The TEDxAustin talk you mentioned is focused on GPS spoofing to make a receiver think that it is somewhere else. Spoofing in that sense has been around for a long time, and while it is very cool and everything, it isn't what is novel about this paper/attack.
This paper goes from just making a GPS receiver think it is located somewhere else to actually exploiting software vulnerabilities in GPS receivers to cause them to crash and things like that. The attacks are related, but the position based spoofing is just a subset of this work.

I don't think you looked at the paper really. GPS spoofing and jamming are nothing new (as is mentioned in the paper). The new aspect is that there are software attacks that can be done on the receivers. For example, one of the divide by zero errors will cause a denial of service attack on some receivers. This is vastly different from jamming, because the DoS continues even after the transmitter is shut off. Jamming would obviously stop as soon as the transmitter is turned off. That is the new, exciting, and dangerous part of all this.

No look, this is perfect. We convince DHS that the terrorists are trying to develop room temperature superconductors to subvert metal detectors and security checkpoints.

Then, clearly the solution is for DHS to start giving obscene amounts of money to physicists in the USA to develop the technology first! It's pretty much a win-win-win situation.

How do you deal with noise for something this sensitive? If you're trying to measure the sound of a bacterium, and someone coughs, or walks by the room, or a truck drives by, how do you cancel that out?

I guess I just don't see how their SNR can be high enough with something that sensitive.

Although 12 million is certainly a large number, the US has many more travelers than that. In 2009, Atlanta's airport had something like 90M travelers use the airport. That means that one airport has more traffic than all of the airports combined in Israel.

I agree that their airport security model is superior, and maybe it can scale to large airports in the USA, but if we have dozens of airports with more traffic than their busiest airport, scaling is very far from a simple task.

Source

Awesome, thanks! I just looked a bit on their website and didn't see that page where they say it's bistable. That definitely makes it harder for e-ink to compare with this.

What does the article mean by e-ink like power consumption? I can't tell if this technology requires power to remain in a given state, or whether it can be static like e-ink. Although the low power consumption of e-ink displays is largely due to their lack of a backlight, being able to display static content with 0 power consumption is really one of the coolest parts about e-ink tech.

I read the article but it didn't seem to answer this, do any readers know? If it could display static content for free then that would be incredibly awesome.

I don't see too many details in this article, but there was something that sounds awful similar from Carnegie Mellon University a little while back called MULE (Mobile User Location-specific Encryption). http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/group/pub/studer_wisec10.pdf [pdf warning]

ZigBee generally operates at 250mW/24dBm max power. Obviously some devices can be made to broadcast higher energy levels, but a quarter watt tends to be used.

I suppose a citation would be nice, but if you google it, you will find most chipsets have that as their maximum power rating. (And as the signal only needs to reach the home, there is no reason for a stronger signal to be used.)

One step at a time. If it exists, then we can try to understand it more deeply.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sort of invisibility cloak would not be perfect as described.

As light is initially slowed down to make "room" for the invisible event to take place, there is going to be a red-shift in the light because the waves must start arriving more slowly. While this change can be made subtle, that means that an "attacker" needs to either spend a long time slowing down the light, or the "attacker" would only create a small gap in time in which to work.

Still very cool though!

I'm all for more privacy, but all this means is the NSA and those other three letter agencies have decided it's easier to snoop on us without asking Facebook and others simply hand over the data they need.

Great. Now where did I put that tinfoil hat...

I think it's pretty clear that is not what I am saying.

Yes. If their motivation for signing up is to "protect us", then I have a great deal of respect for them. My respect for people willing to give their lives to serve others is not dependent on whether or not the services they provide do us good.

Consider the following scenario. Alice is crossing the street right as an oncoming bus approaches. Bob sees this, jumps in the middle of the road, and pushes Alice out of the way.
Whether or not the bus stops (meaning whether or not Alice was in any real danger). If Bob's intention was to give up his life to save Alice's, then I would have respect for him.

The troops can choose to participate as the "sword" of you will, hoping that they can have a positive effect on their country. While someone who signs up for the military now is most likely going to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, it doesn't change the fact that our armed forces are there to protect us, even if that isn't what our leaders task them to do.

I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to risk their life to try to make our country safer, and whether or not they actually make us safer is irrelevant, so long as their intention is to protect us.