Adrian Cho writes via Science Magazine: From 1966 to 1974, France blew up 41 nuclear weapons in above-ground tests in French Polynesia, the collection of 118 islands and atolls that is part of France. The French government has long contended that the testing was done safely. But a new analysis of hundreds of documents declassified in 2013 suggests the tests exposed 90% of the 125,000 people living in French Polynesia to radioactive fallout -- roughly 10 times as many people as the French government has estimated.

The findings come from a 2-year collaboration, dubbed the Moruroa Files, between Disclose, a French nonprofit that supports investigative journalism; Interprt, a collective of researchers, architects, and spatial designers affiliated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who focus on environmental issues; and the Science & Global Security program at Princeton. The findings were presented on 9 March on the project's website, in a book, and in a technical paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. Most French Polynesians were exposed to a relatively small amount of radiation, and the central issue is who is eligible for compensation under French law.

Myanmar's first satellite is being held on board the International Space Station following the Myanmar coup, while Japan's space agency and a Japanese university decide what to do with it, two Japanese university officials said. Reuters: The $15 million satellite was built by Japan's Hokkaido University in a joint project with Myanmar's government-funded Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University (MAEU). It is the first of a set of two 50 kg microsatellites equipped with cameras designed to monitor agriculture and fisheries. Human rights activists and some officials in Japan worry that those cameras could be used for military purposes by the junta that seized power in Myanmar on Feb. 1. That has put the deployment on hold, as Hokkaido University holds discussions with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the two Hokkaido University officials said.

China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none. From a report: Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China's technological rise, the country's leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country's economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide range of industries, from smartphones to jet engines.

China has made audacious and ambitious plans before -- in 2015 -- but is falling short of its goals. With more countries becoming wary of China's behavior and its growing economic might, Beijing's drive for technological independence has taken on a new urgency. The country's new five-year plan, made public on Friday, called tech development a matter of national security, not just economic development, a break from the previous plan. The plan pledged to increase spending on research and development by 7 percent annually, including the public and private sectors. That figure was higher than budget increases for China's military, which is slated to grow 6.8 percent next year, raising the prospect of an era of looming Cold War-like competition with the United States.

France concealed the true impact of its nuclear tests in the Pacific from the 1960s to the 1990s, a study has said. From a report: Researchers used declassified French military documents, calculations and testimonies to reconstruct the impact of a number of the tests. They estimated that around 110,000 people in French Polynesia were affected by the radioactive fallout. The number represented "almost the entire" population at the time, the researchers found. French Polynesia, a French territory made up of hundreds of islands and atolls including Tahiti, was the site of dozens of nuclear tests over 30 years. Over the course of two years, researchers analysed around 2,000 documents released by the French military and recreated the impact of "the most contaminating" of France's nuclear tests carried out between 1966 and 1974.

The study was carried out in collaboration between French news website Disclose, researchers from Princeton University and British firm Interprt. The 41st test took place over Mururoa Atoll on 17 July 1974, when the atomic cloud took a different trajectory than planned. Some 42 hours after the test codenamed Centaur, "the inhabitants of Tahiti and the surrounding islands of the Windward group were subjected to significant amounts of ionising radiation", the report says. The area was home to 110,000 people and Tahiti's main city, Papeete, alone had a population of 80,000.

The proliferation of cyberattacks by rivals is presenting a challenge to the Biden administration as it seeks to deter intrusions on government and corporate systems. From a report: Just as it plans to begin retaliating against Russia for the large-scale hacking of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year, the Biden administration faces a new cyberattack that raises the question of whether it will have to strike back at another major adversary: China. Taken together, the responses will start to define how President Biden fashions his new administration's response to escalating cyberconflict and whether he can find a way to impose a steeper penalty on rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses to spy, steal information and potentially damage critical components of the nation's infrastructure. The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, officials said, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world.

The officials said the actions would be combined with some kind of economic sanctions -- though there are few truly effective sanctions left to impose -- and an executive order from Mr. Biden to accelerate the hardening of federal government networks after the Russian hacking, which went undetected for months until it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm. The issue has taken on added urgency at the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in recent days after the public exposure of a major breach in Microsoft email systems used by small businesses, local governments and, by some accounts, key military contractors. Microsoft identified the intruders as a state-sponsored Chinese group and moved quickly to issue a patch to allow users of its software to close off the vulnerability. But that touched off a race between those responsible for patching the systems and a raft of new attackers -- including multiple other Chinese hacking groups, according to Microsoft -- who started using the same exploit this week.

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Drive: In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country's industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government's contracting website beta.SAM.gov. Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B-2's Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft's many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling...

While it's hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists... Indeed, as the average age of the Air Force fleet continues to increase, there are only likely to be more such requirements for parts that are long out of production. Before he stood down, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Will Roper, told Air Force Magazine of his desire for a "digital representation of every part in the Air Force inventory...."

All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force's current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: U.S. officials blacklisted Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp. as a company with military ties partly due to an award given to the company's founder for his service to the state, the U.S. Department of Defense said in a legal filing. Lei Jun, the chief executive officer and founder of Xiaomi, received the award of "Outstanding Builder of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" in 2019 from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Xiaomi touts the award -- given to 100 Chinese executives that year -- on Mr. Lei's biography page on the company's website and in its annual report.

The award -- coupled with Xiaomi's ambitious investment plans in advanced technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence -- was enough for the Defense Department in January to add Xiaomi to a list of companies that support China's military, according to the filing. The designation prohibits Americans from investing in the company, the world's third-largest smartphone seller. The U.S. rationale for adding Xiaomi to its list was laid out in a court filing by the Defense Department in response to a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by the Chinese company seeking to overturn the military designation. The filing, which appeared last week but hasn't previously been reported, for the first time shed light on the department's reasoning in adding a company to the list.

Microsoft is in danger of losing a contract to provide $10 billion of cloud computing services to the Pentagon, a deal the government has threatened to scrap altogether after years of legal squabbling. From a report: The U.S. Defense Department said it will reconsider the controversial procurement if a federal judge declines to dismiss Amazon's allegations that former President Donald Trump's meddling cost the company the winner-take-all contract. That means the fate of a cloud project the Pentagon considers critical for its war fighters may rest in the hands of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which could soon issue a ruling on Amazon's accusations. The Pentagon said last month it would take too long to prove in court that its decision to award Microsoft the lucrative cloud deal wasn't unduly influenced by the White House. If the judge allows Amazon to argue its bias claims in the case, the government may decide to stop fighting.

"If the court denies the government's motion we will most likely be facing an even longer litigation process," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference late last month. "The DOD Chief Information Officer will reassess the strategy going forward." The warning is another twist in a contentious process that has involved years of legal challenges, behind-the-scenes lobbying and a public relations campaign by technology rivals to unseat Amazon as the original front-runner for the cloud contract when it was unveiled in 2018. More than a year after Microsoft was named the winner, the Defense Department is still fighting to execute the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud -- or JEDI, an acronym intended to evoke "Star Wars" imagery -- to serve as the primary data repository for military services worldwide. The deal is worth $10 billion over a decade. There are signs the Pentagon is already moving on. The Defense Department is talking up its other cloud contracts beyond JEDI, and some of the program's biggest cheerleaders have left the department, leaving new leaders to make decisions on a procurement they inherited from the Trump administration. Even Microsoft executives are trumpeting all the other work the company plans to keep doing for the Defense Department, in the event that its image-boosting JEDI deal goes south.

The U.S., which once had a dominant head start in artificial intelligence, now has just a few years' lead on China and risks being overtaken unless government steps in, according to a new report to Congress and the White House. From a report: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired the committee that issued the report, tells Axios that the U.S. risks dire consequences if it fails to both invest in key technologies and fully integrate AI into the military. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence approved its 750-page report on Monday, following a 2-year effort. Schmidt chaired the 15-member commission, which also included Oracle's Safra Catz, Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Amazon's Andy Jassy.

On both the economic and military fronts, the biggest risk comes from China. "China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world's leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change," the report states. And It's not just AI technology that the U.S. needs to maintain a lead in. The report mentions a number of key technologies, including quantum computing, robotics, 3D printing and 5G. "We don't have to go to war with China," Schmidt said. "We don't have to have a cold war. We do need to be competitive."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn't a particularly close call for the company's leadership, newly disclosed emails show. "I am fine with this," wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly...

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: "We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world," the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. "More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses." But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. "The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material...
"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."

An anonymous reader shares a PopularMechanics report: An American Airlines flight crew encountered an unidentified flying object over New Mexico on February 21. American Airlines has confirmed the strange incident, during which a "long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile" zipped over the Airbus A320, according to a pilot's transmission obtained by The War Zone. American Airlines Flight 2292 was en route from Cincinnati to Phoenix on Sunday afternoon when it came into contact with the mysterious object at approximately 37,000 feet over northeastern New Mexico. Radio interceptor Steve Douglass captured Flight 2292's transmission on the Albuquerque Center frequency of 127.850 MHz or 134.750 MHz.

In the transmission, which you can hear here, the American Airlines pilot reported:

"Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us. I hate to say this, but it looked like a long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing -- moving really fast right over the top of us."

Albuquerque Center didn't respond to the pilot's report because local air traffic interfered, Douglass wrote on his blog, Deep Black Horizon. American Airlines Flight 2292 safely landed in Phoenix shortly after the encounter.

American Airlines later confirmed with The War Zone the validity of the transmission:

"Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21. For any additional questions on this, we encourage you to reach out to the FBI."
When TMZ reached out to the FBI, spokesperson Frank Fisher said the Bureau is "aware of the reported incident." He continued: "While our policy is to neither confirm nor deny investigations, the FBI works continuously with our federal, state, local, and tribal partners to share intelligence and protect the public."

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also released a short statement confirming the encounter:

A pilot reported seeing an object over New Mexico shortly after noon local time on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021. FAA air traffic controllers did not see any object in the area on their radarscopes.

The Myanmar soldiers descended before dawn on Feb. 1, bearing rifles and wire cutters. At gunpoint, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to switch off the internet. For good measure, the soldiers snipped wires without knowing what they were severing, according to an eyewitness and a person briefed on the events. The New York Times: The data center raids in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar were part of a coordinated strike in which the military seized power, locked up the country's elected leaders and took most of its internet users offline. Since the coup, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites, isolating a country that had only in the past few years linked to the outside world. The military regime has also floated legislation that could criminalize the mildest opinions expressed online.

So far, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has depended on cruder forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But the army seems serious about setting up a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. Developing such a system could take years and would likely require outside help from Beijing or Moscow, according to experts. Such a comprehensive firewall may also exact a heavy price: The internet outages since the coup have paralyzed a struggling economy. Longer disruptions will damage local business interests and foreign investor confidence as well as the military's own vast business interests.

[...] If Myanmar's digital controls become permanent, they would add to the global walls that are increasingly dividing what was supposed to be an open, borderless internet. The blocks would also offer fresh evidence that more countries are looking to China's authoritarian model to tame the internet. Two weeks after the coup, Cambodia, which is under China's economic sway, also unveiled its own sweeping internet controls. Even policymakers in the United States and Europe are setting their own rules, although these are far less severe. Technologists worry such moves could ultimately break apart the internet, effectively undermining the online networks that link the world together.

schwit1 shared a thought-provoking analysis from Aviation Week: Douglas Aircraft started down a 30-year path toward extinction when it merged with McDonnell in 1967. McDonnell management prioritized military programs and was not willing to make the investment necessary to maintain its commercial jetliner market position. By the time it merged with Boeing, Douglas' jetliner products were on their last legs.

It has been nearly 25 years since Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged. Given Boeing's significant engineering cuts, program execution problems, clear prioritization of shareholder returns, extremely uncertain product development road map and deteriorating market share outlook, it is time to consider whether Boeing Commercial Aircraft is destined to share Douglas' fate.

President Joe Biden will direct his administration to conduct a review of key U.S. supply chains including semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, medical supplies and rare earth metals. From a report: The assessment, which will be led by members of both Biden's economic and national security teams, will analyze the "resiliency and capacity of the American manufacturing supply chains and defense industrial base to support national security [and] emergency preparedness," according to a draft of an executive order seen by CNBC. The text of the executive order is being finalized and the ultimate language could vary from the current draft. The White House also plans to review gaps in domestic manufacturing and supply chains that are dominated by or run through "nations that are or are likely to become unfriendly or unstable."

Though the order does not mention China, the directive is likely in large part an effort by the administration to determine how reliant the U.S. economy and military are on a critical group of Chinese exports. Biden said earlier this month that his White House is gearing up for "extreme competition" with China. The pending executive order is one of the administration's first tangible efforts to evaluate and shore up American business and defense interests through a thorough review of where, and from which countries, it receives key raw materials. Some of the commodities and components listed in the order included rare earth metals, a group of minerals used in the production of a variety of advanced technologies, including computer screens, state-of-the-art weapons and electric vehicles.

The United States has charged three North Korean computer programmers with a massive hacking spree that stole more than $1.3 billion in money and cryptocurrency, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. From a report: Officials added that a Canadian-American citizen has pleaded guilty to laundering some of the alleged hackers' money. The indictment alleges that Jon Chang Hyok, 31, Kim Il, 27, and Park Jin Hyok, 36, stole money while working for North Korea's military intelligence services. Park had previously been charged in a complaint unsealed in 2018.

Myanmar's new military government has enforced a "near-total internet shutdown" in the country for the third night in a row, and fifth such communication blackout of this kind this month. NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages globally, reports: Myanmar is in the midst of a near-total internet shutdown for the third night in a row ; real-time network data show national connectivity collapsing to 19% of ordinary levels from 1 am local; incident ongoing.

France's cyber-security agency said that a group of Russian military hackers, known as the Sandworm group, have been behind a three-years-long operation during which they breached the internal networks of several French entities running the Centreon IT monitoring software. From a report: The attacks were detailed in a technical report released today by Agence Nationale de la Securite des Systemes d'Information, also known as ANSSI, the country's main cyber-security agency. "This campaign mostly affected information technology providers, especially web hosting providers," ANSSI officials said today. "The first victim seems to have been compromised from late 2017. The campaign lasted until 2020." The point of entry into victim networks was linked to Centreon, an IT resource monitoring platform developed by French company CENTREON, and a product similar in functionality to SolarWinds' Orion platform. ANSSI said the attackers targeted Centreon systems that were left connected to the internet. The French agency couldn't say at the time of writing if the attacks exploited a vulnerability in the Centreon software or if the attackers guessed passwords for admin accounts. However, in the case of a successful intrusion, the attackers installed a version of the P.A.S. web shell and the Exaramel backdoor trojan, two malware strains that when used together allowed hackers full control over the compromised system and its adjacent network.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The U.S. Cyber Command, headed by the National Security Agency's director, has been a part of America's Department of Defense since 2009.

Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine's Day, adding "As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community.

"Love is in the air, find it if you can. #BeOurValentine #cryptochallenge #VDayGifts."

They shared a link to the official U.S. Cyber Command Valentine's Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.
There are 12 tricky puzzles in all — 3 .jpgs, 6 .pngs, 2 .mp3s and a .bmp file — and I couldn't solve a single one of 'em.

Each one has a hint — though that hint is just the number of words in the answer, as well as its number of characters.

"America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane," writes the contributing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (in an article shared by Slashdot reader DanDrollette): It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.

The U.S. Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them...

Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029... The missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for "ground-based strategic deterrent." The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs... The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one. Under the theory of deterrence, America's nuclear arsenal — currently made up of 3,800 warheads — sends a message to other nuclear-armed countries. It relays to the enemy that U.S. retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place...

Many of the missile's critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with those immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, and nuclear bombs on airplanes — the two other legs of the nuclear triad, in defense jargon — America's land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.