A prominent computer security researcher says he recently rejected a request by a Saudi telecommunications company to help it spy on mobile customers.

The security researcher, who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike and who recently left Twitter where he worked on that company’s security team, said he was contacted via email earlier this month by employees of Mobily, a mobile phone operator in Saudi Arabia, seeking his help with a surveillance project the company was developing.

The employees, one of whom Marlinspike identified as Yasser D. Alruhaily, executive manager of Mobily’s network and information security department, told him that Mobily wanted to intercept data for the mobile versions of four social media applications used in that country — Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp — and asked his help in doing so.

Equally disturbing was a document they provided Marlinspike, which discussed compelling a Certificate Authority in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia to produce SSL certificates that Mobily could use to intercept traffic. They also discussed the possibility of purchasing information about security vulnerabilities and exploits that could be used to intercept traffic.

The employees said they were trying to comply with requirements made by a Saudi regulator that they provide the ability to both block and monitor mobile data communication.

“We are working in defining a way to deal with all such requirements from regulator and it is not only for Whatsapp, it is for whatsapp, line, viber, twitter etc.,” one wrote.

They told Marlinspike, who described the email exchange on his web site, that Mobily already had a prototype for the ”WhatsApp interception system working.

“Their level of sophistication didn’t strike me as particularly impressive, and their existing design document was pretty confused in a number of places, but Mobily is a company with over 5 billion in revenue, so I’m sure that they’ll eventually figure something out,” Marlinspike wrote, noting that he could have easily helped them intercept all of the traffic they were interested in except Twitter. “I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well,” he wrote.

It’s unclear why the mobile company would contact someone like Marlinspike, who is an outspoken critic of government surveillance and the developer of free voice and text encryption software programs called RedPhone and TextSecure, produced through his former company Whisper Systems, and that are designed to thwart surveillance. In 2011, he made RedPhone available for download to activists in Egypt during the Arab Spring so that they could organize political protests. That same year, Twitter acquired Whisper Systems, after which Marlinspike joined Twitter’s security team.

Following several exchanges with the Mobily employees, Marlinspike told them he wasn’t interested in assisting them, on privacy grounds.

One employee replied that he was aware of Marlinspike’s privacy stance and suggested that they only wanted to monitor traffic to collect intelligence on terrorists.

“Saudi has a big terrorist problem,” the employee wrote, “and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that’s why I took this and I seek your help.” He implied that if Marlinspike was not willing to help, then he was indirectly aiding the terrorists.

Marlinspike said he disclosed the correspondence with Mobily because he wanted to highlight an ongoing debate in the hacker and security research communities about the ethics of providing tools and assistance to governments and intelligence agencies for purposes of surveillance.

“[W]hat do we in the hacker community value and prioritize, and what is the type of behavior that we want to encourage?” he asked on his blog.

The Saudi Arabia reportedly said earlier this year that it was asking telecommunication companies there to configure their systems to make it possible for the government to intercept communications through Skype, WhatsApp, Viber and other applications.

Despite this, a Mobily spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that Marlinspike’s account of the email exchange ”is not 100% accurate” and said the company was investigating his assertions.

ABOARD THE U.S.S. GEORGE H.W. BUSH — At 11:19 a.m. today, for the first time in history, a plane without a pilot in it executed one of the most complex missions in aviation: launching off an aircraft carrier at sea. Only the Navy can’t yet land that drone aboard the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, an even harder but necessary maneuver if large drones are really going to operate off carriers.

On a crisp, bright and nearly cloudless day, about 100 miles off the Virginia coast, the crew of the Bush and the team behind the highly autonomous X-47B loaded up the deck’s second catapult with the drone and shot it off into the sky above the eastern Atlantic. The drone — which has its own callsign, “Salty Dog 502″ — turned downwind and passed over the ship twice, first from 1000 feet overhead and then from 60 feet overhead, before flying back to dry land in Maryland. The launch went exactly as the Navy hoped.

With that, the era of the drone took a major step toward patrolling the skies above the world’s waterways. It’s something the Navy hopes will have big implications for supplementing manned fighter jets in a carrier air wing, providing both persistent surveillance far out at sea and ultimately firing weapons in highly defended airspace that might mean death for human pilots.

Senior Navy officers openly likened the X-47B’s launch off the Bush to the first-ever launch of a plane off the U.S.S. Birmingham in 1910. “It’s one small step for man,” remarked Rear Adm. Matt Winter, the Navy’s chief program officer for unmanned systems, “and one significant technical step for unmanned-kind.”

Winter is right: the launch is legitimately historic. No nation possesses a drone that can operate off the deck of an aircraft carrier, a complex and dangerous environment that requires years of pilot training and constant deck-crew coordination. When the X-47B shot from the catapult off the Bush on Tuesday, it took a big step toward proving the U.S. will be the first. The X-47B is just a demonstrator aircraft: it will soon give way to the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) robot that the Navy wants to integrate into its carrier air wings by the end of the decade. Today, the X-47B demonstrator demonstrated a lot.

But the X-47B, a Northrop Grumman creation, is a step ahead of other drones in another way. Almost all drones of its size — with a 62-foot wingspan, it’s bigger than a Predator and about on the scale of a manned F/A-18 Super Hornet — are flown by human beings. Those human beings might be thousands of miles away from the drone, in a cramped and freezing-cold Ground Control Station, but they have instruments that give them physical, real-time control of how the drone flies and what it sees — a very remote cockpit. The X-47B is different: its flight plan is pre-programmed, a matter of an algorithm, and the drone executes it autonomously, relying on GPS. The human back on board the ship only overrides it if something goes wrong.

“The Navy’s model is different from the Air Force’s,” said Rear Adm. Ted Branch, the commander of Naval Air Forces Atlantic. “We don’t have someone actively flying this machine with a stick and a throttle. We fly it with a mouse and a keyboard.” In military nomenclature, the Air Force has drone pilots; the Navy has drone operators.

Today’s launch has been planned for months and anticipated for years. Earlier this month, at the Navy’s aviation test hub in Maryland, known as Pax River, the X-47B touched down and caught the arresting wire on a mock carrier deck. Catching the wire, or the “Trap,” is as difficult as it is necessary to keep a plane from careening off the carrier and into the water. While it was a positive sign that the Navy’s new robot demonstrator could do it, the X-47B’s successful Trap catch was still on dry land.

And so it was today. The Navy programmed the X-47B to take off from the Bush and land back at Pax River. Navy officials, including X-47B program manager Capt. Jamie Engdahl, say that the X-47B will actually conduct its first carrier landing at sea around July or August. Engdahl and other Navy officials say they still have to perform more tests before the X-47B is capable of landing on a carrier, particularly to ensure that the robot’s so-called “relative navigation” systems — which ensure it can catch a moving target like a ship at sea — can place the drone precisely where it needs to be on the carrier deck to catch the Trap. “We did not accomplish all the land-based field testing,” Winter told reporters. Engdahl said he opted not to wait.

It remains to be seen whether the Navy will invite the same media spectacle aboard a carrier for the drone’s first landing as it did for the first launch. The Navy paused normal flight operations aboard the Bush while reporters helicoptered out to film the event. Navy officers and Northrop Grumman officials cheered when the X-47B launched and then flew back over the ship. But no one would commit to letting the media return for the carrier landing, suggesting the Navy doesn’t have total confidence in the demonstrator’s ability to execute among the hardest maneuvers in aviation while news cameras roll.

The X-47B has had some difficulty making the Trap on dry land, which helps explain the Navy’s reluctance to bring the robot down onto the Bush today. But difficulties catching the arresting gear ought to be expected: the Navy is literally doing something no drone has ever done before. Failure is a necessary component of testing. Don Blottenberger, one of Engdahl’s deputies, said the drone probably has maybe 10 more land-based landing tests at Pax River before it’s ready for its carrier landing.

After the carrier landing, the next step for the $1.2 billion program is to execute an autonomous mid-air refueling mission, also scheduled for this year. Only it won’t happen with the X-47B exactly: a Lear Jet will be specially equipped with the X-47B’s software and some of its hardware. After that, Blottenberger said, “We’re gonna be done.” The X-47B program will stand down and the UCLASS program will begin. The X-47B may end up in a museum.

The carrier launch is an important demonstration. The forthcoming carrier landing will ultimately prove that drones can join an aircraft carrier airwing. For Engdahl — who ended his pre-launch speech with an enthusiastic “God bless America!” — the difference doesn’t ultimately matter to the robot.

“It’s a UAV,” Engdahl said, using the acronym for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. “It doesn’t know it hasn’t been landing on the boat for the last six months.”

The Danish 1.54-metre telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured a striking image of NGC 6559, an object that showcases the anarchy that reigns when stars form inside an interstellar cloud. This region of sky includes glowing red clouds of mostly hydrogen gas, blue regions where starlight is being reflected from tiny particles of dust and also dark regions where the dust is thick and opaque.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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We’ve hit 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, but we won’t know what that means for decades.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography say that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere hit the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million yesterday, up from about 280, the level it was at for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.

There are two things to keep in mind about carbon dioxide. First, it stays in the atmosphere for a long time—hundreds to thousands of years. If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, the concentration of carbon dioxide will start falling, but it will take over a thousand years to get back to pre-industrial levels (see “Climate Change: The Moral Choices”).

The second is that it takes a long time for the earth to respond to higher levels and reach a new state of equilibrium. So we won’t know for many decades—or even over a hundred years– what impact 400 parts per million will have.

That means that, while it will be a long time before we know what 400 parts per million will do to the planet, whatever it does we’ll be stuck with for a long time.

Here’s the takeaway from Scripps:  “There’s no stopping CO2 from reaching 400 ppm,” said Ralph Keeling [a geochemist at Scripps ]. “That’s now a done deal. But what happens from here on still matters to climate, and it’s still under our control. It mainly comes down to how much we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy.”

Researchers attach “viral hitmen” to surfaces to demonstrate a possible antibacterial defense for catheters and other medical devices.

Medical implants like catheters and pacemakers can be a hotspot for bacteria, which grow in hard-to-treat films on the surface of such devices. Scientists and engineers are taking different approaches to changing the surface of implants so bacteria can’t take hold. For example, some groups are developing polymer films with structures that prevent bacterial growth (see “Pillowy Antibacterial Polymers”), while others are developing coatings that slowly release antibiotic compounds over time (see “Safer Joint Replacements” and “Innovators Under 35, 2007: Christopher Loose”). And now, researchers from Clemson University in South Carolina and the University of Southern Mississippi have described how a layer of bacteria-killing viruses could help prevent bacterial infections.

In a study published in Biomacromolecules, the investigators describe a new method for attaching bacteria-busting viruses, also known as bacteriophages, to plastic and Teflon-type materials. When a bacterium gets too close to these enemy-coated surfaces, a tethered bacteriophage can grab on and inject its genetic material into the bacterial cell where it is copied and turned into many more bacteriophage. Eventually, these virus copies burst open the bacteria, killing it. Each newly freed bacteriophage can then go on to infect more bacteria (the authors note that this “amplification effect” could make it hard to control the population size of the bacteria killers).

The researchers show that E. coli and the species of bacteria that causes staph infections can both be killed by tethered bacteriophages. The team writes that their method could work with almost any surface, and add that beyond fighting infections, their idea could also be used as a “technological platform for the development of bacteria sensing and detecting devices.”

When my editor praised the exceptional quality of Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover with a near-perfect rating, I wondered how any iPad keyboard cover could top or equal that.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to The Contender with the funny name: ZAGGkeys PROplus, a keyboard cover equal to Logitech’s in design and typing comfort that goes one step (actually, make that seven steps) further by adding a week’s worth of backlight color options.

It comes to us from Zagg, a company that makes screen protectors and all sorts of other inexpensive accessories for tablets and smartphones. Though at $130, this backlit iPad keyboard falls closer to the pointy end of its product lineup.

Pair it to your tablet (it’s compatible with iPads 2 to 4) via Bluetooth and, like other keyboard covers, you slot the iPad into the groove just above the keys. Zagg has chosen the familiar island-style (aka chiclet) keys, and I approve of the design. The keys are shaped and spaced in a way that feels balanced on the otherwise compact keyboard. As a finicky touch typist, I felt right at home here, especially since the keys offer a just-right level of travel. Not to be outshined by other models with extra built-in features, Zagg has also added a top row of function keys for cutting and pasting, controlling media playback, and adjusting volume. Where the Escape key normally resides on conventional keyboards, ZAGG places a contextually appropriate embellishment: a Home key that instantly brings users back to the iPad Home screen.

Like other keyboard covers we’ve looked at, Zagg’s aluminum cover, which matches the iPad’s look and thinness, fits perfectly over the tablet’s display and attaches securely with sub-surface magnets. When attached, the cover automatically puts the iPad to sleep. But unlike Logitech’s cover, there are no plastic magnetic hinges, so the cover pops off completely when you open it.

And here’s the killer feature. Working in a dark space? Push the key beside the spacebar to illuminate the keyboard. Keep hitting it, and the Zagg toggles through seven different colors. One color would have been enough. But no, seven — white, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, and red. Also, each color has three different levels of brightness, so choose whatever works best for the room you’re in.

There is one downside to Zagg’s keyboard cover: It adds nearly an extra pound to the weight of the iPad. The total weight ends up about equal to that of an 11-inch MacBook Air.

WIRED A sleek Bluetooth iPad keyboard cover. Island-style keys are a touch typist’s delight. Backlighting offers seven colors to choose from, and three levels of illumination. Fits securely atop the iPad for a uniform look.

TIRED Adds nearly a pound to the weight of the iPad. Not cheap — backlighting always comes at a premium, and there’s also a non-backlit model that sells for $100.

Sailors of catamarans — those light, fleet, double-hulled sailboats — accept capsizing as a part of the game and train for flips before they ever grasp a tiller. Without the massive center-weighted keel of traditional monohulled sailboats, catamarans are much faster and more difficult to keep stable during maneuvers. The risk is especially well-understood by the America’s Cup crewmembers who will race the leading edge AC72 boats in July. But an abiding respect for these untested behemoths wasn’t enough to keep them safe Thursday, when a member of Artemis racing was killed when his boat crashed.

“What happened yesterday was not on the radar for any of us,” said Iain Murray, regatta director and CEO of America’s Cup Race Management.

Race officials and the members of Swedish team Artemis were struggling to determine just what caused the accident that killed Andrew “Bart” Simpson. It was the second time an AC72 — the 13-story tall, carbon fiber racers that will compete in the event — has capsized, and Murray said there will be a thorough review of the crash and any changes that might be made to the America’s Cup and its playoffs, the Louis Vuitton Cup.

“We need to conduct the review before we determine what action, if any, will be taken,” said Stephen Barclay, CEO of the America’s Cup Event Authority. “Nothing’s off the table.”

Yesterday afternoon, both Artemis and Cup defender Team Oracle were on San Francisco Bay for a practice run. The teams stayed close together — they weren’t racing, but paying close attention to how the boats stacked up in similar winds. At 1 p.m., the boat neared the center of the triangle created by Angel Island, Alcatraz, and Treasure Island. During a bear away, the same common but tricky maneuver that led Oracle’s AC72 to capsize in October, Artemis’ boat went into a nosedive.

Artemis was having a difficult time with its AC72 even before yesterday’s crash. After getting the boat in the water for the first time in November, the team quickly realized a number of flaws and put the boat back in the shed. Then, after completing a few practice runs against Team Oracle in February, the team realized it was vastly outgunned by boats that could use trick daggerboards to raise both hulls out of the water and “foil.” The team went back to the drawing board.

Because of the retooling necessary, the team didn’t received its second set of hulls, shrink-wrapped and in royal blue, until Tuesday. The boat on the water Thursday was its red-hulled first design “Big Red,” flying the team’s second wing after the first was smashed in Valencia last May. It was to be the boat’s last practice run.

Breezes were around 18 to 20 knots — brisk, but not at all atypical for a summer day in San Francisco Bay. In contrast, on the October day that Team Oracle’s AC72 capsized, winds were closer to 25 knots with gusts up to 30. The waters also were relatively flat; unlike the choppy waters Team Oracle encountered in October, the boats were sailing in a flood tide.

The two crashes were as different as the conditions in which they occurred.

“It was neither a proper capsize nor a proper pitchpole,” says Dick Enersen, who has competed in and made documentaries about the America’s Cup.

Oracle pitchpoled — digging its hulls into the water and flipping upside down — and took hours to disintegrate. With Artemis, the speculation is that loads on the crossbeam, which links the two hulls, in front of the mast caused the girder to fail at its intersection with the port hull, after which the whole structure immediately collapsed: The port hull snapped in half just in front of the rudder, and the rigid wing fell over. Parts of the wing were seen being picked up by chase boats in the water around the main vessel.

At the very least, the results of the review will hopefully include more safety measures, said Scott MacLeod, who has represented sponsors in the Cup since 1992.

“There’s not much they can do to change the technology or slow the boats down,” he says. “But hopefully they can protect the sailors.”

In most regards, what happened after the crash couldn’t have gone any better. Today, U.S. Coast Guard Captain Matt Bliven praised the on-water teams from both Artemis and Oracle for their rapid response. But the safeguards in place, established both before and after Oracle’s crash, weren’t enough to completely protect either the boat in its shattered state or its crew.

One of the biggest causes of damage to the Oracle boat in October was accumulated water in the wing, which dragged it down and broke off pieces as it sank. After that, teams started putting airbags at the top of their masts to keep the wing from sinking in the event of a capsize. But in video footage shot yesterday from a helicopter, the tip of Artemis’ wing could be seen sinking below the water about an hour after the crash, in spite of the floats.

Precautions have also been taken to prevent sailors from getting trapped under the boat. During the October Oracle capsize, the boat’s wing initially remained intact, propping up the hulls in the sky like the third leg of a tripod. Afterwards, skipper Jimmy Spithill said his greatest fear was that the mast would break and trap the sailors underneath the netting that connects the two hulls. All sailors now carry knives to cut the netting, and oxygen canisters containing four or five life-saving breaths.

It appears, though, that Simpson was caught underneath a solid sections of the boat, where he somehow ended up after being thrown from his windward position on the netting that spans the boat’s hulls. It’s unclear why Simpson was unable to free himself — he may have been incapacitated while trapped beneath the boat for a reported 10 minutes. Once he was found, he was rushed to St. Francis Yacht Club, where CPR was attempted.

Simpson joined Artemis at the end of February. He was an Olympic sailor who competed in the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games, where he won a gold and a silver medal. “As an America’s Cup team, we are investing in the team’s future with guys like Andrew,” team CEO Paul Cayard said in a statement at the time. “These young sailors bring talent and enthusiasm to our team. They are the future of the America’s Cup.”

That enthusiasm turned to sadness Thursday as the team vowed to determine just went wrong, and what might be done to ensure the safety of the sailors.

“Our thoughts are with Andrew’s family, who suffered a tragic loss yesterday — of a son, a father, and a husband,” Torbjörn Törnqvist, team chairman, said in a statement. “As our friend and teammate, Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson was central to Artemis Racing, both in the course of racing and our lives. His presence and personality was a binding force and he will be missed. Right now, the primary focus of Artemis Racing is on the well-being of our team members and their families, and the America’s Cup competition will remain second to that.”