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The Argentine government has used drones to catch out wealthy tax evaders who had not declared mansions and swimming pools. Unmanned aircraft were dispatched over an upper class area of Buenos Aires and discovered 200 homes and 100 pools that had not been detailed on returns. Tax officials said the drones took pictures of luxury houses standing on lots registered as empty. The evasions found by the drones amounted to missing tax payments of more than $2 million and owners of the properties have been waned they now face large fines. Use of drones has been expanding in Argentina and...

According to Robert Sczcerba, a health technology venture capitalist and former director of life sciences at Lockheed Martin, the greatest health technology danger is the cacaphony of beeps that attend medical devices in every hospital. Because if everything is a priority then nothing is. He writes: Have you ever stood in line at a fast food restaurant listening to a loud, persistent beeping from the kitchen’s deep fryer? If so, you’ve probably wanted to yell, “Hey, could somebody get the fries, or press a button to make that stupid dinging stop?” The employees, meanwhile, have long since stopped paying attention...

Aerial footage filmed by a drone shows the large number of people joining pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required police to obtain warrants for surveillance by drone, making California the latest state to weigh on an issue that is dividing lawmakers across the country. Mr. Brown's decision comes as the nation grapples with how to balance concerns over privacy and civil liberties with a technology that police departments say can serve as a powerful law-enforcement tool.

Drone Exemptions for Hollywood Pave the Way for Widespread Use By BROOKS BARNESSEPT. 25, 2014 LOS ANGELES — The commercial use of drones in American skies took a leap forward on Thursday with the help of Hollywood. The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to applications from seven filmmaking companies and pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America, said six of those companies could use camera-equipped drones on certain movie and television sets. Until now, the F.A.A. has not permitted commercial drone use except for extremely limited circumstances in wilderness areas of Alaska. Put bluntly, this is the first time that...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Meet Nixie, a wearable camera concept that flies off your wrist and turns into a remote-controlled quadcopter. It's the bizarre-yet-appealing wearable camera drone nobody asked for... and now I kind of want it. Intel is holding a competition to encourage new wearable technology ideas, and the Nixie is one of the finalists. So far, it's still in development, so the flying wristlet camera is rough around the edges. Team captain Christoph Kohstall eventually wants you to be able to send the the Nixie flying with a gesture. It would recognize where you're standing, snap a picture, then return to the...

Medicine deliveries to a pharmacy on a North Sea island will be made by a drone, Deutsche Post announced on Wednesday, in the first project of its kind. It is the first time that an unmanned drone will be used for a practical business purpose in Europe, the company claims. Inhabitants and visitors on the island of Juist, which has a population of fewer than 2,000, will be able to order medicines from the Seehund Pharmacy and have them delivered from the mainland by the drone. …

Danvers-based CyPhy Works, a maker of flying robots led by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, said today that it was awarded a contract by the U. S. Air Force for a new miniature drone that could help improve search-and-rescue operations. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed. Funded under the Department of Defense's Rapid Innovation Fund, CyPhy Works' Extreme Access Pocket Flyer — which can fit into the cargo pants of a military member and weighs 2.3 ounces — will focus on the remote inspection of small passageways and tunnels that are often blocked by debris and rubble. The drone...

Americans should be more concerned about their privacy being invaded by the spread of drones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an Oklahoma City audience on Thursday. Speaking before a group of faculty members and students at Oklahoma City University’s law school on Sept. 11, Justice Sotomayor said “frightening” changes in surveillance technology should encourage citizens to take a more active role in the privacy debate. She said she’s particularly troubled by the potential for commercial and government drones to compromise personal privacy. Said Justice Sotomayor: There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what...

Last night I saw something I had never encountered before: the launch of what I'm told were probably six large drones. They really made my mouth open with astonishment. They went up very fast then changed heading and rose into the clouds. Two minutes later they were joined on the same course by some fast movers which I could hear overhead but could not see due to high cloud. Bearing in mind that "Loose lips sink ships" (which WWII-era warning not coincidentally we began to use again after 9/11/2001), I'm not sure how much to say here. But it's natural...

NASA Working The Drone Problem Amazon, Google and plenty of others are eager to use drones; the FAA is facing a deadline to allow them into the airspace; pilots are worried about how this will affect them -- and amid all this worrying, NASA scientists are working on new technology that could solve the problem.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Watch out, enemy drones. The U.S. military is developing laser weapons to smite you. The Office of Naval Research announced last week that it is building a laser weapon that will be able to shoot down aerial drones, spelling big trouble for any enemy who tries to target the U.S. Marines. GBAD – Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move – is a laser weapon designed to be installed on the Marines’ Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and other light tactical ground vehicles. Intended to provide an affordable alternative to traditional firepower, GBADs could prevent enemy drones from tracking and targeting...

Drone proponents prefer using the term Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or UAS for Unmanned Aerial System (latter term includes the entirety of the flying vehicle and the ground-base communications connection connecting the two). Whatever your preferred verbiage is, drones are poised to become a huge global business and the aerial devices are going to have a significant impact across a wide variety of industries. Historically, the military has been the biggest user/purchaser of drones; The Wall Street Journal estimated that the U.S. military spent about $3 billion on drone programs in 2012. And many aerospace companies continue to develop highly...

A member of the Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS) has threatened that the organization would soon use unmanned drones to attack Israel. The IS member, a Canadian who left his country to fight alongside the IS in the areas of Iraq and Syria it declared to be an Islamic Caliphate, claimed on Twitter that the group was developing these drones and that they would be unveiled in the near future. He further said that engineers who studied in the West are working on the drones. IS, he wrote, is expected to make use of these drones to attack...

US drones fired on an Islamic extremist mortar position in northern Iraq on Tuesday to protect Kurdish forces battling to rescue a group of Yazidi civilian refugees, the military said. The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), the region's most powerful Sunni jihadist group, has driven thousands of members of the Yazidi minority from their homes and is besieging the refugees on an exposed mountain. Last week, the United States launched an air campaign to break the siege of Mount Sinjar, bring humanitarian relief to the Yazidis and support Kurdish troops protecting their capital Arbil. "US military...

Drones -- unmanned flying machines -- will soon fill our skies. They conjure up fears, especially among some of my fellow libertarians, of spying and death from above. These fears aren't groundless. President Bush approved the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists overseas, and President Obama vastly increased their use. Drones have killed thousands of people in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, countries against which we have not declared war. Drones keep getting more sophisticated. The Air Force is now developing what it calls MAVs, Micro Air Vehicles, tiny drones that can quietly search for an individual terrorist...

Uh oh. Looks like ISIS is taunting Big Guy: “I say to America, that the Islamic Caliphate has been established, and we will not stop,” Abu Mosa told Vice. “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq.”“We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House,” he continued. That’s not smart, I guess they don’t know how truly thin-skinned he is. And how much he hates it when his vacation is interrupted.So watch out ISIS, Big Guy is keeping his eye...

Professor and political activist Cornel West declared President Barack Obama a “war criminal,” arguing that his support of Israel and his drone policy make him complicit in the deaths of innocent people. The controversial activist made the comments at a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, DC on Saturday, according to Talking Points Memo. West began his speech by pointing to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, where more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis have been killed, criticizing Israel’s offensive in the region in front of a “Free Palestine” banner. His comments regarding President Obama begin at around the three-minute...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Senator Charles Schumer is calling for tighter federal regulations on drones. Schumer says he wants the Federal Aviation Administration and the Commerce Department to put several regulations into effect by the end of the year. He says small remote controlled aircraft have become hazardous in New York after a court decision to limit the federal government's ability to regulate them. The senator says private drones have benefits, but sometimes interfere with other aircraft and can be used to spy on people or deliver illegal drugs. Schumer says the FAA should consider several rules including a ban on drone usage by...

Model aircraft able to do what dogs, volunteers, and helicopters could not After authorities spent three days searching for a missing, elderly man in Wisconsin, a hobbyist launched his personal drone in a volunteer search effort and was able to locate the lost individual 20 minutes post launch. During the initial search phase, authorities used dogs, helicopters, and employed local volunteers to comb the Fitchburg countryside in search of Guillermo DeVenecia, an 82-year-old man suffering from Alzheimer’s. David Lesh, a drone enthusiast who uses his personal model aircraft to make videos for his skiing and snowboarding business, was in town...