The seriousness of videogames is often called into question. While it's assured that most of us are safe from having our hearts ripped by the bare hands of some metal faced criminal, we're also aware that eating a mushroom won't make us grow in size (though some might make us THINK we do).
In order to immerse their audience in the world of the game, companies today go above and beyond the "call of duty" to give as much realism as afforded by technology. Case in point, game maker Activision has previously hired military veterans to act as consultants to ensure realism in their Call of Duty series.
The Call of Duty series as a whole is often called into question with regards to whether or not it's realistic, especially with the plot for its upcoming Black Ops 2. Planned for release this fall, Black Ops 2's plot centers around a terrorist who manages to infiltrate America's drone network, and use it against us. We'd like to think that this is a far fetched plot, or at least an incredibly difficult to achieve one, but a team from the University of Texas has recently proven otherwise.
One Professor Todd Humphreys and a group of researchers, with a budget of a measely $1000, managed to build a "spoofer" that could take control of a UAV owned by the college. According to a statement from the university, a spoofer is a device that "creates false civil GPS signals that trick the vehicle's GPS receiver into thinking nothing is amiss--even as it steers a new navigational course induced by the outside hacker." And that's exactly what they were able to do with the UAV. The really impressive part? Their audience was the US Department of Homeland Security.
"Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane," Humphreys told Fox News, proving that the scenario in Black Ops 2 is entirely plausible. "In five or ten years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace," said the professor. "Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us."
That's...intimidating. Hopefully the University is paying the professor well. Otherwise, I think we have a new plot for Expendables 3.
