Sapere Aude
Tag: military
The previous generation of night vision featured a greenish glow, because the images were generated by electrons traveling through a green phosphors tube. The Army’s new tech uses a white phosphors tube. Coupled with whatever secretive image-enhancing technology they’re using, the contrast in the rotoscoping-reminiscent images is startlingly good, and the resolution has been improved as well.
This carefully documents everything the soldiers of a particular conflict, place and time had to carry with them.
Creating that kind of capacity in a matter of weeks in unlike anything the Army Corps of Engineers has ever done before. It’s also exactly what the Corps was built to do.
US officials constantly said they were making progress during the war in Afghanistan. They were not, and they knew it
we should probably talk about the time that Ketchum found $1b worth of LSD, enough to “intoxicate several 100m people”, just sitting in his office—and the fact that it disappeared without explanation.
Libratus’s poker technique suggests Strategy Robot might deliver military personnel some surprising recommendations. Pro players who took on the bot found that it flipped unnervingly between tame and hyper-aggressive tactics, all the while relentlessly notching up wins as it calculated paths to victory. “It’s weird because it doesn’t seem that it overwhelms you, but then you look at the score and you realize what’s happened”.
The Pentagon has suddenly started uploading malware samples from APTs and other nation-state sources to the website VirusTotal, which is essentially a malware zoo that’s used by security pros and antivirus/malware detection engines to gain a better understanding of the threat landscape. This feels like an example of the US’s new strategy of actively harassing foreign government actors. By making their malware public, the US is forcing them to continually find and use new vulnerabilities.
During the refueling and afterward, the B-2 pilots spoke with European air traffic control. The skies cleared. 400km north of the Libyan coastline, the pilots turned south, switched off their transponders, and disappeared from air-traffic-control radar. They had now been flying for 15 hours. Still offshore, they went into a holding pattern that had been planned as a cushion to allow them to get the timing just right. It was nearly midnight Zulu Time—2 in the morning local time. They heard the mission controller order the drones to clear out to the south, and authorize them to return immediately after the strike to kill anyone who survived. The drones were MQ-9 Reapers armed with laser-guided supersonic Hellfire missiles. Their pilots were sitting in front of control panels back in the United States. Scatter was surprised by the blanket authorization to fire. He had never heard that one before.
Strikes with microwaves more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety. In particular, a growing number of analysts cite an eerie phenomenon known as the Frey effect, named after Allan H. Frey, an American scientist. Long ago, he found that microwaves can trick the brain into perceiving what seem to be ordinary sounds. The false sensations may account for a defining symptom of the diplomatic incidents — the perception of loud noises, including ringing, buzzing and grinding. Initially, experts cited those symptoms as evidence of stealthy attacks with sonic weapons.
the incredible true story behind the movie War Dogs.
The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan. After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with 5M rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army. Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. The shipment was part of a $30M contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America’s allies in Afghanistan. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. After 6 years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. For the Bush administration, the ammunition was part of a desperate, last-ditch push to turn the war around before the US presidential election the following year. To Packouz and Diveroli, the shipment was part of a major arms deal that promised to make them seriously rich.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 