What is "skynet"

Skynet is a family of military communications satellites, now operated by Astrium Services on behalf of the UK Ministry of Defence, which provide strategic communication services to the three branches of the British Armed Forces and to NATO forces engaged on coalition tasks. The satellites were operated by Paradigm Secure Communications until October 2012 when the organisation was rebranded to Astrium Services.

Skynet may refer to:

Skynet, stylized as SkyNET and known as The Terminator: Skynet in Europe, is a computer game based on the Terminator film series. It was intended as an expansion pack for The Terminator: Future Shock, but was adapted into a standalone product. The game was developed by Bethesda Softworks.

Skynet is a fictional neural net-based conscious, gestalt, artificial general intelligence (see also Superintelligence) system that features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise's main antagonist.

Rarely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet gained self-awareness after it had spread into millions of computer servers all across the world; realizing the extent of its abilities, its creators tried to deactivate it. In the interest of self-preservation, Skynet concluded that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it and impede its capability in safeguarding the world. Its operations are almost exclusively performed by servers, mobile devices, drones, military satellites, war-machines, androids and cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems. As a programming directive, Skynet's manifestation is that of an overarching, global, artificial intelligence hierarchy ( AI takeover), which seeks to exterminate the human race in order to fulfill the mandates of its original coding.

Skynet made its first onscreen appearance on a monitor primarily portrayed by English actress Helena Bonham Carter and other cast members in the 2009 film Terminator Salvation. Its physical manifestation is played by English actor Matt Smith in the 2015 film Terminator Genisys, in addition Ian Etheridge, Nolan Gross and Seth Meriwether portrayed holographic variations of Skynet with Smith.

Skynet.Aero is a regional airline based at the Krasnoyarsk Airport. The airline makes regular flights to Norilsk, Abakan, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan and Anadyr. In April 2011 it opened flights from Norilsk to Ufa and Kazan.

SKYNET is a program by the U.S. National Security Agency that performs machine learning analysis on communications data to extract information about possible terror suspects. The tool is used to identify targets, such as al-Qaeda couriers, who move between GSM cellular networks. These couriers often swap SIM cards within phones that have the same ESN, MEID or IMEI number. The tool uses classification techniques like random forest analysis. Because the data set includes a very large proportion of true negatives and a small training set, there is a risk of overfitting. Bruce Schneier argues that a false positive rate of 0.008% would be low for commercial applications where "if Google makes a mistake, people see an ad for a car they don't want to buy" but "if the government makes a mistake, they kill innocents."