An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The UK has "no chance in hell" of becoming technologically sovereign, Hermann Hauser, the co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners and Acorn Computers, said at Bloomberg's Technology Summit in London. Hauser emphasized the need for Europe and the UK to have access to critical technologies so it is not dependent on countries like the US. He mentioned former US President Donald Trump, who he said used semiconductor design software as "a weapon to force other countries including Britain to do what he wants."

"These dependencies are as severe now as military occupation was in the past," Hauser said. "And we just have to find our own independent access to critical technologies." One question countries have to ask themselves if whether they have all the critical technologies needed to run a country and its economy. "The answer for Britain" is "absolutely no, there is no chance in hell that Britain could ever become technologically sovereign," he said. Hauser added that Europe is clearly in a recession that could last a year or two. "It's difficult to know for how long with so many imponderables." "The UK in particular is in this very stormy period of having a financially undereducated chancellor, who goes by neoliberal ideology rather than rational decision making so that doesn't help," he added. "The UK has struggled to keep its tech firms owned by local investors," notes Bloomberg. "Arm, one of the most significant global tech companies, is currently being prepped to be floated in the US by its Japanese owner SoftBank."

"French firm Schneider Electric SE has recently agreed to buy out minority shareholders in Aveva Group Plc, currently the UK's largest listed tech firm, in a deal that values the industrial software company at $10.8 billion."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, were exposed to potentially harmful radiation while staying at the US ambassador's residence in Moscow in 1959, according to declassified Secret Service documents. Nixon, who was vice-president at the time, was not informed of the threat, and the state department was only informed in 1976, when a member of his Secret Service detail, James Golden, revealed that detection equipment had measured significant levels of radiation in and around the Nixons' sleeping quarters at the residence, Spaso House. Golden said he was later told by the state department that he had been exposed to "massive dosages" of ionizing radiation produced by an atomic battery used by Soviet spies to power bugging devices hidden in the building. However, Golden had doubts about that explanation and it was not confirmed.

After Secret Service agents denounced Soviet dirty tricks in earshot of the listening devices in the residence, the radiation stopped. "We sat down on the beds facing each other and began berating the Russians in loud voices cursing them for pulling a trick like this and wondering in loud voices why they were taking us for fools and asking each other if they thought they were going to get away with doing this," Golden testified. Before his Moscow visit, Nixon was asked by another member of his Secret Service detail, John Sherwood, whether he wanted radiation detection devices taken on the trip. Sherwood pointed out that Soviet officials visiting the US had asked for Geiger counters. The vice-president turned down Geiger counters, but yes to more discreet dosimeters -- though he said he would not wear one himself and did not want it known that the matter had been discussed.

On the first evening of the visit, on 23 July 1959, the dosimeter readings climbed rapidly, leading a senior military official in the entourage, Adm Hyman Rickover, an expert on nuclear naval propulsion, to suspect that there had been a nuclear accident. Rickover and the US ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, agreed not to tell Nixon. Golden was skeptical of the analysis by the state department's medical division that the radiation came from atomic batteries used to power listening devices inside Spaso House. He pointed out that the radiation had stopped while he was in the building, so no one could have come in and removed the batteries. He concluded the state department experts were not being frank with him. The incident was reported after Golden's revelations in 1976, but this is the first time the underlying documentation has been made available online, after a request to the Nixon presidential library from the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

A growing body of evidence suggests that pro-Russian hackers and online activists are working with the country's military intelligence agency, according to researchers at Google. From a report: Western officials and security experts are interested in the possible Kremlin links because it would help explain Moscow's intentions both inside and outside Ukraine despite recent military setbacks that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin this week to announce a mobilization push. Officials in the U.S. and Europe have warned throughout the war that Russian hackers could lash out against Ukraine's allies by targeting critical infrastructure and governments with cyberattacks, but so far that has largely failed to materialize.

Over the past few months, Google's Mandiant cybersecurity group has observed apparent coordination between pro-Russian hacking groups -- ostensibly comprising patriotic citizen hackers -- and cyber break-ins by Russia's military intelligence agency, or GRU. In four instances, Mandiant says it observed hacking activity linked to the GRU in which malicious "wiper" software was installed on a victim's network. The initial wiper software caused disruption by destroying computer systems across the organization. Then, the hacktivists entered the picture. After each of these hacks -- within 24 hours of the wiping -- the hacktivist organizations have published data stolen from the same organizations.

The military's innovation office is launching a sweeping review of cryptocurrencies to assess threats to national security and law enforcement posed by the rise of digital assets, the Washington Post reported Friday. From the report: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- better known as DARPA, the office that developed the earliest technology undergirding the internet -- has hired crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital to conduct the year-long project. The company will develop tools that give the Pentagon a granular view of crypto markets' inner workings, in part to help authorities crack down on illicit uses of digital assets. "The program underway here involves mapping out the cryptocurrency universe in some detail," Mark Flood, a program manager with the agency, said in an interview with The Washington Post. Beyond fighting illicit finance, the office aims to use the data for insights into dynamics shaping traditional financial markets, where detailed information is harder to gather. The deal is the latest evidence that federal agencies are ramping up efforts to thwart rogue regimes, terrorists and other criminal actors using crypto to fund their operations.

A cache of nearly 160,000 files from Russia's powerful internet regulator provides a rare glimpse inside Vladimir V. Putin's digital crackdown. The New York Times: Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia's expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work. Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia's 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest. Then they compiled their findings. One report about the "destabilization of Russian society" pointed to an editorial from a news site deemed "oppositional" to the government that said President Vladimir V. Putin was pursuing his own self-interest by invading Ukraine. A dossier elsewhere on file detailed who owned the site and where they lived. Another Feb. 28 dispatch, titled "Presence of Protest Moods," warned that some had expressed support for demonstrators and "spoke about the need to stop the war." The report was among nearly 160,000 records from the Bashkortostan office of Russia's powerful internet regulator, Roskomnadzor.

Together the documents detail the inner workings of a critical facet of Mr. Putin's surveillance and censorship system, which his government uses to find and track opponents, squash dissent and suppress independent information even in the country's furthest reaches. The leak of the agency's documents "is just like a small keyhole look into the actual scale of the censorship and internet surveillance in Russia," said Leonid Volkov, who is named in the records and is the chief of staff for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. "It's much bigger," he said. Roskomnadzor's activities have catapulted Russia, along with authoritarian countries like China and Iran, to the forefront of nations that aggressively use technology as a tool of repression. Since the agency was established in 2008, Mr. Putin has turned it into an essential lever to tighten his grip on power as he has transformed Russia into an even more authoritarian state. The internet regulator is part of a larger tech apparatus that Mr. Putin has built over the years, which also includes a domestic spying system that intercepts phone calls and internet traffic, online disinformation campaigns and the hacking of other nations' government systems. The agency's role in this digital dragnet is more extensive than previously known, according to the records.

It has morphed over the years from a sleepy telecom regulator into a full-blown intelligence agency, closely monitoring websites, social media and news outlets, and labeling them as "pro-government," "anti-government" or "apolitical." Roskomnadzor has also worked to unmask and surveil people behind anti-government accounts and provided detailed information on critics' online activities to security agencies, according to the documents. That has supplemented real-world actions, with those surveilled coming under attack for speaking out online. Some have then been arrested by the police and held for months. Others have fled Russia for fear of prosecution. The files reveal a particular obsession with Mr. Navalny and show what happens when the weight of Russia's security state is placed on one target. The system is built to control outbursts like the one this week, when protesters across Russia rallied against a new policy that would press roughly 300,000 people into military service for the war in Ukraine. At least 1,200 people have already been detained for demonstrating. More than 700 gigabytes of records from Roskomnadzor's Bashkortostan branch were made publicly available online in March by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.

Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites' parent company Meta. From a report: "Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred," says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication. Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company's censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain. Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta's delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the "first quarter" of the year. While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames "a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Motherboard, written by Joseph Cox: Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world's internet traffic, and which in some cases provides access to people's email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to contracting data and other documents reviewed by Motherboard. Additionally, Sen. Ron Wyden says that a whistleblower has contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that's part of the Navy, after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Department of Defense, according to a copy of the letter shared by Wyden's office with Motherboard.

The material reveals the sale and use of a previously little known monitoring capability that is powered by data purchases from the private sector. The tool, called Augury, is developed by cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service. In the private industry, cybersecurity analysts use it for following hackers' activity or attributing cyberattacks. In the government world, analysts can do the same, but agencies that deal with criminal investigations have also purchased the capability. The military agencies did not describe their use cases for the tool. However, the sale of the tool still highlights how Team Cymru obtains this controversial data and then sells it as a business, something that has alarmed multiple sources in the cybersecurity industry.

"The network data includes data from over 550 collection points worldwide, to include collection points in Europe, the Middle East, North/South America, Africa and Asia, and is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day," a description of the Augury platform in a U.S. government procurement record reviewed by Motherboard reads. It adds that Augury provides access to "petabytes" of current and historical data. Motherboard has found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Augury. This allows the military to track internet usage using an incredible amount of sensitive information. Motherboard has extensively covered how U.S. agencies gain access to data that in some cases would require a warrant or other legal mechanism by simply purchasing data that is available commercially from private companies. Most often, the sales center around location data harvested from smartphones. The Augury purchases show that this approach of buying access to data also extends to information more directly related to internet usage. "The Augury platform is not designed to target specific users or user activity. The platform specifically does not possess subscriber information necessary to tie records back to any users," said Team Cymru in a statement to Motherboard. "Our platform does not provide user or subscriber information, and it doesn't provide results that show any pattern of life, preventing its ability to be used to target individuals. Our platform only captures a limited sampling of the available data, and is further restricted by only allowing queries against restricted sampled and limited data, which all originates from malware, malicious activity, honeypots, scans, and third parties who provide feeds of the same. Results are then further limited in the scope and volume of what's returned," Team Cymru said in another email.

Charles E. Spirtos from the Navy Office of Information told Motherboard in an email that NCIS specifically "conducts investigations and operations in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The use of net flow data by NCIS does not require a warrant." He added that NCIS has not used netflow during any criminal investigation, but that "NCIS uses net flow data for various counterintelligence purposes."

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, which the whistleblower alleges referred their complaint to the Navy, told Motherboard it had received Wyden's letter and was reviewing it. The Office of the Naval Inspector General declined to comment and directed Motherboard back to its Department of Defense counterpart. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency also deferred to the Department of Defense.

President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over in the US, even as the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. From a report: Mr Biden said that while "we still have a problem", the situation is rapidly improving. Statistics show that over 400 Americans on average are dying from the virus each day. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that the end of the pandemic is "in sight". In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, Mr Biden said that the US is still doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. The interview - aired over the weekend - was partly filmed on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show, where the president gestured towards the crowds. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks," he said. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape...I think it's changing."

In August, US officials extended the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, through 13 October. To date, more than one million Americans have died from the pandemic. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average of deaths currently stands at over 400, with more than 3,000 dead in the last week. In January 2021, by comparison, more than 23,000 people were reported dead from the virus over a single week-long span. About 65% of the total US population is considered fully vaccinated. Some federal vaccine mandates remain in place in the US - including on healthcare workers, military personnel and any non-US citizen entering the country by airplane.

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. From a report: Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.

The world's freight-carrying trucks and ships use GPS-based satellite tracking and navigation systems, reports ZDNet. But "Criminals are turning to cheap GPS jamming devices to ransack the cargo on roads and at sea, a problem that's getting worse...." Jammers work by overpowering GPS signals by emitting a signal at the same frequency, just a bit more powerful than the original. The typical jammers used for cargo hijackings are able to jam frequencies from up to 5 miles away rendering GPS tracking and security apparatuses, such as those used by trucking syndicates, totally useless. In Mexico, jammers are used in some 85% of cargo truck thefts. Statistics are harder to come by in the United States, but there can be little doubt the devices are prevalent and widely used. Russia is currently availing itself of the technology to jam commercial planes in Ukraine.

As we've covered, the proliferating commercial drone sector is also prey to attack.... During a light show in Hong Kong in 2018, a jamming device caused 46 drones to fall out of the sky, raising public awareness of the issue.
While the problem is getting worse, the article also notes that companies are developing anti-jamming solutions for drone receivers, "providing protection and increasing the resiliency of GPS devices against jamming attacks.

"By identifying and preventing instances of jamming, fleet operators are able to prevent cargo theft."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's airspace has been busy this year -- that's the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn't expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv's Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country's National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn't really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. "We see them everywhere," the research said. "We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear."

The paper is titled Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events come from observations made at NAS' Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the paper's authors, the observatories took on the job of hunting for UFO's as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject. It describes a specific type of UFO the researchers call "phantoms" that is an "object [that] is a completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it." The researchers also observed that the UFOs it's seeing are so fast that it's hard to take pictures of them. "The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second," the paper said. "It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon]. To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range."

So the researchers did just that using two meteor monitoring stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka. "We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects," the paper said. "The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz." The scientists divided the phenomenon they observed into two different categories: cosmics and phantoms. "We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle)," the paper said. "Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 percent."

Using the cameras, stationed roughly 75 miles apart, allowed the scientists to make repeated observations of strange objects moving in the sky. The paper didn't speculate on what the objects were, merely noted the observations and mentioned the objects' incredible speeds. "Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second," the research said. "Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -- 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s." The easy explanation would be that these are missiles, or rockets, or something else associated with the war. But the scientists insist that their nature "is not clear."

hackingbear shares a report from Gizmodo: China claims that America's National Security Agency used sophisticated cyber tools to hack into an elite research university on Chinese soil. The attack allegedly targeted the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an (not to be confused with a California school of the same name), which is highly ranked in the global university index for its science and engineering programs. The U.S. Justice Department has referred to the school as a "Chinese military university that is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People's Liberation Army," painting it as a reasonable target for digital infiltration from an American perspective.

China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) recently published a report attributing the hack to the Tailored Access Operations group (TAO) -- an elite team of NSA hackers which first became publicly known via the Snowden Leaks back in 2013, helps the U.S. government break into networks all over the world for the purposes of intelligence gathering and data collection. [CVERC identified 41 TAO tools involved in the case.] One such tool, dubbed 'Suctionchar,' is said to have helped infiltrate the school's network by stealing account credentials from remote management and file transfer applications to hijack logins on targeted servers. The report also mentions the exploitation of Bvp47, a backdoor in Linux that has been used in previous hacking missions by the Equation Group -- another elite NSA hacking team. According to CVERC, traces of Suctionchar have been found in many other Chinese networks besides Northwestern's, and the agency has accused the NSA of launching more than 10,000 cyberattacks on China over the past several years.

On Sunday, the allegations against the NSA were escalated to a diplomatic complaint. Yang Tao, the director-general of American affairs at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published a statement affirming the CVERC report and claiming that the NSA had "seriously violated the technical secrets of relevant Chinese institutions and seriously endangered the security of China's critical infrastructure, institutions and personal information, and must be stopped immediately."

schwit1 writes: Imperial College will shut down two major research centres sponsored by Chinese aerospace and defence companies amid a crackdown on academic collaborations with China, the Guardian has learned.

The Avic Centre for Structural Design and Manufacturing is a long-running partnership with China's leading civilian and military aviation supplier, which has provided more than $6m to research cutting-edge aerospace materials. The second centre is run jointly with Biam, a subsidiary of another state-owned aerospace and defence company, which has contributed $4.5m for projects on high-performance batteries, jet engine components and impact-resistant aircraft windshields. The centres' stated goals are to advance civilian aerospace technologies, but critics have repeatedly warned that the research could also advance China's military ambitions.

Now Imperial has confirmed the two centres will be shut by the end of the year after the rejection of two licence applications to the government's Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU), which oversees the sharing of sensitive research with international partners. The closures follow a warning in July by the heads of MI5 and the FBI of the espionage threat posed by China to UK universities, and highlight the government's hardening attitude on the issue.

"You can say with a high degree of confidence that this decision has been taken because the government is of the view that continuing licensing would enable the military development in China, which is viewed as a threat to security," said Sam Armstrong, director of communications at the Henry Jackson Society thinktank. "The government has made it clear to universities that there is an overall shift in the weather such that these collaborations are no longer possible."

"A vital offsite electricity supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been destroyed by shelling," the Guardian reported Friday, "and there is little likelihood a reliable supply will be re-established, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog chief has said." Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said shelling had destroyed the switchyard of a nearby thermal power plant. The plant has supplied power to the nuclear facility each time its normal supply lines had been cut over the past three weeks.

The thermal plant was also supplying the surrounding area, which was plunged into darkness. Local Ukrainian officials said work was under way to restore the connection, which has been cut multiple times this week....

When the thermal supply has been cut the plant has relied on its only remaining operating reactor for the power needed for cooling and other safety functions. This method is designed to provide power only for a few hours at a time. Diesel generators are used as a last resort. The constant destruction of thermal power supply has led Ukraine to consider shutting down the remaining operating reactor, said Grossi. Ukraine "no longer [has] confidence in the restoration of offsite power", he said.

Grossi said that if Ukraine decided not to restore the offsite supply the entire power plant would be reliant on emergency diesel generators to ensure supplies for the nuclear safety and security functions.

"As a consequence, the operator would not be able to restart the reactors unless offsite power was reliably re-established," he said.
NPR provides some context: Normally, the plant holds a 10-day reserve of diesel fuel, the agency says, and currently has approximately 2,250 tonnes of fuel available. If that fuel is depleted, or the generators are damaged in further fighting, it could trigger a meltdown.

But Steven Nesbit, a nuclear engineer and member of the American Nuclear Society's rapid response taskforce, which is tracking the current crisis, says that doesn't necessarily mean there would be a Chernobyl-like catastrophe. The meltdown at Chernobyl was due to a unique mix of design flaws and operator error that would be essentially impossible to replicate at Zaporizhzhia. And unlike the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, some of the reactors at Zaporizhzhia have already been shut down for a while, allowing the nuclear fuel to cool somewhat, Nesbit says. Even in the worst case scenario, the reactors at Zaporizhzhia are a modern design surrounded by a heavy "containment" building, Nesbit says. "It's reinforced concrete, typically about three to four feet of that; it's designed to withstand very high internal pressures." That could allow it to hold in any radioactive material.

But the world's nuclear agency doesn't want to test any of this.
Meanwhile, the French international news agency AFP reports on what's been happening at the plant since it was captured by Russian troops in March: Russian forces controlling Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have killed two staff at the facility and detained and abused dozens of others, the head of Ukraine's nuclear energy agency told AFP on Friday.

"We do not know where about ten people are now," Petro Kotin said. "They were taken (by the Russians) and after that we have no information about their whereabouts," Kotin said, adding about 200 people had been detained. He described the current situation at the plant as "very difficult," citing "torture" of staff and "beatings" of personnel. "The Russians look for pro-Ukrainian people and persecute them. People are psychologically broken," he said in an interview with AFP reporters in his office in Kyiv... "Two people on the territory of the plant were wounded during shelling — a woman and a man — on separate occasions," Kotin, clad in a military-style jacket, said.

"But people understand that the nuclear safety of the plant depends on them, so the employees return to Energodar and continue working at the facility," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would "harm national security" and told a government transparency website that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information. In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos "will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."

The Black Vault was seeking all videos "with the designation of 'unidentified aerial phenomena.'" This is an interesting response from the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response, where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.

"While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release," it said. "Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security."

North Korea has passed a law declaring itself to be a nuclear weapons state, according to state news agency KCNA. The country's leader Kim Jong-un called the decision "irreversible" and ruled out the possibility of any talks on denuclearisation, it said. From a report: The law also enshrines the country's right to use a pre-emptive nuclear strike to protect itself. Despite crippling sanctions, Pyongyang has conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. It has continued to advance its military capability - in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions - to threaten its neighbours and potentially even bring the US mainland within striking range. Mr Kim carried out long-range launches and nuclear tests in 2019 following two headline-grabbing but inconclusive summits with then US president Donald Trump. But talks between the countries have since stalled.

Although the Biden administration has indicated it's willing to talk to Pyongyang, it hasn't said whether President Joe Biden would meet Mr Kim. The White House also said its attempts to contact Pyongyang and overtures of help over its Covid outbreak had gone unanswered so far. The US reviewed its North Korea policy last year and reiterated that "complete denuclearisation" of the Korean peninsula was the goal. Mr Biden said he would pursue it with a mix of diplomacy and "stern deterrence". Mr Kim responded by saying his country must prepare for both "dialogue and confrontation."

The ship that would have become the world's largest cruise liner has been scrapped before it ever had the chance to take its maiden voyage. Gizmodo reports: Global Dream II was slated to carry 9,000 passengers and was built by German-Hong Kong shipbuilding firm MV Werften to the tune of nearly $US1.4 ($2) billion, according to the Daily Mail. It was nearly finished when the company went bankrupt at the start of this year. Since that happened, no buyer has stepped up to buy the 20-deck, 341.99 m-long monstrosity. That means it's now destined for the scrap heap. The Mail says that Global Dream II also features an outdoor waterpark and a movie theatre.

The capacity of this ship blows the second largest ship, the Oasis-class Wonder of the Sea which is owned and operated by Royal Caribbean, out of the water (I love a good pun). The Wonder of the Seas has a passenger capacity of only 6,988. Pathetic. Despite the $US1.4 ($2) billion put out to build this behemoth, the ship still needs about $US230,000,000 ($319,286,000) worth of work. Apparently, it is structurally complete, but equipment and passenger facilities still need to be finished. Eagle-eyed readers will have noted the "II" in the ship's name. Yes, there is a twin Global Dream, but it hasn't been given the ax... yet. The Mail reports that right now the two ships are being stored in a German shipyard in Wismar. However, that yard will soon be used to build military vessels. That means the Global Dreams have to be out of there by the end of next year.

The Financial Times tells how the head of a Ukrainian cybersecurity company recruited dozens of "high-level Ukrainian hackers" and borrowed a Starlink internet satellite for "the large-scale infiltration of internet-connected security cameras to surveil Russian-occupied territory, and honey-trapping Russian soldiers into revealing their bases." [T]hey hacked thousands of security and traffic cameras in Belarus and parts of Ukraine that Russia had occupied. To filter the information, the team wrote machine-learning code that helped them separate military movements from ordinary traffic, and they funnelled the information to the military via a public portal.

In one example, described to the Financial Times with photographs and locations, they identified a remote Russian base near occupied Melitopol in southern Ukraine. Then, using fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social media websites, they tricked soldiers into sending photos that they geolocated, and shared with the Ukrainian military....

A few days later, they watched on TV as the base was blown up by Ukrainian artillery.

The US Army is taking delivery of a first batch of high-tech combat goggles made by Microsoft, citing encouraging results from testing in the field. From a report: Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Douglas Bush has "cleared the Army to begin accepting" some of the 5,000 sets of goggles, spokesman Jamal Beck said in a statement. Their delivery had been placed on hold over concern about the device's performance until more rigorous testing took place. Based on the test results so far the service "is adjusting its fielding plan to allow for time to correct deficiencies and also field to units that are focused on training activities," Beck said.

Microsoft's Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, is expected to provide a "heads-up display" for U.S. ground forces, similar to those for fighter pilots. The system -- a customized version of Microsoft's HoloLens goggles -- would let commanders project information onto a visor in front of a soldier's face and would include features such as night vision. The Army projects spending as much as $21.9 billion over a decade on Microsoft's combat goggles, spare parts and support services if all options are exercised.

Chip designer Nvidia on Wednesday said that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper a business Nvidia expects to generate $400 million in sales this quarter. Reuters reports: Nvidia shares fell 4% after hours. The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year. Nvidia said U.S. officials told it the new rule "will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a "military end use" or "military end user" in China."

The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. [...] Nvidia said it had booked $400 million in sales of the affected chips this quarter to China that could be lost if Chinese firms decide not to buy alternative Nvidia products. It said it plans to apply for exemptions to the rule but has "no assurances" that U.S. officials will grant them. Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst with Bernstein, said the disclosure signaled that about 10% of Nvidia's data center sales, which investors have closely monitored in recent years, were coming from China and that the hit to sales was likely "manageable" for Nvidia.