The Atavist » The New Yorker

NPR tomorrow

evanratliff — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:36:20 +0000

Update: You can listen to the segment here.

I’ll be on NPR’s “Day to Day” tomorrow, discussing Jerry Baber’s vision for an armed robotic army.

Watch Baber’s back-yard arsenal in action

evanratliff — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:35:00 +0000

In my recent New Yorker story (still just an abstract online), about Jerry Baber’s shotgun-toting robots, I describe a few of Baber’s demonstration videos — some of which have been viewed a couple million times on YouTube. But it’s hard for a paragraph to do them justice, so I’m including here a sampling of my own favorite Baber vids (in addition to the one I posted yesterday, which gives a nice overview of the AA-12 in action).

First, this surprisingly little-viewed footage covers the entire armed robot “family”:

Here we have the armed autocopter gunship, with Baber overseeing a firing test:

And a real classic, “Scary Scottish girl with Automatic Weapon!”:

If that’s not enough for you, you can check out the AA-12 mounted on and fired from an SUV. Or for those looking for something a bit more sleek and official, here’s one put together for the Military Times Web site. There are several videos on the Robotex site, and then there’s an animation of the design concept killer robot, put together by Robotex founder Terry Izumi. The AA-12 has also featured on the Discovery Channel’s “Future Weapons” program, an appearance rumored to be the source of at least one foreign leader’s interest in the shotguns.

Bullets and batteries

evanratliff — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:43:34 +0000

“Shoot!,” my latest piece for The New Yorker, hit the streets today. It’s available to subscribers on the Web, but everyone else will have to shell out for a copy, retro-style. It’s a profile of one Jerry Baber, an engineer from Piney Flats, Tennessee, and his work. That work being the making of gun parts, and from those parts building the AA-12 — a stainless steel fully-automatic 12-gauge shotgun — and with that shotgun helping to create several small, fully-armed and remotely-controlled air and ground robots that he believes will change the future of warfare.

As Baber likes to say of his creations, which he keeps in his workshop and often unleashes in his backyard, “I asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and they said, ‘bullets and batteries.’”

I’ll be posting some of Baber’s videos here, along with some additional passages that didn’t make the article’s final cut. For now, I’ll leave you with a little introduction to the AA-12:

Cyberextortion perpetrator gets anthologized, imprisoned

evanratliff — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:07:49 +0000

For those who enjoy a good tech yarn, you might go pick up a copy of the recently-released The Best of Technology Writing 2006. Edited by my fellow Wired contributor Brendan Koerner, it is (as the title implies) a collection of technology-related pieces penned last year by some top-notch writers like Steven Johnson and Clive Thompson…and by some other writers like me, in the form of my New Yorker piece on cyberextortion. (see UPDATE 2, below)

Coincidentally, I just found out from a source that Ivan Maksakov, the Russian student who carried out many of the distributed denial of service (or zombie) attacks described in the story, was recently sentenced to eight years in Russian prison. Two of his co-conspirators received the same sentence, and other members of the group were never found.

So is eight years a just punishment for a kid who, from his bedroom in Saratov, Russia, helped a larger gang extort millions of dollars from companies around the world? Or is he being made an unfair example of, by Russian authorities desperate to show that they are tackling their cybercrime problem? I dropped a note to Barrett Lyon, the founder of Prolexic, the company profiled in the story defending other outfits against such attacks (Lyon has since moved on to start a new firm, BitGravity, building online video distribution software). Lyon and his colleagues spent months in an all-consuming cat and mouse game with Maksakov, eventually helping the authorities track him down and arrest him. “I’m not sure,” he said when I asked him whether the sentence is justified. “I’m still struggling with it.”

UPDATE: Here’s a story about the sentencing.

UPDATE 2: For some reason the anthology removed all the section breaks from the New Yorker story, making it read rather poorly. So if you do want to read it, better to do so online.