In early 2007, Urban Aeronautics announced it’d have an “air jeep” flying car dubbed the X-Hawk ready for flight by 2009. The future’s now, and while the X-Hawk isn’t quite ready, the test mule almost is, and this is it.

The Urban Aeronautics concept for a flying car, or “fancraft” as they like to call it, centers on a ducted fan concept which was tested by the US military long ago with unacceptable results. Fast forward several decades and add much larger control surfaces, high-power and more reliable hardware, much better controls logic combined with the magic of modern computer processing speeds and the concept is no longer so far-fetched.

The Israeli company currently has a proof of concept scale prototype which runs on electricity, but they’re in the final stages of completing a full scale test mule powered by a pair of gas turbine engines which will supposedly be ready for its maiden voyage in about two months. When fully developed, the craft should be able to achieve vertical takeoff, hover, rotate 360 degrees at a standstill, reach speeds up to 115 MPH and drop vertically into a tight urban landing zone.

According to a somewhat confusing Wall Street Journal story, Iran has adopted NSA-like techniques and installed equipment on its national telecommunication network last year that allows it to spy on the online activities and correspondence — including the content of e-mail and VoIP phone calls — of its internet users.

Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, installed the monitoring equipment late last year in Iran’s government-controlled telecom network, Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., but authorities only recently engaged its full capabilities in response to recent protests that have broken out in the country over its presidential election.

The equipment allows the state to conduct deep-packet inspection, which sifts through data as it flows through a network searching for keywords in the content of e-mail and voice transmissions. According to the Journal, Iran seems to be doing this for the entire country from a single choke point. “Seems,” because although the Journal states that Nokia Siemens installed the equipment and that signs indicate the country is conducting deep-packet inspection, the paper also says “it couldn’t be determined whether the equipment from Nokia Siemens Networks is used specifically for deep packet inspection.”