A new study from the Department of Defense revealed that military pilots and ground crews experienced higher rates of certain cancers compared to the general population. Axios: Earlier military studies had not indicated that aviators were at higher risk, though the data has long been sought by those who raised alarm about the rates of cancer they observed among air and ground crew members, according to AP, which first reported the study. The study examined cancer rates among nearly 900,000 air and ground crew from 1992 to 2017. Overall -- compared to the general population after adjusting for age, sex and race -- aircrews saw a 24% higher rate of cancer of all types while ground crews saw a 3% higher rate of cancer of all types. However, both air and ground crews saw "lower or similar" cancer mortality rates for all cancer types compared to the general population.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK government is to invest 900 million pounds in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around 900 million pounds on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defense, including modeling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximize our potential in AI.".

An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.

The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1,000 scientists and postgraduate students were barred from working in the UK last year on national security grounds, amid a major government crackdown on research collaborations with China. Figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were rejected by Foreign Office vetting in 2022, up from 128 in 2020 and just 13 in 2016.

The sharp increase follows a hardening of the government's stance on scientific ties with China, with warnings from MI5 of a growing espionage threat, major research centers being quietly shut down and accusations by a government minister that China's leading genomics company had regularly sought to hack into the NHS's genetic database. Geopolitical tensions stepped up further this week, as the US, Australia and the UK announced a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal aimed at countering China's military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. China said the Aukus plan to build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines was "a path of error and danger."

The Foreign Office declined to give a breakdown by nationality, but data supplied by leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College suggests that, at these institutions at least, Chinese academics account for a majority of those denied clearance. Some have welcomed the policy shift, with one security expert saying the number of academics being barred is "commensurate with the threat." But leading scientists say the scheme is leaving universities struggling to recruit the best talent from abroad. "A majority of applicants are thought to be scientists seeking to move to the UK to take up offers of research degrees or fellowships," adds the Guardian. "But the Guardian is also aware of researchers, including five Chinese scientists at Imperial college, who did not pass clearance despite having already held positions at UK universities for several years -- and who may have had to leave the UK as a result."

Microsoft warned an infamous hacking group that is tied to Russia's military intelligence agency GRU could be gearing up for more ransomware attacks both inside and outside of Ukraine. From a report: Microsoft calls the group Iridium, but it is perhaps best known as Sandworm. It has been accused of attacks on Ukraine's electric power grid and government agencies, the 2018 Winter Olympics and businesses across the globe. Now, it appears to be preparing for a renewed destructive campaign, the software company said in a threat intelligence report on Wednesday. Russian hackers have been accused of bombarding Ukrainian institutions with "wiper malware" and DDoS attacks, a campaign that began even before President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to invade more than a year ago. However, Ukraine's defenses have largely fended off a major cyberwar with the help of foreign tech companies including Microsoft. The ransomware attack on Polish and Ukrainian transport services in October, attributed to Sandworm, may have been "a trial balloon" for further attacks, the report said. Microsoft warned it was a potential precursor to further Russian hacks beyond Ukrainian soil.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Dutch government confirmed for the first time Wednesday it will impose new export controls on microchips manufacturing equipment, bowing to U.S. pressure to block the sale of some of its prized chips printing machines to China. The U.S. and the Netherlands reached an agreement to introduce new export restrictions on advanced chip technology to China at the end of January, but until now, the Dutch government hadn't commented publicly on it. The deal, which also included Japan, involves the only three countries that are home to manufacturers of advanced machines to print microchips. It is a U.S.-led initiative to choke off the supply of cutting-edge chips to China.

"Given the technological developments and geopolitical context, the government has concluded that it is necessary for the (inter)national security to expand the existing export controls on specific manufacturing equipment for semiconductors," Foreign Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher wrote in a letter to Dutch lawmakers published Wednesday evening. The Dutch government wants to prevent Dutch technology from being used in military systems or weapons of mass destruction, Schreinemacher wrote — echoing the U.S. reasoning when it imposed its own export controls in October. The Netherlands also wants to avoid losing its pole position in producing cutting-edge chip manufacturing tools: Schreinemacher said the government wants to uphold "Dutch technological leadership." While China is not explicitly named in Schreinemacher's letter, the new policy is targeted at Chinese efforts to overtake the U.S. and others like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and leading European countries in the global microchips supply chain.

The new export restrictions deal a blow to ASML, the global leader in producing advanced microchips printing machines based in Veldhoven, in southern Netherlands. In the letter, Schreinemacher said the new export control measures include the most advanced deep ultraviolet (DUV) machines, which are part of ASML's advanced chips printers portfolio. The Dutch firm, which is the highest-valued tech company in Europe, already did not receive export licenses for selling its most advanced machines using extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) technology to China since 2019. ASML in a statement confirmed it will now "need to apply for export licenses for shipment of the most advanced immersion DUV systems," but it noted it has not yet received more details about what "most advanced" means.

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government's ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance. WashingtonPost: The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent. Many of the records relate to the Janus program, a project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or IARPA, the high-level research arm of the U.S. intelligence community modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA. Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation's leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the "truly unconstrained face imagery" recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post.

In a 2019 presentation, an IARPA program manager said the goal had been to "dramatically improve" the power and performance of facial recognition systems, with "scaling to support millions of subjects" and the ability to quickly identify faces from partially obstructed angles. One version of the system was trained for "Face ID ... at target distances" of more than a half-mile. To refine the system's capabilities, researchers staged a data-gathering test in 2017, paying dozens of volunteers to simulate real-world scenarios at a Defense Department training facility made to resemble a hospital, a subway station, an outdoor marketplace and a school, the documents show. The test yielded thousands of surveillance videos and images, some of which were captured by a drone. The improved facial recognition system was ultimately folded into a search tool, called Horus, and made available to the Pentagon's Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, which helps provide military technologies to civilian police forces, the documents show. The Horus tool has since been offered for use to at least six federal agencies, and their feedback is "continuing to be used to refine the tool," Department of Homeland Security officials said last year.

The state sponsors titles that cast it in a favorable light and punish indies for depicting a more complex vision of Iranian identity. From a report: Commander of the Resistance: Amerli Battle is a first-person shooter set in Iraq. Launched in 2022, the game pitches players against Islamic State militants laying siege to a town, based on a real-life event that took place in 2014. Its hero -- the commander of the title -- is a real-life figure too: Qasem Soleimani, a major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force under the command of Iran's theocratic leadership. Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, was a powerful figure in the regime -- and a controversial one, declared a terrorist by the US and accused of overseeing human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

The game was produced by Monadian Media, an offshoot of the Basij Cyberspace Organization -- the digital wing of the IRGC's paramilitary group, the Basij's and it is part of an ongoing propaganda effort by the regime to rewrite history and mythologize its leading figures. Facing growing discontent, the Islamic Republic has increasingly invested in producing video games, in the hope that it can use them to influence young people. The games' narratives try to reinforce the religious identity of the nation, to portray domestic opponents -- such as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began last year -- as sectarian extremists, and to rehabilitate figures like Soleimani, a military commander associated with brutal crackdowns. And it has thrust Iran's once-thriving games industry into the midst of a battle over Iranian identity.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Eric Berger: One of the world's most important rocket companies, United Launch Alliance, may be sold later this year. The potential sale has not been disclosed publicly, but three sources confirmed to Ars that potential buyers have been contacted about the opportunity. These sources said a deal is expected to be closed before the end of this year and that investment firm Morgan Stanley and consulting firm Bain & Company are managing the transaction.

The sale of United Launch Alliance, or ULA as it is known within the industry, would mark the end of an era that has lasted for nearly two decades. The company was officially formed in 2005 as part of a deal brokered by the US government, ensuring the military had access to both Atlas and Delta rockets to put national security satellites into space. To form ULA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing merged their launch businesses into a single company, each taking a 50 percent stake. This union was profitable for both parent companies, as ULA held a monopoly on launching national security missions and, effectively, NASA science probes. In return for 100 percent mission success, ULA received large launch contracts and an approximately $1 billion annual subsidy from the US Department of Defense to maintain "launch readiness."

The emergence of SpaceX in the early 2010s with the increasingly reliable Falcon 9 rocket started to disrupt this profitable arrangement. SpaceX sold the Falcon 9 rocket at a substantial discount to ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. The company also successfully sued the US government to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to compete for national security missions, and SpaceX launched its first one in 2017. In recent years, SpaceX has come to dominate United Launch Alliance in terms of cadence. By the end of 2022, the upstart was launching as many rockets each month as ULA launched during a calendar year. During the last four years, in fact, SpaceX has landed more rockets than ULA has launched during its existence. However, ULA still holds a prominent place in the global launch industry, and there will likely be no shortage of suitors.

The Wikimedia Foundation was fined 2 million roubles ($27,000) by a Russian court on Tuesday after the authorities accused it of failing to delete "misinformation" about the Russian military from Wikipedia, the courts service said. From a report: Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Russia introduced sweeping new laws restricting what people can report about the conflict, fining or blocking websites that spread information at odds with the Kremlin's official narrative. Wikimedia, which owns Wikipedia, was already fined last year after it failed to delete two articles related to the war, including one on "evaluations of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine." The latest fine was imposed after the authorities accused Wikipedia of "spreading misinformation" in articles about Russian military units, Wikimedia Russia said.

The U.S. Department of Defense secured an exposed server on Monday that was spilling internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks, TechCrunch reported Tuesday. From a report: The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft's Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. [...] But a misconfiguration left the server without a password, allowing anyone on the internet access to the sensitive mailbox data inside using only a web browser, just by knowing its IP address.

[...] The server was packed with internal military email messages, dating back years, some of which contained sensitive personnel information. One of the exposed files included a completed SF-86 questionnaire, which are filled out by federal employees seeking a security clearance and contain highly sensitive personal and health information for vetting individuals before they are cleared to handle classified information.

"The United States on Friday called off the search for two of the unidentified flying objects that the military shot out of the sky this month," reports the New York Times.

NBC News adds that "The end of recovery efforts could mean the country may never know what, exactly, the objects were, how they were propelled, and where they came from." The conclusion applies to airborne objects shot down by U.S. fighter jets Feb. 10 near Deadhorse, Alaska, and Feb. 12 over Lake Huron, off the coast of Michigan. "The U.S. military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate debris," the command said. Efforts in Deadhorse were hampered by Arctic conditions and sea ice instability, it said.

The recommendation does not cover the Feb. 4 takedown of what the United States has described as a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Military officials said recovery efforts in the Atlantic, which ended Thursday, were successful, and recovered items were taken to an FBI lab "for counterintelligence exploitation," according to the statement Friday.... One other incident involving the takedown of an airborne object took place in Canadian airspace Feb. 11 and is the purview of Canadian authorities.

The Biden administration announced Monday it was forming an interagency group to address the recent cluster and future unidentified objects.
The New York Times includes this response from National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby: Asked if the Biden administration overreacted in shooting down the objects or had any regrets, Mr. Kirby said the craft were at altitudes that could affect civilian aircraft and could have flown over military spaces.

New submitter kalieaire writes: Steve Trimble of Aviation week reports that a Hobby Club's missing ballon might have been inadvertently targeted as a malicious UFO and subsequently shot down. When Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS) company founder, Ron Meadows, reached out to Gov't resources at the FBI and DoD, they were brushed off. "I'm guessing probably they were pico balloons," said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. According to Trimble, the description of all three UFOs shot down during 2/10-12 match the description of pico balloon models which can be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type. "Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade," writes Trimble. He continues: Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.

The balloons can come in several forms. Some enthusiasts still use common, Mylar party balloons, with a set of published calculations to determine the amount of gas to inject. But the round-shaped Mylar balloons often are unable to ascend higher than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to different materials. [...] In fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries -- North Korea, Yemen and the UK -- restrict transmissions from balloons in their airspace, so the community has integrated geofencing software into the tracking devices. The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace. On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects "could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose," but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.

The U.S. government on Thursday issued a declaration on the responsible use of artficial intelligence (AI) in the military, which would include "human accountability." From a report: "We invite all states to join us in implementing international norms, as it pertains to military development and use of AI" and autononous weapons, said Bonnie Jenkins, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: ASML, one of the world's most critical semiconductor firms, said Wednesday that it recently discovered that a former employee in China had misappropriated data related to its proprietary technology. The Dutch firm said that it does not believe the alleged misappropriation is material to its business. "We have experienced unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China," ASML said in its annual report. "However, as a result of the security incident, certain export control regulations may have been violated. ASML has therefore reported the incident to relevant authorities." The data that was misappropriated involved documents. ASML did not expand on the details.

The security incident comes at a sensitive time for ASML and the government of the Netherlands which has been caught in the middle of a battle for tech supremacy between the U.S. and China. Semiconductors are very much part of that rivalry. ASML holds a unique position in the chip supply chain. The company makes a tool called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that is required to make the most advanced semiconductors, such as those manufactured by TSMC. ASML is the only company in the world that produces this piece of kit. The U.S. is worried that if ASML ships the machines to China, chipmakers in the country could begin to manufacture the most advanced semiconductors in the world, which have extensive military and advanced artificial intelligence applications. "With ASML's unique position and the growing geopolitical tensions in the semiconductor industry, we see increasing security risk trends, ranging from ransomware and phishing attacks to attempts to acquire intellectual property or disrupt business continuity," a spokesperson for the company said.

The U.S. military shot down another high-altitude object Sunday, reports CNN — this one flying near Michigan.

"The operation marks the third day in a row that an unidentified object was shot down over North American airspace." Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said Sunday that the operation to down the object over Lake Huron was carried out by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard.... The object was flying at 20,000 feet over Michigan's Upper Peninsula and was about to go over Lake Huron when it was neutralized, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

The object was "octagonal" with strings hanging off and no discernable payload, according to the official and another source briefed on the matter. While the U.S. has no indication that the object had surveillance capabilities, that has not been ruled out yet.
Why have so many flying objects been spotted in the last week? The Washington Post says the Chinese spy balloon and subsequently-spotted objects "have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors, a U.S. official said Saturday." The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that sensory equipment absorbs a lot of raw data, and filters are used so humans and machines can make sense of what is collected. But that process always runs the risk of leaving out something important, the official said.

"We basically opened the filters," the official added, much like a car buyer unchecking boxes on a website to broaden the parameters of what can be searched. That change does not yet fully answer what is going on, the official cautioned, and whether stepping back to look at more data is yielding more hits — or if these latest incursions are part of a more deliberate action by an unknown country or adversary....

The official said the current U.S. assessment is the objects are not military threats.

CNN reports: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday that an "unidentified object" had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet over Canadian airspace on his orders.... "Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object," Trudeau said on Twitter....

A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets "monitored the object" with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder's statement said, "tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object."

"Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object. A U.S. F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile," his statement added....

It is not clear what the object is or whether it is related to the spy balloon shot down last week or the unidentified object shot down over Alaska on Friday.
"Saturday's incident follows the downing of another unidentified object on Friday over Alaska, and the shoot-down of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 by a US F-22 fighter jet."

"The waiting time for general purpose quantum computers is getting shorter, but they are still probably decades away," notes Security Week.

But "The arrival of cryptanalytically-relevant quantum computers that will herald the cryptopocalypse will be much sooner — possibly less than a decade." It is important to note that all PKI-encrypted data that has already been harvested by adversaries is already lost. We can do nothing about the past; we can only attempt to protect the future.... [T]his is not a threat for the future — the threat exists today. Adversaries are known to be stealing and storing encrypted data with the knowledge that within a few years they will be able to access the raw data. This is known as the 'harvest now, decrypt later' threat. Intellectual property and commercial plans — not to mention military secrets — will still be valuable to adversaries when the cryptopocalypse happens.

The one thing we can say with certainty is that it definitely won't happen in 2023 — probably. That probably comes from not knowing for certain what stage in the journey to quantum computing has been achieved by foreign nations or their intelligence agencies — and they're not likely to tell us. Nevertheless, it is assumed that nobody yet has a quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor's algorithm and crack PKI encryption in a meaningful timeframe. It is likely that such computers may become available as soon as three to five years. Most predictions suggest ten years.

Note that a specialized quantum computer designed specifically for Shor does not need to be as powerful as a general-purpose quantum computer — which is more likely to be 20 to 30 years away.... "Quantum computing is not, yet, to the point of rendering conventional encryption useless, at least that we know of, but it is heading that way," comments Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber. Skip Sanzeri, co-founder and COO at QuSecure, warns that the threat to current encryption is not limited to quantum decryption. "New approaches are being developed promising the same post-quantum cybersecurity threats as a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, only much sooner," he said. "It is also believed that quantum advancements don't have to directly decrypt today's encryption. If they weaken it by suggesting or probabilistically finding some better seeds for a classical algorithm (like the sieve) and make that more efficient, that can result in a successful attack. And it's no stretch to predict, speaking of predictions, that people are going to find ways to hack our encryption that we don't even know about yet."

Steve Weston, co-founder and CTO at Incrypteon, offers a possible illustration. "Where is the threat in 2023 and beyond?" he asks. "Is it the threat from quantum computers, or is the bigger threat from AI? An analysis of cryptoanalysis and code breaking over the last 40 years shows how AI is used now, and will be more so in the future."
The article warns that "the coming cryptopocalypse requires organizations to transition from known quantum-vulnerable encryption (such as current PKI standards) to something that is at least quantum safe if not quantum secure." (The chief revenue officer at Quintessence Labs tells the site that symmetric encryption like AES-256 "is theorized to be quantum safe, but one can speculate that key sizes will soon double.")

"The only quantum secure cryptography known is the one-time pad."

Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the article.

An anonymous officer writes in an opinion piece via Military.com: It was the "reply-all" heard around the world. Around 06:30 Eastern time Feb. 2, approximately 13,000 Army inboxes pinged with an email from an unfamiliar sender. It was from a U.S. Army captain, asking to be removed from a distribution list. It initially seemed as though some unfortunate soul had inadvertently hit "reply-all" and made an embarrassing mistake. What followed can really be described only as professional anarchy, as thousands of inboxes became buried in an avalanche of email replies. Someone appears to have unwittingly edited an email distribution list, entitled "FA57 Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program," routing replies back to the entire list.

Most Army officers receive emails from human resources managers from time to time, usually sent using the blind copy (BCC) address line with replies routed to specific inboxes, preventing someone from accidentally triggering the mayhem that unfolded Feb. 2. The voluntary incentive program list, however, hadn't been so prudently designed and, in addition to 13,000 Army captains and some newly promoted majors, a single chief warrant officer, a Space Force captain and a specialist began to have their inboxes groan under the weight of inbound traffic. Within a few short hours of the initial email, predictable hilarity ensued. Hundreds of Army captains were sending emails asking to be removed from the distro list. In short order, hundreds of other captains replied, demanding that everyone stop hitting "reply-all" and berating their peers' professionalism (oblivious to the fact that they were also part of the problem). Many others found humor in the event, writing poems, sending memes and adding snarky comments to the growing dumpster fire. Before long, the ever-popular U.S. Army WTF! Moments Facebook page picked up on the mayhem and posted one of the memes that had been circulating in the email thread.

By 7 p.m. Eastern time, more than 1,000 emails had been blasted out to this massive group of Army officers. Those in different time zones (like Hawaii) came into work and were quickly overwhelmed by the deluge of emails clogging their inboxes. Some of the humorless officers resorted to typing in all caps "PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS DISTRO," prompting at least two to three sarcastic replies in return. Other captains took the opportunity to blast out helpful (or not so helpful) instructions on how to properly create email sorting rules in Outlook. A few intrepid officers tried to Rickroll everyone, and one even wrote new lyrics to the tune of an Eminem song. A particularly funny officer wrote a Nigerian prince scheme email and blasted it out to the group. Eventually, someone created and shared a Microsoft Teams group to move the devolving conversation to a new forum, quickly amassing more than 1,700 members. What started off as a gloriously chaotic email chain quickly turned into one the largest and most successful professional networking opportunities most of us have ever seen. Officers from multiple branches and functional areas across the globe took to the Microsoft Teams page, sharing useful products, making professional connections, and generally raising everyone's esprit de corps. The group's creator even started a petition to promote the one specialist who was inadvertently added to the distro list.

According to CNBC, the United States is placing sanctions on six Chinese tech companies for supporting spy balloon programs that have spanned more than 40 countries. The development comes less than a week after the U.S. military used fighter jets to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon along the South Carolina coast. From the report: "The Commerce Department will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security and sovereignty," said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves. "The Entity List is a powerful tool for identifying and cutting off actors that seek to use their access to global markets to do harm and threaten American national security. We will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security." Earlier today, a U.S. military F-22 shot down a second "high altitude object" in American airspace over Alaska.

"We're calling this an object because that's the best description we have right now," said White House spokesman John Kirby. He also said U.S. officials did not yet know which nation or group was responsible for it.

The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Thursday night at the order of President Biden, according to a U.S. official. From a report: The U.S. official said it was not confirmed if the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft. Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object downed "out of an abundance of caution," the official said. The action comes less than a week after a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had traversed the United States, according to three American officials. The latest breach, officials said, took place Thursday night, over Alaska. One official described it as a "fast-moving" situation that was still developing. It is not clear if the object was from an adversarial power, or a commercial or research operation that has gone astray, the official said.