My quarry stops and looks around confused, but makes no effort to take cover. So I resume firing until my gun yells "Arrrrrrgh!", signifying a kill shot. The LED lights on my opponent's head flash red and he raises his gun into the air. This little tree is proving to be the perfect spot for ambushing attackers. I maybe kind of like pretending to kill people.

——————

Today is BattleSFO, a day-long laser tag capture-the-flag tournament. The field of conflict is a hilly eucalyptus grove in San Bruno, CA, 45 minutes south of San Francisco, in Juniperro State Park. There are about 30 people here broken up into platoons of 5 to 7. Each player is dressed to the nines in varieties of camouflage, some with black war paint under their eyes. They're not quite as geeky as I had expected them to be. Then again, this isn't exactly the kind of laser tag everyone played as kids. The gear is bigger and badder, even if the players are not.

Almost the entire crowd of mostly men has never played laser tag outdoors before. For the most part they're very friendly, though a little shy when I ask them about themselves. One team is made up of four guys who went to college together — an electrical engineer, a carpenter, and an options trader. Another team makes up a local rock band (they seem more interested in drinking beer and running around the woods in battle gear then actually playing to win.) Then there's a group of three middle-aged Asian gentlemen and one of their sons who get together regularly and compete. They found the game on Meetup.com. Raymond Wan, who convinced the others to join him in the woods, explains that normally they play paintball. "The weapons and radio communication make a big difference," he says. "I'm a strategy person. This is more fun."

But among the beginners are some veterans of ray gun war.

The general of these mini-gorilla-armies today is Ziggy Tomcich. Earlier in the morning Tomcich performed his duties as the event's organizer, scurrying around the picnic table area, AKA central command. He's sort of a goofy guy, but his excitement was palpable and I couldn't help but giggle a little bit in anticipation of getting my hands on these fake guns and peering down the sight at some unknowing adversary. As I watched Tomcich untangle headsets, distribute color-coded headbands, and make sure everyone was checking in correctly it was clear that, though his day job is as an audio engineer for the San Francisco Opera, playing laser tag is his true passion in life.

Tomcich has been playing the game since he was a teenager. Running around the Photon indoor arena in Baltimore at 15, Tomcich got hooked. After graduating college he took a job as a designer, marketer, and consultant for several arenas around the country. Then, in 2006, Tomcich took laser tag to the next level. Playing in Armageddon games in the UK and Sweden, where players compete in 3-4 day tournaments, Tomcich played outdoor laser tag for the first time. When he returned to San Francisco, Tomcich realized that the city lacked the kind of gaming he really loved. Being outdoors and playing laser tag was something, he felt, everyone should do.

"To me, laser tag is an extreme sport," he says. For him, part of the fun and the reason why he started his event website SFLastag.org, is the idea that the game is simple to play and creates a highly social environment. "Unlike most other sports, first-time players in outdoor laser tag can do quite well against seasoned players. It's more about strategy and tactics."

Before the first battle "Cypher," aka Todd Robinson, who co-owns SpecOps Live Play, a central California company that provided the artillery, gave everyone a rundown of their equipment. SpecOps imports their guns from an Australian company called Battlefield Sports, essentially an arms dealer that deals in toys. The company custom builds 10 different models of gaming weapons from sniper rifles to sub machine guns – all equipped with real-world laser sights, speakers for feedback, and sensors to keep track of game stats. Guns can emulate any of 69 models down to recoil, and fire and reload rates and muzzle flashes (LEDs, essentially). SpecOps has brought M4 assault rifles, sub machine guns, carbine rifles, and sniper rifles.

During Robinson's speech, Tomcich chimed in: "Do not aim your gun at non-laser tag players. These guns don't exactly look like Hasbro." For this game every weapon has 99 clips of 50 rounds. Those with smaller guns reload in about 5 seconds, the bigger ones about 7-10 seconds, so Robinson recommended taking cover while reloading. "The ‘bullets' will bounce off of pavement," he says. For this game they've disabled friendly fire. But when they hit the laser targets velcro'd to heads that belong to enemies, the guns vocalize the action like weapons with built in sports announcers synthesizing current status of prey as "casualty", "killed" or "already dead".

As he went through the briefing, the look on Robinson's face was more serious then anyone in the eucalyptus grove. Listening to him describe each weapon and how they worked made it clear to me that, though some people are here to play a game, for others laser tag is a way of life. In other words, I better take good care of his guns.

Honestly, the weapons are a little intimidating. First off, they're huge and I'm, well, I'm little. The guns are so heavy, in fact, that I opted for the smallest one I could find. I was also one of two girls on the field. Cypher's father, who co-owns SpecOps, told me that women actually tend to fair better at this type of laser tag then men. Women, he said, will hang back and think tactically about the game. Guys sometimes have a tendency to run out out commando-style and shoot at everything they see. My tactics were set: I'd wait for my enemies to come to me.

The game starts and I take up position. When I shoot people that happen upon my trap, they stood still, look around, and fired recklessly without making much effort to take cover. Those I shoot over 20 times are killed, sent back to the respawn area (AKA Command Center, AKA picnic tables) where Robinson will reset them, reactivate their ordinance and send them back into the fray.

The battle heats up. Despite my overall aversion in life to things that require running and exercise, the real-world feel of this whole day is bringing up the competitor in me that normally only emerges when I'm shit-talking people during video games. It is unclear who is winning at the moment; the command center tracks the flag movement via new GPS-tracking system and the PC that also handles all the on field comms.

But no one is listening back at HQ. The General Tomcich isn't attending to the computer anymore. Instead, Tomcich's standing across from me in the grove defending our Purple flag from capture. "We're encountering heavy resistance," we can hear over the radio. "Wear them down," a player shouts. Minutes later our fellow Purple team members come running through the brush holding a flag. Our opponents are not far behind. But they're too late. This round is ours.

Erin Biba is a San Francisco-based Correspondent for WIRED Magazine who writes about science, popular culture and beer made from primordial yeast. Follow her on Twitter.

Wired's Danger Room found the whole situation kind of bewildering, so they went to their military sources to find out exactly what happened:

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken...those early units were "fielded so fast that it was done with an unencrypted signal. It could be both intercepted (e.g. hacked into) and jammed," e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program. In a presentation last month before a conference of the Army Aviation Association of America, a military official noted that the current ROVER terminal "receives only unencrypted L, C, S, Ku [satellite] bands."

So the military fielded a rough, poorly secured video system on drones and AC-130s. We already knew that! The story's been reported, and late night comedians will have a good rest of the week. But there's a lovely twist:

Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet - from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs. Thousands of ROVER terminals have been distributed to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq...

These insurgents didn't hack into a single type of drone; they found a cheap, dead-simple way to hack into the military's primary airborne surveillance system.

Is the ability to eavesdrop on live video streams from airplanes a significant strategic risk? It's debatable. But did this hack make a couple of dudes in a basement in Basrah feel like Angelina Jolie in (noted Western pornographic infidel film) Hackers? Hell yes it did. [Danger Room]

The software, as far as I can tell, is a simple data-leeching utility. With a satellite dish and a few parameters (Packet IDs and transponder codes, which you can evidently scan for) you can tap into downstream data feeds, and essentially recording whatever data is transmitted to (specific) other users on a satellite network. How the insurgents got the proper parameters for predator drone, I have no idea—but apparently it's not that hard. Says a senior defense official:

There did appear to be a vulnerability. There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so.

If twelve-year-olds can encrypt their torrent downloads, I think it's a reasonably fair expectation for the US military to be able to encrypt mission-critical data transmissions, the insecurity of which could kill people. (Or, alternatively, the security of which ensures that that we can kill people. Someone's got to die, right? Right? Right.)

Also worrying: reports that the new Battleship iPhone app has, due to a small programming error, destroyed most of the Navy's pacific fleet.

At the time of posting, SkyGrabber's website is down. [WSJ]

In this map, which takes into account all the documented nuclear tests since 1945, two things really stand out. The few days in 1945 that saw the only use of nuclear weapons on humans register, when measured on the unfeeling scale of kilotons, as two small blips, aberrant in their location but unremarkable in their size. Then you see the key: The scale is not linear. If it was, the larger explosions would cover most of the map. That's the thing with nuclear weapons: It's easy to lose your sense of scale when it comes to how powerful they are, or what havoc they can wreak.

It paints (or visualizes) an unflattering portrait of the fifties and sixties not as golden years of postwar recovery and American prosperity, but as the years that the US and the Soviet Union, in blind competition with one another, spent all their time and untold amounts of their money blowing their own countries up. History! [DataVis]

UPDATE: Swapped image for original infographic, from Radial Cartography—Thanks, Adam!

They've been working on these Active Protection Systems for a while now, but this is the first that works on a moving vehicle. As Danger Room details, It uses radar, optical sensors and some other secret elements to detect projectiles. It then destroys them right before impact, creating an explosion but one that is much less harmful to the vehicle.

But don't take my word for it, check out the bananas video of it in action above. [Danger Room via BotJunkie]

To be able to instantly detect contraband like this would be a gamechanger in Iraq, where the (effectively) free transit of roadside bombs and IEDs is a constant threat, so the Iraqi government is willing to pay a premium for devices that promise as much—they've already bought 1,500 of the detectors, which are almost definitely just electric whisks with antennae, at a price of $16,500 to $60,000 each. Despite the steep price and fierce user loyalty, though, US government officials say the devices don't work at all:

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had "tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance."

The device as even earned its own rhetorical "show us" bounty from the Capital "S" Skeptical James Randi Educational Foundation, which flags the ADE 651's manufacturer's claims that the device works with spooky-sounding "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction." This is by far the highest honor in pseudoscience.

ATSC, the company that manufactures the device out of the UK, wouldn't even talk to the New York Times, cementing an already obvious conclusion: This is a case of a bogus company taking advantage of credulous, vulnerable consumers by selling a device that seems like it works by virtue of being many users' only means of bomb detection, meaning that they'll never notice when it doesn't work—it's just one more shady car passing through a checkpoint; who knows if the massive bombing later that afternoon had anything to do with it!?—and will always notice when it "does," even if it's a function of pure chance.

You may have failed miserable at designing a universal contraband detector, ATSC, but hey, at least your scam is well engineered. [NYT]

The HUD replaces technical manuals on a bulky laptop with floating instructions, labels and oh yes, 3D models of tools right in front of the mechanic. The wrist-mounted interface is run off an Android-powered G1 (which looks much cooler as gauntlet). Apparently Android's seeing a lot of use as a tool of war. You can check out a video of it here. [Technology Review via PopSci]

Oh ED, you're a lifesaver! A general who lead an infantry division in Iraq recently said that of the 155 men killed in combat, 122 could have lived if autonomous robots were doing the shooting instead. (Strangely, the other 33 would have died whether robots were around or not.) Replacing infantrymen with robots is a no brainer if you want to save your own boys, but Smokey from The Big Lebowski would probably say if nothing did the killing, even more lives would be spared. [Wired]

Am I reading this right? Slashdot says the entire domain .se—a million souls, I mean sites—up and vanished from the internet. Some didn't deliver successful replies for more than a day. Maybe I need to call Tim Berners-Lee for interpretation, but I don't get why more people aren't freaked out that an entire country up and disappeared, even if it was just for a moment. [Slashdot]

[Edit: This has been one of the most traumatic moments in my life. J.D.]

Someone did a comprehensive study of 836 people to see how people managed to keep username/password logins straight in their head. The test noted that only 4.4% of people showed no "deviations" from the ideal password rules, deviations including jotting down the password, reusing it time and again, using a deliberately short password or—and here's probably where most people failed-having no mix of characters and symbols. Having "best practices" that insanely rigid probably upped the failure rate substantially, but I think the important thing here—as Ars points out—is that the username/password system is a joke to begin with. [Ars Technica]

The 23-year-old guy who founded the International Church of Jediism obviously needs to watch Star Wars a few more times. The other day, he wore his hood into a supermarket and got yelled at something fierce. His very Jedi response? To run to the press and cry like a little bitch:

They said: 'Take it off', and I said: 'No, its part of my religion. It's part of my religious right.' I gave them a Jedi church business card.

No lightsabers, no waving of the hand in the air, not even "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" Just a business card? He continues:

They weren't listening to me and were rude. They had three people around me. It was intimidating.

"Intimidating"? For a Jedi? Just remember, intimidation leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Don't look now, but I think someone's headed for the Dark Side. [Guardian UK]

Using camouflage netting and trompe l'oeil, they brilliantly disguised the enormous plant as something completely benign. Just look at these before and after pictures! Fortunately, it all ended up being unnecessary, but what a cool example of creative thinking in a time of crisis. [Think or Thwim, Thanks, Jason!]

The BedBunker is a 1300lb 10 gauge steel strongbox that locks your arsenal away safely with a hydraulic gas-assist piston—even in a fire. Withstanding up to 1533 degrees for 2 hours, the BedBunker keeps your guns safe from your extensive napalm collection, making $2,200+ a small price to pay for a good night of your guns' sleep. [BedBunker via Uncrate via OhGizmo!]

[Big Picture]

To start with, the U.S. Government ignored the attack warnings and has admitted that they didn't handle the successful Distributed Denial of Service attacks properly. They assumed our defenses were going to work perfectly against a bunch of North Korean bozos. They were wrong:

The current U.S. defenses against cyber attack are woefully inadequate against even moderate level attacks as we have just experienced.

Since these attacks were routed or launched through systems in 16 countries, they recommend for the government and friendly countries to sign agreements on cyber warfare defense as soon as possible.

The most scary part is: How do you react to these attacks? The South Korean intelligence agency claims to have documents from the North Korean government ordering these electronic attacks. If that's the case, should the United States retaliate? Even while there is no smoke and physical mayhem, DDoS attacks can cause real damage in the virtual world and have the potential paralyze the economy.

The problem here is that an counter-cyberattack will have little effect on North Korea, as they are barely communicated. The other option is to use real bombs to respond to cyberattacks, like we saw before. I don't know what would happen, but these North Korean dudes better get their act together, because the future doesn't look good at all. [Defense Tech]

If the information is true, North Korean hackers launched an offensive using denial of service attacks against the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Transportation Department's web sites, which were down at some points during July 4 and this week. These attacks have been confirmed by US officials, although the origin hasn't been clarified by the US government yet.

The hackers simultaneously attacked South Korea's government sites too, including the Blue House—the equivalent to the White House—and the Defense Ministry. The South Koreans are claiming that the DoD attacks used 12,000 zombie PCs in Korea, and 8,000 in other parts of the world.

Can I say these guys are fucking bunch of morons? Oh wait, I did already. [Yahoo News]

The NYT published an interesting piece categorizing the new role of cadets from West Point as digital information sabotage—scenarios like mailbombs flooding email servers in hot zones —becomes a worrisome daily hurdle in a war.

During a senior elective class at West Point, the cadets competed with the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine to thwart attacks from the N.S.A. The students went so far as to hang a sign reading "Information Warfare Live Fire Range" outside their class.

In other words, military dudes can now pwn your ass in analog and digital. [NYT]

Surprising no one, the Phantom Menace Ray parent program (X45-C) is funded entirely by DARPA to the tune of $942 million.

The Ray is designed to do a number of things all by its lonesome, including bombing runs, surveillance and autonomous mid-air refueling. Top speed? 0.85 Mach. Ceiling is 40,000 feet. It can carry 4,500-lbs., which hopefully does not include any chips on its shoulder for its human designers. Unless Jessica Biel is involved. Then by all means go to town. [Boeing, Image]

The video is eight minutes long, but absolutely worth the view since it's hard to describe what it does in words (even if the quality is really bad.)

Called Global Situational Awareness the system seamlessly puts together geographical information and schematics with material from countless sources in the battlefield: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, AWACs, satellites, ground-level radar, reconnoissance units... anything that is connected to the battle grid will be mixed into one single tactical plan.

The result of this advanced information merging system—for a lack of a better term—is then shown in a touch display, which is used by the people in command to access all the information in a comprehensive way. To do it, the system has different applications that allow to show and mix this information with different levels of transparency, in 2D and 3D, all manipulated using gestures and simple icons.

The level of sophistication of this system—developed in three years by DRS technologies— is simply amazing, making current battlefield displays look like a Napoleonic Wars map with lead soldiers on top. This is like the crazy made-up stuff that you can see in series like 24 or Tom Clancy movies, but for real. [Defense Tech]

That's exactly what happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi back in 1945. He was on a business trip in Hiroshima, where he suffered serious burns to his upper body after the US dropped a nuke on the city. He spent the night in the city then returned home to Nagasaki, just in time for the second bomb to drop. [AP]

Howie Choset, an associate professor at CMU, engineered the robotic arm with various sensors so it can monitor and assess a soldier's condition. The are detectors on it can determine if a person is breathing. Eventually Choset hopes to attach an ultrasound that would allow the arm to detect internal bleeding. An oxygen mask can also be attached the robotic arm. Controlled wirelessly though a joystick, the arm has multiple joints allowing it to flex, retract and twist, allowing it the flexibility to do different tasks.

The team is collaborating with the U.S. Army's Life Support for Trauma and Transport system (LSTAT), a stretcher that is a basically a portable intensive-care unit that is being used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem with the LSTAT is that it's sensors need to be moved by hand, and assisting medics on the battlefield would be easy targets, something that the snake bot could help solve. Still the uses of the snake bot aren't limited to just biotechnology: Choset hopes to apply it to search and rescues, surgical procedures, bridge inspections, bomb disarming and more. [CMU via Technology Review]