Between 2014 and 2015, seasoned pilots in the U.S. Navy experienced a number of harrowing encounters with UFOs during training missions in the U.S. While pilots were mid-flight, their aircraft cameras and radar detected seemingly impossible objects flying at hypersonic speeds at altitudes up to 30,00 feet (9,144 meters); these mysterious UFOs did so with no visible means of propulsion, The New York Times reported on May 26.
However, none of the pilots suggest that these perplexing UFOs represent an extraterrestrial invasion, according to The Times, which previously wrote about Navy pilots encountering UFOs in 2004.
In total, six pilots who were stationed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt between 2014 and 2015 told The Times about spotting UFOs during flights along the southeastern coast of the U.S., extending from Virginia to Florida. [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs]
Two of the pilots who spoke with The Times about the inexplicable sightings share their stories in the new History Channel documentary series “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” premiering May 31.
Video of two aerial encounters appears in the series, showing clips of UFOs: one tiny white speck and one large, dark blob. These UFOs later came to be known respectively as “Go Fast” and “Gimbal.”
The objects had “no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,” Lt. Danny Accoin, one of the Navy pilots who reported UFO sightings beginning in 2014, said in the documentary.
“It seemed like they were aware of our presence, because they would actively move around us,” Lt. Accoin said.
According to Lt. Accoin, when a strange reading shows up on radar for the first time, it’s possible to interpret it as a false alarm, “but then when you start to get multiple sensors reading the exact same thing, and then you get to see a display, that solidifies it for me.”.
Accoin told The Times he encountered UFOs twice, during flights that were a few days apart. He also said that though tracking equipment, radar and infrared cameras on his aircraft detected UFOs both times, he was unable to capture them on his helmet camera.
Lt. Ryan Graves, an F-18 pilot, said in the documentary that a squadron of UFOs followed his Navy strike group up and down the eastern coast of the U.S. for months. And in March, 2015, after the Roosevelt was deployed to the Arabian Gulf, Graves said the UFOs reappeared.
“We did have issues with them when we went out to the Middle East,” Lt. Graves said.
Pilots who spotted the UFOs speculated among themselves that the unnerving objects may have belonged to a highly classified drone program using unknown technology, and they did not consider them to be extraterrestrial in origin, The Times reported. T
Lt. Graves and others are speaking out now because what they saw raised concerns for them about their comrades and national security, Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, told the History Channel.
In 2015, following this spate of UFO sightings, the U.S. Navy issued official guidelines for personnel to report and investigate aerial objects, according to The Times. Those Navy protocols were updated earlier this year; all data will be classified information and will not be made available to the general public, Live Science previously reported.
“Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” airs on the History Channel on May 31 at 10 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT.
A database containing records of tens of millions of users of various dating apps has been found publicly accessible, according to a researcher who says it remains unclear who amassed the data.
In a blog Wednesday, security researcher Jeremiah Fowler said he discovered the database and that it was not protected by so much as a password. The 42.5 million records, which appeared to belong to multiple apps, were stored on a U.S.-based server and largely contained the IP addresses and location data of American users.
The apps to which the data belongs include Cougardating, Christiansfinder, Mingler, Fwbs (friends with benefits), and “TS,” which Fowler speculates is likely short for “transsexual.”
The database also contained Chinese text, he said, leading him to believe its owner is also Chinese.
“What really struck me as odd was that despite all of them using the same database, they claim to be developed by separate companies or individuals that do not seem to match up with each other,” he wrote in a blog post detailing his findings. “The Whois registration for one of the sites uses what appears to be a fake address and phone number.”
Gizmodo attempted reached out to Christiansfinder for comment, but the email address listed on its website bounced back. The other app developers could not be reached.
Fowler told CyberScoop that while he wasn’t implicating the developers behind the apps of doing anything nefarious, the fact that they’d gone to such lengths to conceal their identities was inherently suspicious.
In addition to IP and location data, the database includes users’ account names and ages. However, there was no personally identifiable information, or PII, a term that encompasses information such as real names, physical addresses, and Social Security numbers.
Fowler notes that a lot of people tend to reuse account names and that can be used as a type of fingerprint. “This makes it extremely easy for someone to find and identify you with very little information,” he said. “Nearly each unique username I checked appeared on multiple dating sites, forums, and other public places.”
Researchers generally wait until exposed databases are taken down before going public. But at time of writing, the database remains online, despite Fowler attempts to notify the host. He disclosed his discovery to raise awareness among users of the apps that their private data is leaking online.
There’s a dark secret lurking behind all the promised benefits of the impending 5G networks slowing coming online around the world: All that extra speed and bandwidth is going to make it really hard to stay within your monthly data limits, as the BBC recently discovered with its first live segment streamed over 5G.
Today, EE, one of the UK’s cellular providers, fired up its 5G network in six cities across the country including Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, London, and Manchester. To help illustrate one of 5G’s biggest advantages over previous wireless networks—its ability to deliver broadband speeds without wires—the BBC had reporter Rory Cellan-Jones do a live report during its BBC Breakfast program that was streamed over EE’s 5G network.
You can watch the segment here, but needless to say, the quality of the image is excellent, with no compression artifacts, hiccups, or random freezes that happen quite often when live broadcasts are streamed over older 4G and 3G networks. But EE’s first 5G networks aren’t perfect. While testing one of the few 5G-capable smartphones currently available, Jones found that the connection speed went up and down depending on where he stood—a problem that should eventually be alleviated once 5G towers are more prevalent and able to provide thorough, reliable coverage.
However, the BBC Breakfast segment was actually delayed by 15 minutes when the cellular equipment (provided by Huawei) they were using to stream the broadcast suddenly stopped working. But it wasn’t a problem with the 5G network; the SIM card used for the live stream had simply reached its data cap, which is a problem that many users will inevitably experience once they start streaming 4K Netflix movies to their phones every morning on their commutes to work.
With carriers already introducing additional charges to allow existing smartphones to just use 5G networks, your cellphone bill is going to inevitably get quite expensive once you realize you need heaps more data every month.
This is the GameShell, a retro gaming handheld that I built from a kit. I clipped and trimmed the plastic pieces, inserted the circuit boards, connected the wires and snapped it all together. It plays old games, emulated titles and homebrew software. It’s pleasing that something I built does those things.
The folks at Clockwork did most of the work, to be fair. They created the ClockworkPi, the small development board that powers the GameShell. It’s a small chip powered by a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, a Mali GPU and 1GB DDR3 memory. It’s got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a micro HDMI port to output to a monitor and a slot for a micro SD card for storage. It’s an excellent base for a modestly-powered portable emulator box.
Along with the ClockworkPi, the GameShell also has a 2.7 inch TFT RPG display that runs at 60 frames-per-second. There’s an input board with a directional pad, ABXY buttons and a couple of additional inputs. There’s also a tiny two-channel speaker, a 3.7V 1200 mAh rechargeable battery and an optional row of five additional buttons that can snap onto the back of the GameShell’s case.
I mention these components separately, because that’s how they are assembled. Here’s what comes in the GameShell kit.
It looks like a lot, but it’s really simple. There are four main modules encased in their own plastic housings—the ClockworkPi, controller pad, display and battery. Once assembled, cables connect the ClockworkPi to the three other units. They are stacked within a Game Boy-esque plastic housing, two on two. The speaker bar is plugged into the main bar, and the unit is snapped together.
It’s a simple build that’s hard to screw up. If one were to say, bend the pins connecting the main board to the controller, that might make it harder to get it working. Also, from what I have heard, the screen will not survive being run over by a 470 pound motorized wheelchair. But that’s what replacements were made for, right? Okay, I made a few mistakes, but those were on me, and eventually I wound up with a nice little handheld that I could probably strip down to component parts blindfolded.
Once assembled, the GameShell is a tiny handheld Linux device. The 16GB micro SD card that comes with the kit is preloaded with Clockwork OS, based on Debian 9 ARMhf and Linux mainline Kernel 4.1x. It comes loaded with popular emulator front end RetroArch, and can run up to Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis games quite capably. There’s a standalone emulator for the original PlayStation, which can be hit or miss.
It comes loaded with the original Cave Story. There’s a free version of Doom on it, because any gaming system has to run Doom in some form in order to be validated. It even has a built-in music player, which I will never use.
With its Game Boy look and feel and its pleasantly responsive controls, the GameShell is nice to play games on. I feel like game makers and electronics hobbyists will get the most out of the system. It supports Preset C, Python, Lua, JS and LISP programming languages and supports a slew of smaller-scale game engines, including PICO 8 and LOVE2D. It’s open source hardware, so users are free to take it apart, wire it to other devices and fiddle to their hearts’ content. The studded backplate used to connect the optional five-button input bar to the back of the GameShell is even Lego compatible.
There’s a lot to do with Clockwork’s GameShell. I don’t know if I will ever build a game or program the GameShell into a television remote, but I will always be proud of this quirky little piece of hardware I put together.
Researchers used over 1,700 photos of students and others without their permission for a facial recognition study sponsored by US military and intelligence services, according to the Colorado Springs Independent and Financial Times. While technically legal, it has raised questions about privacy around facial recognition tech, especially considering how the photos might end up being used. "This is essentially normalizing peeping Tom culture," the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Maas told CSIndy.
The study, carried out in 2012 and 2013, was made to determine, in part, if algorithms could identify facial features from a long distance away, through obstacles and in poor light. A telephoto camera was set up at a distance of about 150 meters away from a public area with a lot of foot traffic. Most of the subjects were looking away from the camera, with many looking a their phones.
After researchers carefully combined the photos, they created a dataset called "Unconstrained College Students." Since it’s more random and less detailed than other databases, it could help scientists develop algorithms that work from farther away. That could be particularly useful to the military, for instance, by helping them see if an approaching boat was a friend or foe.
The professor who conducted the study, Dr. Terrence Boult, said that acquiring images of people in public places is not illegal, and the study was cleared by the school.
"The research protocol was analyzed by the UCCS Institutional Review Board, which assures the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in research," wrote University spokesperson Jared Verner in a statement. "No personal information was collected or distributed in this specific study. The photographs were collected in public areas and made available to researchers after five years when most students would have graduated."
Still, it seemed the measures they took weren’t enough. Boult notes that the study was initially made available to corporate researchers, but was later pulled because the Financial Times article included the dates and times the photos were taken, jeopardizing anonymity. "They gave out more information in the article than we had intended," Boult told the Denver Post.
Still, the study will do more good than harm, according to Boult. "If police use them and they match the wrong person, that’s not good," he said. "Our job as researchers is to balance the privacy needs with the research value this provides society, and we went above and beyond what was required."
Facial recognition is increasingly becoming a hot button topic, of course. The city of San Francisco recently banned the systems, and Uber is facing claims of racism over its driver recognition system. And critics of the study note that the subjects may not be thrilled with how the data is eventually used. "He may be helping them do something that’s not right in the first place," said Denver University’s Bernard Chao.
For a game seemingly about immortal pilots waging interstellar wars, EVE Online has a surprising amount of ties to reality. Stories from EVE often play out on stages far beyond the confines of the game world and reach audiences far beyond its players. Sometimes, skills learned in the cut throat world of EVE can change a person’s future.
Peel away EVE’s layers of space and spreadsheets and you’ll see skills applicable to our everyday lives: managing a supply network, understanding vendor relationships, profit and loss analysis, human resource management. These are all skills a person might find handy if they were trying to start their own business and become a real-life CEO. Player Matthew Ricci did just that.
Ricci says that he first started playing EVE in 2009, at the age of 19, after becoming exhausted with the grinding and raiding in other MMORPGs. “I stumbled across an internet meme popular back in the day, the learning curve of MMORPGs. It had this inverted line graph with a bunch of bodies on it,” Ricci told Kotaku, describing an image attempting to depict the intense learning curve of EVE. “I thought to myself, [EVE] can’t be THAT hard.”
After downloading and installing EVE, Ricci logged in for the first time to what he hoped would be his new obsession. “As soon as I looked at the interface, I was overwhelmed. I quit within an hour. This is way too hardcore for me.”
EVE Online is a notoriously prickly game, almost arcane in nature, and even if you do get started, it’s difficult to keep playing long enough to figure out exactly what you’re doing. This was especially true in 2009, before major overhauls to the game’s New Player Experience.
“I was so mad at myself for giving up so quickly,” Ricci said. “A week went by and I was signed up for another free trial. I was determined to make it stick. This time, it did, it blew up and became a huge passion for me.”
Pretty soon Ricci found himself completely caught up in the game, to the detriment of his other responsibilities. He recalled, “It was two weeks before Christmas, and I was celebrating my first Christmas holiday at my parents’ home and was running up and down the house into my bedroom checking my laptop out of panic. My wife, wondering what was going on, checked in on me, only to find me on my computer, and questioned me. I distinctly responded to her, ‘Babe, I am AFK mining in a bestower. I need to be careful of gankers.’ Needless to say, she stormed off in an epic rage… It was a true Doomsday attack right into the hull.”
These early warning signs didn’t dissuade him from playing, though. He joined a Nullsec-based player corporation, which was trying to carve a name for itself in the game’s captuarable territories. Just being a part of the group wasn’t enough for him for long. “I became the main fleet commander for the corporation. Then the head of recruitment. Then I became the main contact between our corporation and all of our allies.” The more Ricci played, he said, the more he realised that what he wanted was to be in charge of things, which meant being the Human Resource Manager, the Fleet Commander, the CEO, and the overall leader of the group of about 200 players.
Despite his desires, leadership ability wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “I was around 19 at the time, and my corporation [was] bigger than the rest of our allies. I got a big head, and decided we would run off and do our own thing.” Ricci and several other players broke away from his former alliance and forged a new one, gathering other corporations to his banner. Before his group could become the kind of group that goes down in legends, EVE happened. “We were backstabbed. Someone infiltrated our alliance to spy on us, and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down,” Ricci said. “That was it for me.”
Ricci realized that the game was negatively impacting his life. The massive amount of time and effort he was investing in EVE was causing his physical and mental health to deteriorate. “I was micromanaging everything. I was stationary in my gaming chair for twelve plus hours a day, six days a week,” Ricci said. “I was deteriorating, and not growing as a person in my real life, and had begun to sink into depression.” He decided something had to change. “So I quit. The first time.”
Ricci stepped away from the game for several years. He focused on improving his family life and on changing his career. He quit his job as a financial advisor for mutual funds and accepted a position working with his father as an entry-level account manager at a consumer electronics company. These changes helped, but they weren’t enough. “I was in a pretty good place. But slowly I began to feel anxiety and depression building. I needed something to take the edge off. I wanted to play EVE again,” he said.
Ricci’s wife was not thrilled with the idea of him returning to EVE. “She didn’t take the news well, but I promised her I could handle it, I was much more mature now,” Ricci said. “She had seen how intense I used to play the game, she knew how much time, energy and soul I poured into the game. She was worried about seeing me falling back to playing twelve hours a day. My wife is my best friend, and the love of my life. She was right to be worried.”
Going back to something that had previously caused depression and anxiety in an effort to stave off those same emotions might seem unintuitive, but it made perfect sense to Ricci. “I found a lot of success in EVE, I was somebody there. Like in all MMORPGs, you can be whoever you want… I was good at leading people, it came very natural to me. As [my group] would grow and blossom I felt great, and it would become a sort of feedback loop for me personally.”
But Ricci also wanted to be careful. “When I came back to EVE Online the second time, my idea was that I had to find a way to balance EVE with my life, career, and my family. I wanted to be more casual.”
Old habits die hard, though. “I’m the type of person who has to be the leader. I knew that about myself at eight years old: my dream was to run a huge corporation.” Eventually, this desire led Ricci to start his own EVE corporation and to begin recruiting other players. This soon meant he was dedicating himself to the game all over again. “After a while, people started to complain. We needed a better system, we needed better hunting grounds.” Ricci moved his corporation’s home base to a new star system and gave it a new focus. They moved into a structured PvP sector known as Faction Warfare, in low security space, and began to use the resource in the area to produce giant capital ships, all while fighting other players to defend their new space and protect their operations. His corporation did mass recruitment, gaining over 250 members at its peak and having, over the course of Ricci’s involvement, between 500 and 600 people.
Eventually, they had different players mining minerals from asteroids almost around the clock, as well as pre-planned gatherings where the corporation would mine together and protect each other. Those minerals were funneled to their production-focused players, who would use EVE’s incredibly complex industry system to produce enormous capital vessels to bolster their power or to sell to line the corporation’s pocket book. Between all of these planned activities, they would take fleets out into the Faction Warfare zones, looking for other players to fight. Despite his intentions, Ricci had been sucked back into EVE.
After a while, the game began to feel like a second job. “The corporation had grown to the point that there was always someone online doing something,” Ricci said. “Inevitably, most of those things seemed to require my attention. I had to be online all the time.” Since he worked from home selling consumer electronics for his dad’s company, being constantly available was easy. “But the constant pressure began to run me into the ground, and my work began to suffer.”
One day while he was playing EVE, Ricci’s daughter, who was just learning to talk, came into his room. He says she asked, “‘Daddy, are you working?’ Without a thought, I said yes, I was. She accepted my answer, said OK, and happily walked out of the room.”
“It broke me. I was working, in my mind, but I was working on the corp’s industry portfolio. Not something for my job, not something for my family or to pay our bills.” He said he was angry at himself for effectively lying to his young daughter, and he knew something had to change.
“I distinctly recall looking at my computer screen, and having these angry thoughts, full of self loathing and doubt. ‘Why can’t I do this in real life, why can’t I use this energy for something real?’”
Ricci asked himself, “What’s the difference between a fake ship, or digital ammo, or any other EVE item, and a real pair of headphones?” The more he thought about it, the more he realized that there wasn’t one, not in any way that mattered to him. He came to the realization that he was already doing a lot of the tasks required to run a business, only he was doing it for fun, in his spare time, for free.
EVE Online Industrial Complex and Refinery
“The average EVE Online player has the untapped potential to drive industries of change. That’s something I think is not said enough about EVE Online in a firm way—seeing something that you think you can do better, and doing it. That’s the spirit of entrepreneurship.”
When he first started considering how EVE might apply to his life, he was full of self-doubt. “I don’t know how to figure out profit margins, I can’t staff a company, I don’t know how to really do all of this,” he said he thought at first. But then he realized, “Well, yeah I do. I’ve got this mining spreadsheet that tells me the exact profitability of every action I take, every ship I build. I know how to go to a trade hub, check prices, calculate shipping costs, fuel, taxes, broker’s fees, and I know how to use all of that to make a profit.”
Inspired by his realizations, Ricci called his father, a successful businessman, seeking some advice. “I told him that I wanted to open a sales firm in the IT and electronics sector. He laughed. He told me to quit while I was ahead, that I would never be successful, and it infuriated me. I was already in sales, I was doing all of this work for another company, and I saw no reason that I couldn’t do this myself!”
“Entrepreneurship is central to the spirit of EVE,” Ricci said. “When you log in, you have to choose your path. You have the tools, but nothing is laid out for you, just like in real life… EVE Online reinforced this to me. Every step of the way other players had told me that there was no way I could do the things I wanted, no way that I could achieve my in-game goals.” Soon after his realization, Ricci quit EVE for the second time, but he still wanted to prove that he could translate everything he’d learned from the game into real life.
Within 24 hours of the fateful conversation with his daughter, Ricci founded a new business, Zentech Canada Corporation. The company helps international consumer electronics manufacturers enter the Canadian market. According to a message Ricci sent EVE developer CCP, Zentech had about an $8 million dollar portfolio of retail sales at the end of 2018. Ricci chalks it all up to skills he learned in EVE.
In Ricci’s opinion, sales is effectively equivalent to recruiting for an EVE Online corporation. “EVE encourages you to find problems and gaps in the community, and leaves it up to you to be creative, to fill that gap, and solve that problem.”
“Once you convince them to join you, to sample your product, you have to treat your corporation members as repeat customers, who trust in your brand and keep coming back… Dealing with other companies, especially major suppliers or retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, or Staples, is kind of like dealing with major trade hubs like Jita or Amarr. Understanding broker fees, fuel costs, export taxes and how all of those things factor into the bottom-line and profitability is effectively the same in real life or in EVE, just with different kinds of currency.”
Ricci says he even learned a thing or two about business from EVE’s player-versus-player combat. “In the real world, every single day is PvP,” he said. “Say two people are trying to sell the same backpack to a customer. One person has better craftsmanship, but no reputation with the buyer. And the other person has better equity with the customer, but an inferior product. People tend to go with the brand they trust over the facts of the products. Every single day in sales, you’re competing for that customer’s trust and patronship. This is the face of real life PvP.”
The parallels that Ricci sees between his EVE life and his business life have helped him fulfil a childhood dream due to the ideals and lessons he learned in a video game. He hopes that others can do the same. “Find your real world EVE,” Ricci advises other players looking to connect their gaming experiences to the rest of their life.“Find what speaks to you, what makes your heart sing, and accept the fact that if you’re playing EVE Online, you basically already have an MBA. The average EVE player is beyond creative and inspirational. There are more insane stories that come out of EVE than anywhere else, there are better leaders than come out of anywhere else. You can take the EVE that you know, and you can apply those lessons to real life, and you’d be surprised what you can accomplish.”
