Archive for the 'War' Category
At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
March 17th, 2018Via: Foto: Ron Haeberle was a combat photographer in Vietnam when he and the Army unit he was riding with — Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment — landed near the hamlet of My Lai on the morning of March 16, 1968. Villagers weren’t alarmed; American GIs had visited the region near the central […]
Palantir Wins $876 Million U.S. Army Contract
March 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army. Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, […]
Trump Says Prepared to Meet North Korea’s Kim in First-Ever Summit
March 8th, 2018Via: Reuters: President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was prepared to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first U.S.-North Korea summit, marking a potentially dramatic breakthrough in nuclear tensions with Pyongyang. Kim has committed to “denuclearization” and to suspending nuclear or missile tests, South Korea’s National Security Office head Chung Eui-yong […]
Google’s AI Is Being Used by U.S. Military Drone Program
March 8th, 2018“For non-offensive uses only.” *snort* Via: Guardian: Google’s artificial intelligence technologies are being used by the US military for one of its drone projects, causing controversy both inside and outside the company. Google’s TensorFlow AI systems are being used by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven, which was established in July last year […]
Tor Is a Foreign Policy Weapon of the U.S. Government
March 2nd, 2018Via: Yasha Levine: For years, the Tor Project — along with other U.S. government crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First […]
Los Angeles: How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function?
March 1st, 2018How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function? Answer: With favelas and airmobile paramilitary forces. Most Americans couldn’t identify Brazil on a map, but the sprawling U.S. ghettos will increasingly look like Rio. Via: Los Angeles Times: Homelessness affects the lives of all Angelenos, not just those forced to live on the […]
Former Google Exec: Don’t Worry About Terminator Robots for Another Decade or Two
March 1st, 2018Via: Defense News: Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and military robotics have some concerned that the development of Terminator-like killer robots will be humankind’s downfall. But that doesn’t seem to worry Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, who addressed the impact of technology on democracy at the Feb. 16-18 Munich […]
Brazil Military Takes Control of Rio de Janeiro’s Security
February 16th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Brazil’s military will take control of public security in the state of Rio de Janeiro as a wave of violence rattles the population and dominates media coverage ahead of this year’s presidential election. President Michel Temer will issue a decree on Friday putting the military in charge of Rio’s security forces, his press […]
Hey Buddy, Can You Give Me a Hand?
February 12th, 2018Via: Boston Dynamics:
Israeli Jet Shot Down After Bombing Iranian Site in Syria
February 10th, 2018Via: Reuters: Anti-aircraft fire downed an Israeli warplane returning from a bombing raid on Iran-backed positions in Syria on Saturday in the most serious confrontations yet between Israel and Iranian-backed forces based across the border. The F-16, one of at least eight Israeli planes despatched in response to what Israel said was an Iranian drone’s […]
