An anonymous reader quotes a report from War Is Boring: An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, this time after someone revealed some US stealth technology testing going on and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform. The stealthy object -possibly a component of a new drone or plane- was filmed on a tractor-trailer platform at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility. After making their debut on a social media platform tied to America's top adversary, images of the object quickly made their way to the internet, gracing everything from 4chan to Reddit. It is unknown what project the object is tied to, though speculation has ranged from a new Boeing product to even the famed "TicTac" UFO sighted by Naval Aviators in recent years. Steve Trimble of Aviation Week wrote in a tweet: "I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed."

The U.S. Space Force, the military branch spun out of the Air Force in December 2019, has announced its next batch of awards for projects related to next-gen rocket engine testing and upper stage improvements. From a report: The awards were granted by the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC), a program managed by the Space Force's Space Systems Command. SpEC facilitates engagement between the U.S. Department and Defense and the space industry, by allowing its nearly 600 members to compete for contracts. The awards, which total $87.5 million, were granted to four launch companies:

America's Department of Defense "is taking input on its plan to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho," reports the Associated Press: The department began a 45-day comment period on Friday with the release of a draft environmental impact study evaluating alternatives for building and operating the microreactor that could produce 1 to 5 megawatts of power. The department's energy needs are expected to increase, it said. "A safe, small, transportable nuclear reactor would address this growing demand with a resilient, carbon-free energy source that would not add to the DoD's fuel needs, while supporting mission-critical operations in remote and austere environments," the Defense Department said.

The draft environmental impact statement cites President Joe Biden's January 27 executive order prioritizing climate change considerations in national security as another reason for pursuing microreactors. The draft document said alternative energy sources such as wind and solar were problematic because they are limited by location, weather and available land area, and would require redundant power supplies. The department said it uses 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons (37.9 million liters) of fuel per day. Powering bases using diesel generators strains operations and planning, the department said, and need is expected to grow during a transition to an electrical, non-tactical vehicle fleet. Thirty terawatt-hours is more energy than many small countries use in a year.

The department in the 314-page draft environmental impact statement said it wants to reduce reliance on local electric grids, which are highly vulnerable to prolonged outages from natural disasters, cyberattacks, domestic terrorism and failure from lack of maintenance. The department also said new technologies such as drones and radar systems increase energy demands...

The Defense Department said a final environmental impact statement and decision about how or whether to move forward is expected in early 2022. If approved, preparing testing sites at the Idaho National Lab and then building and testing of the microreactor would take about three years.

Slashdot reader AleRunner tipped us off to some excitement in the UK: The British government said on Friday it may draft in the army to help deliver gas after shortages caused by a scarcity of truck drivers forced the closure of stations across the country. The haulage industry said there was a shortfall of some 100,000 drivers, and that could also lead to shortages of turkeys and toys this Christmas. Some 25,000 drivers returned to Europe after Brexit, and the pandemic halted the qualification process for new workers...

Gas is just the latest thing that people in the U.K. are finding hard to come by after its departure from the European Union. Previously McDonald's has been forced to take milkshakes off the menu, KFC has run short on chicken and supermarket shelves have been left bare. The crisis is already beginning to bite in other areas of life, with 18 percent of adults saying they have been unable to buy essential food items in the past two weeks, according to the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics. The pandemic means that many countries are facing supply chain problems, as manufacturing centers in Asia are hit by continuing cases and restrictions.
Now the Associated Press reports the government has decided to issue thousands of emergency visas to foreign truck drivers: Post-Brexit immigration rules mean newly arrived EU citizens can no longer work visa-free in Britain, as they could when the U.K. was a member of the trade bloc. Trucking companies have been urging the British government to loosen immigration rules so drivers can more easily be recruited from across Europe...

One cause of the trucker shortage is a backlog caused by the suspension of driver testing for months during Britain's coronavirus lockdowns. The government has already increased testing capacity, as well as extending the number of hours that drivers can work each week, prompting safety concerns. The government said military driving examiners would be pulled in to further boost civilian testing capacity.

Paul Ratner writes via Interesting Engineering: Theoretical inventions known as the "UFO patents" have been inflaming worldwide curiosity. A product of the American engineer Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, the patents were filed during his work for the U.S. Navy and are so ambitious in their scope and imagination that they continue to draw interest despite any clear evidence that they are feasible. The patents include designs for a futuristic hybrid vehicle with a radical propulsion system that would work equally well in the air, underwater, and in space, as well as a compact fusion reactor, a gravitational wave generator, and even a "spacetime modification weapon." The technology involved could impact reality itself, claims its inventor, whose maverick audacity rivals that of Nikola Tesla.

How real are these ideas? While you can read the patents for yourself, it's evident that the tech necessary to actually create the devices described is beyond our current capabilities. Yet research into many of these fields has gone on for years, which may explain why the Navy expressed an interest. Another likely influence is the fact that the Chinese government seems to be working to develop similar technology. The fantastical inventions devised by Dr. Pais largely build upon an idea that he calls "The Pais Effect." In his patent write-ups and in an interview with The Drive, he described it as "the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients." This effect amounts to the ability to spin electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. The electromagnetic energy fields would be so powerful that they could "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," writes Pais. In practical terms, this invention could lead to a veritable revolution in propulsion, quantum communications, and create an abundance of cheaply-produced energy. Certainly, an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, as posits the Sagan standard.

Despite the well-founded unease at Dr. Pais's inventions, the Navy took them seriously enough to run experiments for three years and even found some of them "operable," although the extent of that alleged operability is under debate. In the patent documents, two Navy officials seemed to assert the operability of the inventions. Furthermore, in correspondence with The Drive's "War Zone," Timothy Boulay of NAWCAD, stated that Pais's High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator was, in fact, tested from 2016 until 2019, at a cost of $508,000. The team working on the project consisted of at least 10 technicians and engineers and put in some 1,600 hours of work. But upon the conclusion of the testing, the Pais Effect "could not be proven," shared Boulay. What happened subsequently with the tested device and further investigations is not known at this point. There are indications in documents obtained by The Drive's WarZone through the Freedom of Information Act that the inventions could be moved to another research department in the Navy or the Air Force, or possibly even to NASA or DARPA, but whether that really happened is not clear. "One of the most attention-grabbing designs by Dr. Pais is the 2018 patent for a cone-shaped craft of unprecedented range and speed," writes Ratner. "Another futuristic patent with far-reaching ramifications is Pais' Plasma Compression Fusion Device. [...] Notes from researchers who worked on vetting Pais' ideas indicate that a possible outcome of the plasma fusion device and the high energy levels it may generate is the 'Spacetime Modification Weapon' (SMW). Research documents refer to it as 'a weapon that can make the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison.'"

Pais also has a patent for an electromagnetic field generator, which could create "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." Another device conceived by Pais that could deflect asteroids is the high-frequency gravitational wave generator.

For 14 years Israel had wanted to kill Iran's chief military nuclear scientist and the father of its weapons program, who they suspected of leading Iran's quest to build nuclear weapons.

Then last November "they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present" using a "souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun," according to the New York Times:

(Thanks to Slashdot readers schwit1 and PolygamousRanchKid for sharing this story.) Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. It was also methodically picking off the experts thought to be leading Iran's nuclear weapons program. Since 2007, its agents had assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists worked directly for Fakhrizadeh on what Israeli intelligence officials said was a covert program to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the substantial technical challenges of making one small enough to fit atop one of Iran's long-range missiles. Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in charge of missile development and 16 members of his team.

But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive... This time they were going to try something new.

Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles. Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material in the truck bed was a 7.62 mm sniper machine gun... The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position, calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly touched the trigger. He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away... Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment...

The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.The AI was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car's speed.
Ultimately 15 bullets were fired in less than 60 seconds. None of them hit Fakhrizadeh's wife, who was seated just inches away.

The whole remote-controlled apparatus "was smuggled into the country in small pieces over several months," reports the Jerusalem Post, "because, taken together, all of its components would have weighed around a full ton." One new detail in the report was that the explosives used to destroy evidence of the remote-gun partially failed, leaving enough of the gun intact for the Iranians to figure out what had happened...

While all Israeli intelligence and defense officials still praise the assassination for setting back Iran's nuclear weapons program dramatically, 10 months later and with the Islamic Republic an estimated one month away from producing sufficient enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, the legacy of the operation is less clear... On the other hand, others say that even if Iran decides to move its uranium enrichment up to 90%, that is weaponized level, they still have to put together the other components of a nuclear weapon capability. These include tasks concerned with detonation and missile delivery. Fakhizadeh would have shone in these tasks and his loss will still be felt and slow down the ayatollahs.

"Y'all a plane just crashed into all those houses," one eyewitness says in an online video. "People jumped out of the plane with parachutes."

The two people — jumping from the 38-foot-long training plane — were both hospitalized, reports CNN: Police were notified of the crash...around 10:53 a.m. (11:53 am ET) and on arrival found one pilot who had ejected from the military training jet caught in power lines, Lake Worth Police Chief JT Manoushagian said during a Sunday afternoon news conference. Another pilot also ejected from the training jet and was found in a neighborhood nearby...

None of the homes involved in the crash took a direct hit, said Fire Chief Ryan Arthur. A little bit of damage occurred to the areas around the homes, he said. "This incident could've been much worse knowing that this plane went down in a residential area here in Lake Worth," Arthur said.
ABC News has more information: One of the occupants was burned by power lines and another landed in a tree as they parachuted to the ground, authorities said. One of the crew members was in critical condition, the other one was in serious condition, authorities said...

WFAA-TV reported that the plane crashed in the backyard of a home, and no one on the ground was injured. Power was also knocked out to around 1,300 customers in the area.
ABC News identifies the aircraft as a T45 Goshawk fighter jet trainer, a plane first developed in 1974 by McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace (before McDonnell Douglas's 1997 merger with Boeing). But Boeing.com notes they "delivered the 221st and final T-45 training jet to the Navy in November 2009." The company continued to support the T-45 fleet by providing engineering, logistics and support equipment in partnership with BAE Systems, the successor company to British Aerospace, which had supplied the aircraft's rear and center fuselage sections, wing assembly and vertical tail. On Aug. 26, 2010, Boeing joined the U.S. Navy at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida, to celebrate the Naval Air Training Command's one millionth flight-hour with the T-45 Goshawk.

I first saw the news on the front page of Yahoo.com. But every American remembers where they were when they heard the news. "The World Trade Towers in new york were crashed into by 2 planes, one on each tower, 18 minutes apart," CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot. "Nobody really knows who did it, but the planes were big ones.

"Normally I wouldn't consider posting this on Slashdot, but I'm making an exception this time because I can't get news through any of the conventional websites, and I assume I'm not alone."

CmdrTaco later posted an update. "Both towers havecollapsed, pentagon hit by 3rd plane. Part of it has collapsed."


It's 20 years later, and there's plenty of hindsight, recollections, and reflection around the web. But today back on the front page of Yahoo.com, ABC News brings this remembrance from a U.S. airman who'd been dispatched to crash her plane into one of the hijacked jetliners: As the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were unfolding, then-Air Force Lt. Heather Penney was given a mission to intercept hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 before it reached Washington, D.C. The rookie F-16 pilot said she believed she would not come back from that mission.

"[I remember] how crystal blue the skies were that day," she told ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis...

"I had raised my hand and swore an oath to protect and defend our nation," she said. "If this was where the universe had placed me at this moment in time... that this was my purpose. Anyone who had been in our position would have been willing to do the same thing.

"And the proof is in the pudding, because the passengers on Flight 93 did...."

Flight 93 passengers attempted to retake the plane, and in the struggle, the aircraft crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. It was the only one of the four hijacked aircrafts that day that did not reach the terrorists' intended target.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

The US Air Force's first ever chief software officer has quit the job after branding it "probably the most challenging and infuriating of my entire career" in a remarkably candid blog post. The Register reports: Nicolas Chaillan's impressively blunt leaving note, which he posted to his LinkedIn profile, castigated USAF senior hierarchy for failing to prioritise basic IT issues, saying: "A lack of response and alignment is certainly a contributor to my accelerated exit." Chaillan took on his chief software officer role in May 2019, having previously worked at the US Department of Defense rolling out DevSecOps practices to the American military. Before that he founded two companies.

In his missive, Chaillan also singled out a part of military culture that features in both the US and the UK: the practice of appointing mid-ranking generalist officers to run specialist projects. "Please," he implored, "stop putting a Major or Lt Col (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field -- we are setting up critical infrastructure to fail." The former chief software officer continued: "We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus. IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such."

Chaillan went on to complain that while he had managed to roll out DevSecOps practices within his corner of US DoD, his ability to achieve larger scale projects was being hampered by institutional inertia. "I told my leadership that I could have fixed Enterprise IT in 6 months if empowered," he wrote. Among the USAF's sins-according-to-Chaillan? The service is still using "outdated water-agile-fall acquisition principles to procure services and talent", while he lamented the failure of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) to secure its required $20m funding in the USAF's FY22 budget. He was also quite scathing about the USAF's adoption -- or lack thereof -- of DevSecOps, the trendy name for efforts to make developers include security-related decisions at the same time as product-related decisions when writing new software. It appears the service wasn't quite as open-minded as its overseers in the wider DoD.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An anonymous reader Days before Christmas in 2015, Juniper Networks alerted users that it had been breached. In a brief statement, the company said it had discovered "unauthorized code" in one of its network security products, allowing hackers to decipher encrypted communications and gain high-level access to customers' computer systems. Further details were scant, but Juniper made clear the implications were serious: It urged users to download a software update "with the highest priority." More than five years later, the breach of Juniper's network remains an enduring mystery in computer security, an attack on America's software supply chain that potentially exposed highly sensitive customers including telecommunications companies and U.S. military agencies to years of spying before the company issued a patch.

Those intruders haven't yet been publicly identified, and if there were any victims other than Juniper, they haven't surfaced to date. But one crucial detail about the incident has long been known -- uncovered by independent researchers days after Juniper's alert in 2015 -- and continues to raise questions about the methods U.S. intelligence agencies use to monitor foreign adversaries. The Juniper product that was targeted, a popular firewall device called NetScreen, included an algorithm written by the National Security Agency. Security researchers have suggested that the algorithm contained an intentional flaw -- otherwise known as a backdoor -- that American spies could have used to eavesdrop on the communications of Juniper's overseas customers. NSA declined to address allegations about the algorithm.

Juniper's breach remains important -- and the subject of continued questions from Congress -- because it highlights the perils of governments inserting backdoors in technology products. "As government agencies and misguided politicians continue to push for backdoors into our personal devices, policymakers and the American people need a full understanding of how backdoors will be exploited by our adversaries," Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a statement to Bloomberg. He demanded answers in the last year from Juniper and from the NSA about the incident, in letters signed by 10 or more members of Congress.

California Bay Area space startup Astra "attempted its third orbital test flight today, sending its two-stage Launch Vehicle 0006 skyward from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska's Kodiak Island at 6:35 p.m. EDT (2235 GMT)," reports Space.com.

"The rocket suffered an anomaly about 2.5 minutes after liftoff, however, and the flight was terminated." Something appeared to be wrong from the beginning, as Launch Vehicle 0006 lurched sideways at the moment of liftoff rather than rise smoothly off the pad. But the rocket recovered and soared high into the Alaska sky, reaching an altitude of about 20.5 miles (33 kilometers) before shutting down, according to real-time data Astra provided during a webcast of the launch. The mission was terminated right around "max q," the point when the mechanical stresses on a rocket are highest. A camera mounted on Launch Vehicle 0006 appeared to show a piece of the booster breaking loose around that time.

"Although we did not achieve our primary objective today, our team will work hard to determine what happened here," Carolina Grossman, director of product management at Astra, said during today's launch webcast. "And as we dig into the flight data, we are optimistic about the future and our next attempt...." Initial analyses show that one of the rocket's five first-stage engines failed about 1 second after liftoff, for reasons that weren't immediately clear, Astra co-founder, chairman and CEO Chris Kemp said in a short postflight briefing this evening... "It was obviously not successful at putting anything in orbit, but it was a flight where we learned a tremendous amount of obviously things we need to look into as we prepare to return to Kodiak and fly again," he added...

[T]oday's launch was the first of two booked by the U.S. Space Force; the second was expected to lift off later this year, though that timeline could end up shifting a bit. Astra holds a number of other contracts as well: The company has signed deals for more than 50 launches that together represent more than $150 million in revenue, Kemp told Space.com last month... And over the long haul, the company plans to ramp up its launch cadence to an unprecedented level, potentially transforming humanity's access to space.

"Our next objective is monthly, then weekly, and finally daily space delivery," Astra co-founder and chief technology officer Adam London said...

sandbagger shares an excerpt from a MIT Technology Review article, written by Christopher Ankersen and Mike Martin: Despite their terrible human costs -- or perhaps because of them -- wars are often times of technological innovation. [...] But Afghanistan is different. There has been technological progress -- the evolution of drone warfare, for example. But the advances made by the US and its allies have not been as pronounced as those seen before, and they haven't been as profound as some experts have claimed. In fact, contrary to the typical narrative, the technological advances that have taken place during the 20 years of conflict have actually helped the Taliban more than the West. If wars are fought through innovation, the Taliban won. What do we mean? The West fought the war in much the same way from beginning to end. The first airstrikes in 2001 were conducted by B-52 bombers, the same model that first saw service in 1955; in August, the attacks that marked the end of US presence came from the same venerable model of aircraft. The Taliban, meanwhile, made some huge leaps. They began this war with AK-47s and other simple, conventional weapons, but today they have harnessed mobile telephony and the internet -- not just to improve their weapons and their command-and-control systems, but even more crucially, to carry out their strategic communications and their influence operations.

What accounts for this underwhelming and unevenly distributed technological gain? For the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan has been existential. Confronted with hundreds of thousands of foreign troops from NATO countries, and hunted on the ground and from the air, they had to adapt in order to survive. While the bulk of their fighting equipment has remained simple and easy to maintain (often no more than a Kalashnikov, some ammunition, a radio, and a headscarf), they have had to seek out new technology from other insurgent groups or develop their own. One key example: roadside bombs, or IEDs. These simple weapons caused more allied casualties than any other. Originally activated by pressure plates, like mines, they had evolved by the midpoint of the war so that the Taliban could set them off with mobile phones from anywhere with a cell signal. Because the Taliban's technological baseline was lower, the innovations they have made are all the more significant.

But the real technological advance for the Taliban took place at the strategic level. Acutely aware of their past shortcomings, they have attempted to overcome the weaknesses of their previous stint in government. Between 1996 and 2001, they preferred to be reclusive, and there was only one known photo of their leader, Mullah Omar. Since then, though, the Taliban have developed a sophisticated public affairs team, harnessing social media domestically and abroad. IED attacks would usually be recorded by mobile phone and uploaded to one of the many Taliban Twitter feeds to help with recruitment, fundraising, and morale. Another example is the technique of automatically scraping social media for key phrases like "ISI support" -- referring to Pakistan's security service, which has a relationship with the Taliban -- and then unleashing an army of online bots to send messages that attempt to refashion the image of the movement.

For the coalition, things were quite different. Western forces did have access to a wide range of world-class technology, from space-based surveillance to remotely operated systems like robots and drones. But for them, the war in Afghanistan was not a war of survival; it was a war of choice. And because of this, much of the technology was aimed at reducing the risk of casualties rather than achieving outright victory. Western forces invested heavily in weapons that could remove soldiers from harm's way -- air power, drones -- or technology that could speed up the delivery of immediate medical treatment. Things that keep the enemy at arm's length or protect soldiers from harm, such as gunships, body armor, and roadside-bomb detection, have been the focus for the West. The West's overarching military priority has been elsewhere: in the battle between greater powers. Technologically, that means investing in hypersonic missiles to match those of China or Russia, for instance, or in military artificial intelligence to try outwitting them. In closing, the authors say that technology "is not a driver of conflict, nor a guarantor of victory. Instead, it is an enabler."

"It also tells us that the battlefields of tomorrow might look a lot like Afghanistan," they add. "[W]e will see fewer purely technological conflicts that are won by the military with the greatest firepower, and more old and new technologies fielded side by side."

NASA hopes that commercial space stations will orbit Earth once the International Space Station eventually retires, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said today at the 36th Space Symposium. Space.com reports: The space station, which was completed in 2011, could retire as soon as 2024. However, today, Nelson revealed that he expects the orbiting lab to last to 2030 and that NASA hopes it will be replaced by commercial labs in orbit. "We expect to expand the space station as a government project all the way to 2030. And we hope it will be followed by commercial stations," Nelson said during a "Heads of Agency" panel alongside other space leaders from around the world.

Now, while NASA hopes for commercial space stations to take over as the International Space Station nears the end of its tenure, China has already begun building its own space station. And, as NASA is prohibited from engaging in bilateral activities with China, this move by China is more competitive than collaborative. "Unfortunately, I believe we're in a space race with China," Nelson said during the panel. "I'm speaking on behalf of the United States, for China to be a partner. I'd like China to do with us as a military adversary, like Russia has done ... I would like to try to do that. But China is very secretive, and part of the civilian space program is that you've got to be transparent." Nelson pointed to Russia's longstanding history as a collaborator alongside NASA in space, despite ongoing political divides back on Earth.

Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said that the warfighting force he leads has reached Initial Operational Capability and will need to double the size of its headquarters staff to achieve full operational capability. It also needs a permanent headquarters. Space News reports: U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, who was put in charge of Space Command a year ago, made the announcement Aug. 24 during a keynote speech at the 36th Space Symposium here. "We are a very different command today at IOC than we were at stand-up in 2019, having matured and grown into a warfighting force, prepared to address threats from competition to conflict in space, while also protecting and defending our interests in this vast and complex domain," he said. Dickinson said reaching initial operational capability is an important milestone for the two-year-old command. "It's an indication that we've moved out of our establishment phase."

The command is headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, and supported by two field organizations: a Combined Force Space Component Command at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California; and a Joint Task Force Space Defense at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. [...] It was temporarily stood up at Peterson Space Force Base pending a basing decision by the Department of the Air Force. Former Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett announced in January that the Air Force had selected Huntsville, Alabama, as the new location for Space Command headquarters. Colorado lawmakers have since pushed back, claiming the decision was politically motivated and that the Air Force initially had recommended keeping Space Command at Peterson. [...] Dickinson said the command needs to have a permanent headquarters location sooner rather than later so it can move forward with its organization and plans.

The New Yorker looks at Cerebras, a startup which has raised nearly half a billion dollars to build massive plate-sized chips targeted at AI applications — the largest computer chip in the world. In the end, said Cerebras's co-founder Andrew Feldman, the mega-chip design offers several advantages. Cores communicate faster when they're on the same chip: instead of being spread around a room, the computer's brain is now in a single skull. Big chips handle memory better, too. Typically, a small chip that's ready to process a file must first fetch it from a shared memory chip located elsewhere on its circuit board; only the most frequently used data might be cached closer to home...

A typical, large computer chip might draw three hundred and fifty watts of power, but Cerebras's giant chip draws fifteen kilowatts — enough to run a small house. "Nobody ever delivered that much power to a chip," Feldman said. "Nobody ever had to cool a chip like that." In the end, three-quarters of the CS-1, the computer that Cerebras built around its WSE-1 chip, is dedicated to preventing the motherboard from melting. Most computers use fans to blow cool air over their processors, but the CS-1 uses water, which conducts heat better; connected to piping and sitting atop the silicon is a water-cooled plate, made of a custom copper alloy that won't expand too much when warmed, and polished to perfection so as not to scratch the chip. On most chips, data and power flow in through wires at the edges, in roughly the same way that they arrive at a suburban house; for the more metropolitan Wafer-Scale Engines, they needed to come in perpendicularly, from below. The engineers had to invent a new connecting material that could withstand the heat and stress of the mega-chip environment. "That took us more than a year," Feldman said...

[I]n a rack in a data center, it takes up the same space as fifteen of the pizza-box-size machines powered by G.P.U.s. Custom-built machine-learning software works to assign tasks to the chip in the most efficient way possible, and even distributes work in order to prevent cold spots, so that the wafer doesn't crack.... According to Cerebras, the CS-1 is being used in several world-class labs — including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and E.P.C.C., the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh — as well as by pharmaceutical companies, industrial firms, and "military and intelligence customers." Earlier this year, in a blog post, an engineer at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca wrote that it had used a CS-1 to train a neural network that could extract information from research papers; the computer performed in two days what would take "a large cluster of G.P.U.s" two weeks.

The U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory reported that its CS-1 solved a system of equations more than two hundred times faster than its supercomputer, while using "a fraction" of the power consumption. "To our knowledge, this is the first ever system capable of faster-than real-time simulation of millions of cells in realistic fluid-dynamics models," the researchers wrote. They concluded that, because of scaling inefficiencies, there could be no version of their supercomputer big enough to beat the CS-1.... Bronis de Supinski, the C.T.O. for Livermore Computing, told me that, in initial tests, the CS-1 had run neural networks about five times as fast per transistor as a cluster of G.P.U.s, and had accelerated network training even more.
It all suggests one possible work-around for Moore's Law: optimizing chips for specific applications. "For now," Feldman tells the New Yorker, "progress will come through specialization."

Gallup: More Americans are taking UFOs seriously than just two years ago. When asked which of two theories better explains UFO sightings, 41% of adults now believe some UFOs involve alien spacecraft from other planets, up eight points from 33% in 2019. Half of Americans, down from 60% in 2019, remain skeptical, saying all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena. Another 9% are unwilling to venture a guess. The recent change spans a period when UFOs have received significant coverage in mainstream news publications. This includes a spate of articles in 2019 focused on leaked footage of mysterious flying objects taken by Navy pilots. While the Department of Defense has not suggested these or any UFOs involve alien visitors, the Navy has acknowledged the leaked video is authentic, and in 2020, it commissioned a task force to study "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP).

The latest Gallup results are based on a telephone poll conducted July 6-21. This was less than a month after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued its preliminary report on UAPs, stating that the various types of incidents examined likely fall into one of five categories: "airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, [U.S. government] or U.S. industry development programs, foreign adversary systems and a catchall 'other' bin." The 2019 survey was conducted Aug. 1-14, several months after the Navy UFO footage was first leaked. From 1973 to 2019, Gallup tracked whether Americans thought UFO sightings involved "something real," as opposed to "just people's imaginations." This wording found between 47% and 57% believing they were real, including 56% in 2019. However, it wasn't clear from the question whether "real" meant people thought UFOs involved alien visitors or earthly objects such as drones, military planes or unusual cloud formations. To address that uncertainty, in a separate 2019 poll, Gallup first asked whether any UFOs have been alien spacecraft, with no questions about UFOs immediately preceding it in the survey. Today's update replicated that methodology, thus providing a reliable trend.

Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 quotes Wired: Location data sharing from wireless carriers has been a major privacy issue in recent years... Carriers remain perennially hungry to know as much about you as they can. Now, researchers are proposing a simple plan to limit how much bulk location data they can get from cell towers.

Much of the third-party location data industry is fueled by apps that gain permission to access your GPS information, but the location data that carriers can collect from cell towers has often provided an alternative pipeline. For years it's seemed like little could be done about this leakage, because cutting off access to this data would likely require the sort of systemic upgrades that carriers are loath to make.

At the Usenix security conference on Thursday, though, network security researchers Paul Schmitt of Princeton University and Barath Raghavan of the University of Southern California are presenting a scheme called Pretty Good Phone Privacy that can mask wireless users' locations from carriers with a simple software upgrade that any carrier can adopt—no tectonic infrastructure shifts required... The researchers propose installing portals on every device — using an app or operating system function — that run regular checks with a billing server to confirm that a user is in good standing. The system would hand out digital tokens that don't identify the specific device but simply indicate whether the attached wireless account is paid up.

CBS News reports: Russian intelligence services worked with prominent ransomware gangs to compromise U.S. government and government-affiliated organizations, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Analyst1.

Two Russian intelligence bureaus — the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR — collaborated with individuals in "multiple cybercriminal organizations," security analysts with the firm say in the report. The research indicates these cybercriminals helped Russian intelligence develop and deploy custom malware targeting American companies that serve U.S. military clients... The code was launched sometime between June 2019 and January 2020 and hid in the background of Windows machines, silently harvesting keystrokes and sensitive documents...

Analyst1 does not attribute the rise in organized criminal ransomware directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin. But DiMaggio does "strongly believe" the Russian government colluded with cybercriminal gangs to spy on American defense targets.
The report described said two different Russian cybercriminal groups attacked the same target, infiltrated their targeted systems, "then distributed malware using a PowerShell Windows application..."

The report's author, a lead researcher at Analyst1, tells CBS that the ransomware variation "crawls documents for specific keywords, like 'weapon' and 'top secret,' then quietly sends the info back to the attacker."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from FedScoop: The Department of Defense has awarded a task order worth up to $979 million over a five-year period to Peraton to counter misinformation from U.S. adversaries. The contractor will provide services to U.S. Central Command and its mission partners with operational planning, implementation and assessment services. Peraton has undertaken such work for Central Command since 2016 under its counter-threat messaging support program, and according to the company, the latest contract represents a doubling of work already scheduled to be carried out under the program.

Commenting on the contract, Tom Afferton, president of Peraton's cyber missions sector, said: "Since 2016, Peraton has executed campaigns to promote regional security and stability. Our ability to provide the U.S. government with insight, expertise, and influence helps ensure the safety of Americans, our allies, and the more than 550 million people under U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility, spanning three continents and 20 nations." The award comes after Peraton earlier this month won an IT infrastructure contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which could be worth up to $497 million over seven years. The Virginia company will provide infrastructure-as-a-managed service for storage and computing infrastructure facilities across the U.S. and globally. Announcing the award, Peraton said it will deliver an enterprise-scale solution that integrates on-premise infrastructure with the VA's enterprise cloud architecture.