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Patrick Tucker

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As seen in: Defense One, MSN, Goodreads, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera English, Quartz, Slate, MIT Technology Review, Salon, Constant Contact, Stars and Stripes and
Covers:  robots, science, privacy, national security, emerging technology
Sci-Tech editor for @DefenseOne. Spies, AIs and the future(s). signal signal.me/#eu/RniNNB5sfqCtvKrPXOJ7Bb8fdhS352E-RYdqeG2nGHTRmpJCuhFBnaKl91umQcRj
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How to Fight Poachers With Drones and Big Data

How to Fight Poachers With Drones and Big Data

The Atlantic — "Drones Fight Poachers" has an undeniable sexiness to it as a news narrative. Who doesn't want to read about flying killer robots battling machete-wielding criminals chasing innocent animals on the wild African plains? The instant appeal of a high-tech solution to a pervasive low-tech problem is also why Silicon Valley giant Google has given the World Wildlife Fund () $5 million for drones to stop poaching. But to actually stop poachers, WWF should focus less on drones and more on math-and some lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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This app is fueling the uprising in Venezuela

This app is fueling the uprising in Venezuela

Quartz — Entrepreneur Bill Moore was in his Austin, Texas, office last Thursday, watching explosive growth for his company's walkie-talkie app, Zello, inside Venezuela. Zello had become the favorite app of protest organizers there after recently hitting the mark as the most popular app in the Ukraine. Over the past few days in Venezuela, the protests ballooned following rapidly rising food prices, controversy over President Nicolas Maduro's economic policies, public dissatisfaction over crime and multiple other factors. Moore was finding that in Venezuela that popularity had a price. Shortly after 9pm, his Twitter feed blew up with messages from users inside the country.
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Why Ukraine Has Already Lost The Cyberwar, Too

Why Ukraine Has Already Lost The Cyberwar, Too

National Journal — Don't wait for cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia to break out ahead of the actual shooting. Ukraine already lost that, too. Russia may have unfettered access into the Ukrainian telecommunication systems according to several experts. It's access that Russia can use to watch Ukrainian opposition leadership, or, in the event of an escalation in the conflict, possibly cut off telecommunications within Ukraine. The ongoing situation in Ukraine has been marked by bloody protests, sieges of government buildings, ethnic clashes and misinformation campaigns. In cyberspace, relatively low-level exchanges between hacker groups have taken the form of temporary website attacks called displacements and distributed denial of service, or DDOS, which flood sites with phony traffic rendering the site inaccessible.
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Lost and Found in Japan

Lost and Found in Japan

THE FUTURIST magazine — While the world turned its attention to the frightening prospects of a nuclear catastrophe in post-tsunami Japan, another crisis was being dealt with, quietly, humbly, and with pragmatic determination. Click the photo to launch slideshow The date is April 8, 2011. I am on a bus to go into the Japanese city of Ishinomaki, a place that consisted of 162,882 souls before the March 11 tsunami struck. On the day of my journey, 2,283 of the city's citizens are feared dead, 2,643 are missing, and some 18,000 are in shelters.
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Solar Power from the Moon

Solar Power from the Moon

THE FUTURIST magazine — By Patrick Tucker A Japanese company is pitching an alternative energy plan that's out of this world-and potentially the largest public infrastructure project in human history. The year is 2050 and it's morning on the Moon. The Sun is rising over a landscape that is bleak and featureless with one exception: a wide belt of photovoltaic panels that cuts across the ash-gray lunar surface like a straight river. Not a single astronaut is in sight, but a troop of robots is busily making repairs to the installation where tune-ups are needed. Beneath the panels, superconducting cables are ferrying the Sun's power to transmission centers.
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My First Meltdown: Lessons from Fukushima

My First Meltdown: Lessons from Fukushima

THE FUTURIST magazine — By Patrick Tucker Japan's nuclear disaster carries a number of important lessons, such as how and when to deploy a worst-case scenario. While working in Kyoto, THE FUTURIST's senior editor observed Japan's nightmare and the costs of poor communication during a crisis. Scene: The date is March 11, 2011. I am in my apartment in Kyoto, Japan, watching my first partial nuclear meltdown 335 miles away in Fukushima. Because the word "melt" suggests a visible and even transition between physical states, I always thought of a meltdown as a fast and fluid event.
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Kyoto: City of a Thousand Futures

Kyoto: City of a Thousand Futures

THE FUTURIST magazine — Every day in Kyoto carries with it the promise of a rare visual sighting; a geisha moving in graceful but hurried steps between the tea houses in Gion; Maple leaves crisping red at their tips beneath the awnings of Shinto shrines. Kyoto is so notoriously charming and well trafficked by foreign tourists that the casual visitor arriving fresh in the city is tempted to assume that every one of Kyoto's splendors has already been seen by a thousand previous invaders. But on one particular day in the fall, the city brings out a few of her more private treasures.
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Making Sense of It All.

Making Sense of It All.

The Wilson Quarterly — TO THE MODERN MIND, THE verb "compute" signifies a murky electronic process-blinking lights, the hum of a processor, possibly the scrolling of digits across a screen. But before the 20th century the word had a very different connotation, namely, to count, reckon, or impose order on information. Alex Wright, an information architect and former Harvard librarian, argues that we've outsourced so much processing, storing, and retrieving of information to machines that we've come to see information technologies as mysterious, thoroughly modern innovations. In Glut, he sets out to show that if we resist the tendency of the technorati to look only into the future, we can see that we've been in an information age of sorts all along.
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Forget the Sony hack, this could be the biggest cyber attack yet

Forget the Sony hack, this could be the biggest cyber attack yet

Quartz / Defense One — On Friday, the FBI officially named North Korea as the party responsible for a cyber attack and email theft against Sony Pictures. The Sony hack saw many studio executives' sensitive and embarrassing emails leaked online. The hackers threatened to attack theaters on the opening day of the offending film, "The Interview," and Sony pulled the plug on the movie, effectively censoring a major Hollywood studio. The end of "The Interview" is not the end of the world. Technology journalists were quick to point out that, even though the cyber attack could be attributable to a nation state actor, it wasn't particularly sophisticated.
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To Protect Ourselves From Bioweapons, We May Have to Reinvent Science Itself

To Protect Ourselves From Bioweapons, We May Have to Reinvent Science Itself

Defense One — To Protect Ourselves From Bioweapons, We May Have to Reinvent Science Itself In January 2012, a team of researchers from the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin published a paper in the journal Science about airborne transmission of H5N1 influenza, or bird flu, in ferrets. The article changed the way the United States and nations around the world approached manmade biological threats. This was not the researchers' intent. The team had altered the virus's amino acid profile, allowing it to reproduce in mammal lungs, which are a bit colder than bird lungs.
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