Archive for the 'War' Category
Make Your Time: Hacking Group Purportedly Hacked NSA-Linked Equation Group, Auctioning Cyber Weapons
August 15th, 2016Real or fake, I couldn’t stop chortling while reading the text. I think I know the author. Via: Computerworld: Quite honestly this could be fake – even the broken English announcement could be faked to make the attackers seem to not use English as their native language – but the Shadow Brokers said on GitHub: […]
How CIA’s Palantir Wired Washington
August 14th, 2016Via: Politico: When a little-known Silicon Valley software startup began vying for national security contracts, it went up against an entrenched bureaucracy and opposition from major contractors skilled in the Washington game. But quickly, Palantir began pulling pages from the defense industry’s own playbook — bulking up on lobbyists, challenging the Pentagon’s contracting rules and […]
90-Year-Old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, Says NSA
August 9th, 2016Via: The National Security Archive: The National Security Agency is withholding 90-year-old information on early American cryptanalytic efforts against Russia and the Soviet Union from a 20-year-old document on the grounds that releasing the information could “reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to national security.” Specifically, the NSA claims that the release […]
Quantum Computers: Chips with Built-In Optics
August 9th, 2016In case you don’t know about Lincoln Lab: The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Via: MIT News: Although quantum systems with as many as 12 qubits have been demonstrated in the lab, […]
ISIS Acquires Another U.S. Weapons Cache
August 7th, 2016Via: Reuters: Militants linked to Islamic State have released photos that purport to show weapons and equipment that belonged to American soldiers and were captured by the group in eastern Afghanistan. The photos, which came to light on Saturday, show an American portable rocket launcher, radio, grenades and other gear not commonly used by Afghan […]
MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip
August 5th, 2016Via: IEEE: Applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics heavily depend on lidar, and an expensive lidar module is a major obstacle to their use in commercial products. Our work at MIT’s Photonic Microsystems Group is trying to take these large, expensive, mechanical lidar systems and integrate them on a microchip that can be mass […]
Sea Hunter Unmanned Sub Chaser Completes First Sea Trials
August 3rd, 2016Via: New Atlas: The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) has completed its first round of sea trials, during which main contractor Leidos says it met or surpassed its performance goals. Co-sponsored by DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the autonomous 132-ft (42-m) trimaran, which is designed to track potentially hostile […]
U.S. Sent Pallets of Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed
August 2nd, 2016Via: Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward. Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies […]
Tim Kaine’s Unlikely Biography
August 1st, 2016Via: Mad Cow Productions: A 21-year old Harvard Law School student spending 1981 in Honduras as a Jesuit volunteer is as absurd as an English tutor parachuting before D-Day into Normandy to teach French children when to use “their” and when to use “they’re.” It doesn’t pass the smell test.
1980s Nuclear War Nightmares
August 1st, 2016Reading the piece about the 390th Strategic Missile Wing in Tucson, Arizona reminded me about being somewhat traumatized as a child by seeing news shows on TV discussing nuclear war. Yep, even as a young kid, I used to watch a lot of news on TV and read newspapers and news magazines. I was so […]
