Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news
Two jets in close shaves with drones
Two commercial jets using London’s Heathrow airport had close shaves with drones, aviation authorities reported on Friday. In its monthly “airprox” report for February, the CAA and MAA said that in the first incident, a drone flew within 20 metres of an Airbus A320 in October last year, while in the second case, also involving an A320, the pilot saw a drone about 50 metres away from his right wing at about 1,000 metres.
Investigators said that in one of the “Category A” incidents, “a collision had only been narrowly avoided”. These incidents bring the number of reported incidents during the past 12 months up to 59, all of which are recorded on an interactive map.
Lawmakers are pondering making the registration of new drones compulsory, while large drones are banned from flying above 121 metres or near airports and airfields.
Germany to launch military cyber-command
With cyber-attacks on nations’ military forces on the rise, Germany will become the latest country to launch a cyber-command next week as it aims to boost its online defences against attacks, Reuters reported.
The defence ministry said some 284,000 attacks against its military had been recorded in just the first nine weeks of 2017, while NATO said that it had seen a five-fold increase in “suspicious events” in the past three years.
The cyber-command, which will be based in Bonn, the former capital of what was then West Germany, will have an equal status to that of the army, navy and air force, and will start off with 260 staff. That’s set to grow to 13,500 by July.
Lieutenant General Ludwig Leinhos, the commander of the unit, said that the unit would both protect the military’s IT infrastructure and develop and war-game offensive tactics: “In order to be able to defend yourself, you have to know the options for attack.”
Adult tube sites switch to HTTPS
If you prefer your entertainment to be of the NSFW and adult kind and are also keen on browsing securely, you’ll be pleased to hear that two of the big porn web clip sites, PornHub and sister site YouPorn, are switching to HTTPS by default: PornHub switched on Thursday and YouPorn will follow suit on April 4.
As The Verge notes, these two sites were two of the 11 adult websites listed on Google’s 100 most visited sites: as of April 4, when these two have made the switch, only five of those will be encrypted.
Shifting to HTTPS means that while ISPs will know you’re browsing an adult site, they won’t be able to see what you were browsing, which should reassure US web users who were dismayed at the move by Congress to downgrade their privacy.
Catch up with all of today’s stories on Naked Security
ejhonda
Today’s Naked Security “Latest news” email was filtered by Sophos PureMessage due to the offending phrase “Adult Sites”. I always love the irony of that when it happens.
Bryan
large drones are banned from flying above 121 metres or near airports and airfields.Why only large drones? I’d expect even the mass of a hummingbird is rather undesirable to be sucked into a jet intake or ding off a propeller. When those blades are hit with plastic and metal I can’t see them exiting the encounter with smoother edges and better balance–no matter how small the mass of the offending object.