Tag: military

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

zero-knowledge proofs are one of the most powerful tools cryptographers have ever devised. But unfortunately they’re also relatively poorly understood. In this series of posts I’m going try to give a (mostly) non-mathematical description of what ZK proofs are, and what makes them so special. In this post and the next I’ll talk about some of the ZK protocols we actually use.

2016-09-20: how do you inspect nuclear weapons without learning the secrets of their design? enter zero knowledge proofs.

The female warlord

Commander Pigeon is a collector of lost and exiled men. The quietest soldier once belonged to the Taliban. He had been captured by local police, escaped, and having heard about Commander Pigeon, walked km to reach her home. He fell to his knees and begged for protection. She made him swear loyalty. I asked how she knew he wouldn’t rebel. “I’m watching him closely. I’m converting Taliban to normal people.”

$40b Missile Defense unreliable

Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system’s performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the 8 tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, 5 have been failures.

awkward for international relations, given that this missile defense system was supposed to keep others in check, both rogue and not.

Railguns

a railgun can accelerate projectiles to 8500 kph for 1% of the price of a missile. only ICBM are faster, at 24k kph. rail guns have been a SF staple for a long time.

The Navy will fire its electromagnetic railgun from a joint high speed vessel in 2016 as part of a broader effort to develop the long-range, high-energy weapon.

Losing a plane in 2014

all this endless nattering about “flight 370” makes you wonder what the us military really knows. i’d be shocked if they didn’t have the capability to track any object of that size anywhere in the world, but won’t reveal it to tip others off. just consider the commercially available data from skybox. military hardware is typically a few orders of magnitude more advanced.

either way, this will be one of the last times we lose track of something of that size. it’s an embarrassment, really, size of the ocean notwithstanding.