Short Takes – 7-18-23

Robotic Bees Could Support Vertical Farms Today and Astronauts Tomorrow. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “Polybee currently sells its pollination system to commercial tomato greenhouses in Australia. (Compared with many other food crops, tomato pollination is relatively straightforward because the plants’ flowers have both male and female parts.) The team has also run trials with indoor vertical farming companies, Jadhav says, although “we do not have many commercial vertical farms that grow fruit crops at scale yet.””

A Survey of Security in UAVs and FANETs: Issues, Threats, Analysis of Attacks, and Solutions. Arxiv.org article. Pull quote: “In this survey, we aimed to present a comprehensive detailed approach to security by classifying possible attacks against UAVs and flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). We classified the security threats into four major categories that make up the basic structure of UAVs; hardware attacks, software attacks, sensor attacks, and communication attacks. In addition, countermeasures against these attacks are presented in separate groups as prevention and detection.”

‘Non-human intelligence’: Schumer proposes stunning new UFO legislation. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “As Schumer rightly said, “the American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.” Hopefully, the extraordinary legislation enacted and proposed in recent years, in tandem with open congressional hearings, will get to the bottom of the decades-long UFO mystery.”

White House partners with tech manufacturers, retailers to put cyber ‘trust mark’ on devices. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “As part of the effort, internet or Bluetooth-connected devices like baby monitors, home security cameras and refrigerators that meet U.S. government cybersecurity requirements will have an identifier mark, or “trust mark,” put on them.” Lots of details and regulatory language to be worked out.

The Death of Infosec Twitter. Cyentia.com article. Pull quote: “Unfortunately this is where the story will stop too. The free tier we were using to collect this data was cut off last week. Between the headlines and the trend we are seeing in this data, it just doesn’t make sense to pay for access to this data. The last day we were able to save twitter data was July 12th, 2023, exactly two years from the start of our experiment. And with that, we say “so long” to infosec twitter.”