[Update: This story did indeed turn out to be a hoax, which duped a number of publications as the blog posts were published three days prior to April Fools. Parrot declined to comment on requests for clarification.]

Residents of Auvergne, a province in south central France, may soon receive their daily paper by drone.

According to a blog post published yesterday, local postal service La Poste Groupe has been working for several years to modernize its delivery processes. A plan has been hatched to implement paper delivery by drone in early May with the help of local volunteers, and tests are already underway.

The drone is a quadricopter, which can be controlled by iPod touch, iPhone, iPad and Android devices, and costs over $300. It is manufactured by Parrot.com, a French wireless devices maker that also announced a partnership with La Poste this morning.

We have not heard back from Parrot.com after reaching out for comment. It’s not quite April Fools — but there are legal issues to consider with this insane (but awesome) idea.

French Internet personalities say they will national attention to the crazy experiment, including Olivier Bernasson, founder and CEO of online store Pecheur.com.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in private markets — not just in covert government operations. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported that drones would prove useful for nonmilitary tasks, such as wildlife-tracking or emergency rescue efforts.

The primary impediments were a short battery life and flight time — often 30 minutes or less.

Today, thousands of amateur drone hobbyists are sharing ideas on websites like DIYdrones.com. And as the technology evolves, the FAA is working with private industry to relax guidelines for personal drones by the end of this year.

So someday soon you might receive your daily paper from a silent, miniature object from above. Let’s just hope it doesn’t drop on an unsuspecting person’s head!

Images via La Poste / Parrot.com 

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has granted $6 million to Professor Franz Franchetti to develop software that protects unmanned ground vehicles and high-end cars from digital threats. Franchetti is an associate research professor the department of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

“This is an extremely challenging project as we work to develop secure robotic systems that are resilient to cyberattacks,” he said in a statement.

Over the past five years, the U.S. military has focused on unmanned vehicles such as airborne drones because they cost less, are smaller, and allow military personnel to operate them from afar. This removes them from harm’s way and makes high-risk missions more realistic options. However, the technology that helps the vehicles work is also hackable, which provides a significant threat to military security and safety.

A recent study by the U.S. Commerce Department found that cyberthreats cost billions of dollars in lost yearly revenues and threaten not only our economy but our security as well. A Carnegie Mellon release said, “Experts fear a click of a simple computer mouse could ultimately explode a fuel refinery, blind air traffic controllers, or jam an important power grid.”

DARPA supports the development of a number of tech projects, such as a “robo-horse of doom” and funneling $3.5 million into maker-haven TechShop to create “insta-factories for weapons systems.” With this contract, Franchetti’s team will develop verification tools such as virtual high-assurance sensors and automatic software systems “to help computers figure out that they are under attack and to help them survive and continue operating.”

Carnegie Mellon University is a private institution based in Pittsburgh, Penn. that’s well known for its engineering programs. Read the press release. 

Photo credit: The U.S. Army/Flickr