sci-fi movie of your choice). [Danger Room]

[Flickr via NikonD700.com]

The Pennycam is powered by a 12V adapter and is fairly inexpensive at only $199. [StealthVue via Gizmag via SlipperyBrick]

3VR is tweaking their software to automatically blur the faces of individuals that do not pique the cameras' interest, thereby protecting the privacy of innocent individuals. The footage could still be unencrypted by authorized parties, but any changes would be trackable, so there would be a record to follow in the event that that the footage is misused. So, in effect, the software watches the people watching you. [Danger Room]

This software will look for nervous face touching, profuse sweating and various other ticks that passengers do all the time. A guy from UCSD built a similar system, but says it only identifies people correctly 70% of the time and only under optimal conditions, which don't exist in airplanes. Sounds foolproof! [Newscientist via Boing Boing]

• Robotic critters, from the insectothopter of the 1970s to the robofish of today

• Cigars developed to kill, confuse or humiliate Fidel Castro—not surprisingly, one would have made his beard fall out.

• The beloved skyhook—yes, the thing that yanks people from the ground up into airplanes. Learn of its origins, early animal test runs and its one successful on-record mission.

• The Soviet's most amazing spy gadget, dubbed "The Thing" by befuddled CIA agents who didn't know how on earth it worked. It was built by Theremin, inventor of that wacky musical thingy, himself a part-time Soviet agent and researcher.

• Spies, spying and spy talk. Yes, the book may be focused on hardware, but man it's full of crazy stories about spies. The most interesting tales are about the Russians who were leaking info to the US, often upon pain of death. Stories of American traitors are pretty familiar, but you rarely get to hear about what went on over on the other side of the Curtain.

Meanwhile, here's a recap of what I did cover, in case you missed it:
• My interview with the authors
• Blow-up Sex Toys as In-Car Decoys
• A Speedboat Disguised as a Junk
• Hide and Seek, CIA Style
• The Inflatable Rescue Plane
• Animal Agents, Live and Dead
• A Gallery of CIA Spy Cameras

Anyway, I enjoyed the book and the authors, and I highly recommend it for a Father's Day gift. Needless to say, I've not received anything in return for this endorsement except a copy of the book itself, which they can have back when they pry it from my cold dead hands. [CIA Spycraft; Amazon Sales Page]

The outdoor version will include a flat Phillips screwdriver, flint stick and combo edge blade while the spy version will utilize a diamond tip glass cutter, Phillips head screwdriver, lock pick, magnifying glass and a straight edge blade. Users interested in the everyday version will get a flat Phillips screwdriver, bottle opener, refillable pen, magnifying glass and a combo-edge blade. As an added touch, the design of the "Q" watch resembles the hammer mechanism of 007's Walther PPK pistol.

The watches are currently in pre-production and a timetable for their release has not yet been determined. However, expect to pay far out the ass to feel like James Bond—to the tune of $2-$3,000 for the sterling silver model, $5-$7000 for Gold or Rose Gold and $10-$15,000 for platinum. [Veldini via BornRich]

The agency's star camera was the T-100, so named because it could take images of up to 100 full-sized documents on a piece of film measuring 4mm wide by 15mm long—and that baby could be embedded anywhere. Hollywood may have desensitized you to the spycam notion, but remember, the images you see here are of totally real devices that were actually used in death-defying espionage. Hey, careful where you point that necktie, buddy.

All of this CIA tech and much more like it is covered with great depth and hair-raising anecdotes in Spycraft, a new book by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, reviewed by us, and available for pre-order at Amazon.

Gear Crazy
No offense to Steve Carell, but I'm not talking about goofy Maxwell Smart crap—I'm talking about serious Bond-grade hardware: Inflatable getaway airplanes, remote-controlled spying insects, cigarettes that fire .22 rounds, hallucinogenic cigars, about 100 other tobacco-related instruments of deception and an ingeniously camouflaged speedboat or two, not to mention digital audio recorders and CCD-based digicams developed decades before their commercial appearance. They've all been built by CIA engineers and used successfully, at least in the test phase.

The extensively researched book chronicles the gear and the people behind the gear, operatives still shrouded in pseudonym (or even anonym) who went around Moscow on cold winter days planting listening devices in hotel rooms or dead-dropping microfiche in the middle of public parks. It's about the nerds in the labs who were asked to make debris-free drills and didn't balk, guys who were asked to mount blow-up sex dolls as pop-up in-car decoys and didn't laugh. (OK, some probably laughed.) In short, it's an incredible page turner, mostly because none of it was dreamed up by Sir Ian Fleming or any of his thousand copycats.

Whodunit
The book is so good because it's written by two of the only guys who could write it. Bob Wallace was a CIA agent for 32 years and the director of the CIA's Office of Technical Services (that is, "office of covert badass spy gear") from 1998 to 2002. A guy who chose spy work over journalism after leaving the University of Kansas, he did his first 20 years the hard way, in field ops. He admits that many of his own early exploits can never be written down.

Keith Melton is an espionage historian, something of an international man of mystery if I ever met one, whose most authoritative claim on this project is that he has the largest collection of espionage devices the world has ever (not) seen. You know that Palm III that features heavily in the 2007 spy thriller Breach, about late Cold War Soviet turncoat Robert Hanssen? Yeah, Melton owns that Palm III—Hanssen's original, complete with stolen state secrets. I asked Melton how he got it, and he just said vaguely that he has his ways. "Let's leave it at that."

Too Many Secrets
I asked both of the authors how they were allowed to release a book filled with spy secrets, and they admitted it had not been easy. By Wallace's account, the CIA tied it up for 18 months. Melton says it's more like two years, and that at one point the CIA deemed the work "the most damaging book on espionage ever to be published," and "a virtual primer on espionage." As you can tell, the CIA eventually consented to the book's publication, more or less intact.

"At one time, all this material would have been classified secret or higher," Wallace says. "But given the change in technology that has occurred, the time that has passed and the fact that the primary target, the Soviet Union, no longer existed, these stories could be written down to fill a major void in American intelligence literature."

In truth, the reason it can be declassified is that espionage involves totally different kinds of machines now, mainly laptops and BlackBerrys, and instead of needing microphones and cameras, agents need software to "listen" to chatter in the ether.

CIA's Secret Gadget Rooms
I asked Wallace if there was a secret room at CIA headquarters where all the gadgets hung from the wall, his answer was even better: there are multiple rooms, one for each department: the guys who did disguises and forged documents had one, the guys who did secret listening devices had one. "It was like going on a Hollywood tour," he says, only as OTS director, he was the guy giving the tours, to visiting congressmen and other senior Washington staff.

"I don't know that I ever had a bad visit with a congressman. You would put things in their hands to touch and feel, to operate and manipulate, and then you'd tell them the operational story that went behind the object: what it was used for, and the product that came from it," says Wallace, adding wistfully, "It was a dream job."

End of Spy Gear?
Melton says that Wallace may be the last OTS director to give those tours, or to bring a briefcase of neat-o hardware to his closed congressional hearings. In the future, directors would be "more likely to come and show you a printout or algorithm, something that could do more than 1,000 spies." Melton explains, "The gadgets are the spies, while the humans are support, now more than ever." How's that for making you feel sad and Matrix-y all at the same time?

If the age of the crazy cool spy gear has come to an end, all the more reason we should celebrate it. For the next several days, I will be posting spy hardware from Wallace and Melton's book with a "CIA Spytech" tag, stuff that will make you laugh, cry or just hide under your dresser for a while. It's amazing, chilling stuff and again, it's ALL TOTALLY REAL. Stay tuned! [Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda]

But the neatest thing from a production standpoint? Apparently elephants move so smoothly that the improvised footage resembles that shot with a Steadicam rig. Look for the show on BBC One this Sunday, March 30th. [BBC and dailymail via bbgadgets]

The mission was simple. At 10:26PM EST, a standard missile 3 carrying a kinetic warhead was launched northwest of Hawaii from the USS Lake Eire, a Ticonderoga Class missile defense cruiser. 24 minutes later, at 10:50, the Joint Space Operations Center at the Vandenberg Air Force base confirmed the breakup of the satellite at 153 nautical miles above the Earth from a direct hit.

While they can't confirm completely the destruction of the tank, which was needed to release the toxic fuel that may have posed a danger to us Earthlings, the Pentagon has declared the mission a complete success and with good reason. Some experts criticized the plan as probable failure during the past days, with the argument that the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System being developed by the US Missile Defense Agency, wasn't designed to do this and, therefore, it wasn't going to be able to hit the target and destroy it effectively.

Their reasons were three: first, the kinetic warhead, launched in a long range standard missile 3, a isn't designed to destroy targets by explosion but by the sheer force of multiple impacts. While this is enough to destroy other incoming missiles, the critics said that this wasn't going to be enough to destroy the much larger satellite. Second was the speed of the target, which was traveling at double the speed of the missiles which are the usual target of the Aegis. And third, the tracking system, which wasn't originally designed to operate in high orbits.

The video, however, shows that the direct kinetic hit has completely obliterated its target. Now the world can rest at peace. Until A542B, that asteroid ten times bigger than Texas, finally arrives. [Wikipedia, Defense Tech Org and BBC]

Why did Intelius develop a cell directory?
The trend of Americans increasingly relying on their cell phones as their only method of telecommunication was compelling, and indicated that consumers were transitioning away from land lines en masse. If that were the case, we believed consumers would need many of the same tools widely available to landline users, such as a cell-based white pages service (our directory) to keep them connected and enable their friends, colleagues and classmates to be able to keep in touch with them in an increasingly transient society.

The indicators for market demand for such a service were strong: In 2005, according to one In-Stat report, 43% of phone users nationwide were considering switching to mobile phones as their primary phone, but only 1 in 20 adults lived in wireless-only households. By 2006, that number had grown to 1 in 10. During the first six months of 2007, 1 out of every 8 adults inhabited a cell-only household. And with approximately 200,000 American households moving daily, it was clear to us that consumers were likely struggling to stay connected with a network of friends and family members who continued to move nationwide.

Early adopters likely to be the key demographic for the product: "Early adopters" of new services often fall in the 30 and under age group. Importantly to us, the National Center for Health Statistics reported 30% of adults age 18 to 29 have only a wireless phone, more than double the number of those over age 30 who rely only on a cell phone. This segment of the population, we believed, would likely be the first users of our service when we launched it as a test product a few months ago.

Telemarketers a non-issue: We recognized that telemarketing calls to cell phones would be a non-issue, as we planned never to sell cell numbers in bulk to businesses. Moreover, a federal law already exists prohibiting telemarketers to call cell phones, which supported by the Do Not Call Registry makes a strong statement against such practices.

Price Point as a Barrier: The price point of the product was set to make it difficult for someone to randomly buy phone numbers for people they don't know. Our thinking was that if someone is going to pay $15 for a phone number, they likely know who they're calling. Again, we never sold these numbers in bulk and we did a velocity check to ensure no customer purchased more than a few numbers for personal use.

Intelius Listens to Customers; Pulls the Plug on Cell Phone Directory Service

Company's Popular Cell Phone Caller ID Service Still Allows Customers to Identify Unrecognized Numbers for Personal Safety

BELLEVUE, WA — February 01, 2008 — In response to consumer feedback, Intelius Inc., a company that empowers consumers and businesses with information for intelligent decisions, today announced that it has discontinued its search by name cell phone directory service. Intelius launched the cell phone directory in recent months as a test for the first-of-its-kind resource.

"As a company, we have strived to be at the forefront of innovation," said Liz Murray, Communications Manager at Intelius. "We realize that in this instance we may have been ahead of our time. Wireless carriers attempted to develop a similar product a few years ago and found the market wasn't ready; it's clear that the market is still not ready. We always listen carefully to our customers, which is why we recently discontinued our cell phone directory."

In keeping with the company's mission to empower consumers with information services for personal and family safety, Intelius continues to offer a Cell Phone Caller ID service (reverse search). This service works much like the caller ID consumers are familiar with on their home phones. Cell Phone Caller ID allows a customer to input a number that has shown up on their home or cell phone into the Intelius site and receive basic information associated with that number. Consumers can use this service to protect themselves from harassing calls, hang-ups, pranks, or mystery calls into their children or other family members.

"We believe that consumers have a right to know who's calling them. Our Cell Phone Caller ID service is a natural extension of our personal safety and information services, and we believe it is a critical tool to prevent the creation of a safe-harbor for harassers, predators, telemarketers and pranksters," Murray explains. "We are firmly committed to providing consumers positive, proactive ways to help them protect their personal safety and obtain peace of mind."

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation. Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."

According to Ajoka, the Buckle DVR can record 33 hours of audio and video on one 1GB microSD card, even while the rechargeable lithium battery can only last for two hours. These are the specs:

• Dimension: 2.54" (H) * 1.47" (W) * 0.60" (D)
• Video Compression︰ 3GP video format, 176x144 ,QCIF / 15fps
• Voice Recording: High quality digital voice recording.
• Internal Memory︰ No
• Micro SD card / T-Flash card support︰ 128MB to 2GB (Not included)
• Recording Mode︰ Continuous recording until memory is full or manually turned off.
• Video File Size︰ >500KB per minute

Absolutely Batworthy for $150. [Ajoka]