Amid intense scrutiny over TikTok as a potential national security risk in the U.S., WeChat, the essential tool for Chinese people's day-to-day life, is also taking heat from Washington. TechCrunch reports: White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told Fox Business on Sunday that "[TikTok] and WeChat are the biggest forms of censorship on the Chinese mainland, and so expect strong action on that." Navarro alleged that "all of the data that goes into those mobile apps that kids have so much fun with and seem so convenient, it goes right to servers in China, right to the Chinese military, the Chinese communist party, and the agencies which want to steal our intellectual property."

It's unclear how the U.S. restriction will play out, if it will at all, though some WeChat users are already speculating workarounds to stay in touch with their family and friends back home. In the case that the Tencent-owned messenger is removed by Apple App Store or Google Play, U.S.-based users could switch to another regional store to download the app. If it were an IP address ban, they could potentially access the app through virtual private networks (VPNs), tools that are familiar to many in China to access online services blocked by Beijing's Great Firewall.

"The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21," reports Aviation Week.

"By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism." The Skyborg family of aircraft is expected to fill an emerging "attritable" category for combat aircraft that blurs the line between a reusable unmanned aircraft system and a single-use cruise missile. As the aircraft are developed, Skyborg also will serve as the test case of a radical change in acquisition philosophy, with ecosystems of collaborative software coders and aircraft manufacturers replacing the traditional approach with a supply chain defined by a single prime contractor...

At the core of the Skyborg program is the software; specifically, the military aviation equivalent of the algorithm-fed convolutional neural networks that help driverless cars navigate on city streets... The autonomy mission system core — as integrated by Leidos from a combination of industry and government sources — will be inserted into multiple low-cost UAS designed by different companies, with each configured to perform a different mission or set of missions...

"Even though we call Skyborg an attritable aircraft, I think we'll think of them more like reusable weapons," says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.... "I expect that the pilots, depending on the mission, [will] decide: Does the Skyborg return and land with them and then go to fight another day, or is it the end of its life and it's going to go on a one-way mission?" Roper explains. In some cases, the pilot may decide a target is important enough that it is worth the loss of a Skyborg, even if its service life has not been used up, he adds.
"The Air Force's goal is to build up a large fleet of armed, sort-of disposable jets that don't need conventional runways to take off and land," reports Popular Mechanics: Skyborg will be available with both subsonic and supersonic engines, indicating both attack and fighter jet versions. The basic design (or designs) will likely be stealthy, carrying guided bombs, air defense suppression missiles, and air-to-air missiles inside internal weapons bays. Interesting, according to AvWeek, the Air Force is considering Skyborg as a replacement not only for the MQ-9 Reaper attack drone but early versions of the F-16 manned fighter....

Unmanned jets like Skyborg promise to remake the U.S. Air Force and other air forces. Manned aircraft have become increasingly large, difficult to develop, and expensive. This in turn means the Pentagon can afford fewer jets, ultimately leading to a smaller Air Force. Unmanned jets, on the other hand, are smaller, easier to develop, and cheap — allowing the Air Force to buy lots of them... The drone will grow the fighting arm of the U.S. Air Force, move air power away from air fields, fly alongside fighter jets, and escort traditionally undefended assets like the E-3 Sentry.

And it promises to do it all affordably. If the Air Force really can get Skyborg into the game by 2023 it will dramatically change the shape of aerial warfare.

schwit1 writes: Indian troops will not be allowed to use some of the world's most well-known applications. The move goes further than for civilians when the government banned 59 apps, including TikTok, from general use. According to India Today, the Indian Army on Wednesday asked its personnel to delete 89 apps from their phones, including apps such as Facebook, Truecaller, Instagram and games like PUBG. "The latest instruction comes as a bid to plug leakage of sensitive national security information from phones of armed forces personnel," the report says. "The Army has set July 15 as the deadline for the security forces personnel to remove the 89 apps from their phones."

Apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube are O.K. as long as the personnel don't reveal their army background on the platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Tiny, 3-D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially leading to new types of lightweight armor and structural materials effective against explosions and impacts. "The goal of the work is to manipulate the wave interactions resulting from a shockwave," said Dana Dattelbaum, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on a paper to appear in the journal AIP Advances. "The guiding principles for how to do so have not been well defined, certainly less so compared to mechanical deformation of additively manufactured materials. We're defining those principles, due to advanced, mesoscale manufacturing and design."

The researchers tested their fractal structures by firing an impactor into them at approximately 670 miles per hour. The structured cubes dissipated the shocks five times better than solid cubes of the same material. Although effective, it's not clear that the fractal structure is the best shock-dissipating design. The researchers are investigating other void- or interface-based patterns in search of ideal structures to dissipate shocks. New optimization algorithms will guide their work to structures outside of those that consist of regular, repeating structures. Potential applications might include structural supports and protective layers for vehicles, helmets, or other human-wearable protection. The research will be published in the July 2020 issue of AIP Advances.

Over the past two years, thousands of tech company employees have taken a stand: they do not want their labor and technical expertise to be used for projects with the military or law enforcement agencies. Knowledge of such contracts, however, hasn't been easy for tech workers to come by. From a report: On Wednesday, newly published research from the technology accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry revealed that the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, have secured thousands of deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Facebook that have not been previously reported. The report offers a new window into the relationship between tech companies and the U.S. government, as well as an important detail about why such contracts are often difficult to find.

Tech Inquiry's research was led by Jack Poulson, a former Google research scientist who quit the company in 2018 after months of internal campaigning to get clarity about plans to deploy a censored version of its search engine in China called Project Dragonfly. Poulson has publicly opposed collaborations between American technology companies and the U.S. and foreign governments that aid in efforts to track immigrants, dissenters, and bolster military activity. Poulson analyzed more than 30 million government contracts signed or modified in the past five years. The Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies accounted for the largest share of those contracts, with tech companies accounting for a fraction of the total number of contracts.

"A security researcher was able to access files on a Axon body-worn camera he purchased from eBay that had video files of Fort Huachuca Military Police officers conducting investigations and filling out paperwork," reports the Arizona Mirror: The files were able to be extracted after the researcher, who goes by KF on Twitter, was able to remove a microSD card from the body-worn camera. KF was then able to extract the un-encrypted files, which were not protected by a password, using a tool called Foremost. KF shared screenshots of the footage he was able to pull from the cards that appeared to show members of the Fort Huachuca Military Police entering a person's home and filling out paperwork.

"We are aware of this issue and have launched an investigation looking into the matter," a statement from Scottsdale-based Axon said to Arizona Mirror. "We are also reevaluating our processes to better emphasize proper disposal procedures for our customers."

The camera that was purchased by KF was an Axon Body 1, one of the company's earliest generation models that launched in 2013. The company said it stopped the model in 2015. "Our latest generation camera, Axon Body 3, offers enhanced security measures such as storage encryption to protect video from being retrieved from lost or improperly disposed cameras," the statement said.
Friday the original security researcher posted an update on Twitter, saying he'd offered to send the body cam's SD card back to the military police -- an offer that was eventually accepted by Axon itself -- and "I only listened to a few seconds of audio merely to verify its presence. I've since removed all extracted data in full."

In an earlier tweet he'd added, "Those of you asking... NO, I won't dump the card for you. Procure your own BWC (Body Worn Cam), and dump it yourself " But it looks like they already are. Earlier on Twitter, one Security Operations Center analyst posted, "I just ordered two myself.

"I'd actually really like to get a fund going to buy literally all of them and dump them to an open cloud storage bucket... Freedom of Information Act through the secondhand market."

Amazon.com is boosting efforts to lure military and commercial space organizations as major users of its cloud-computing services, hoping to benefit from rising government spending and burgeoning private investment. From a report: The move by Amazon Web Services, the online retail giant's cloud-computing arm, comes during a multiyear surge in U.S. military and civilian agency spending on space projects, with NASA, the Pentagon and their largest contractors -- including Lockheed Martin -- benefiting from hefty appropriated or proposed budget increases. Lockheed Martin already is an Amazon customer. Capitol Hill is pouring billions of dollars into new boosters and the next generation of superfast missiles, driven, in part, by White House and intelligence community warnings about Chinese and Russian advances in space. Commercial companies are building or planning to deploy swarms of small satellites encircling the globe, though the Covid-19 pandemic has dimmed the immediate outlook for many private space projects.

Amazon is anticipating a huge increase in space-related cloud-computing contracts globally with a market size estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, said Teresa Carlson, AWS's vice president in charge of public sector business. "There's a need for a more modernized approach to this industry," Ms. Carlson said. AWS will formally announce it is establishing a dedicated segment, called Aerospace and Satellite Solutions, at an online summit focused on business with the public sector on Tuesday. The group will be run by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier, who, until recently, was in charge of planning to set up the Space Force, the newly created branch of the military. The initiative comes as AWS faced increased pressure from cloud-computing rivals for public sector business. Last year, AWS lost out to Microsoft in a high-profile competition to provide the Pentagon cloud-computing services. The program, known as JEDI, could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Amazon has challenged the outcome.

schwit1 writes: Same vaccine being tested in Canada. But China just skipped ahead and approved it for one year for its soldiers without full long-term data. The COVID-19 vaccine (Ad5-nCoV) in question is developed by China's Academy of Military (AMS) research unit and CanSino Biologics. Clinical trials proved it was safe and showed some efficacy, according to the company.

Reuters says the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets. "AMS received an approval earlier this month to test its second experimental coronavirus vaccine in humans," adds Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate secrets to the public. But in Assange's absence, another group has picked up where WikiLeaks left off -- and is also picking new fights.

For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs' emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police files provided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement "fusion centers," which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data. It may put DDoSecrets on the map as the heir to WikiLeaks' mission -- or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years -- and the inheritor of its never-ending battles against critics and censors. "Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest," writes the group's cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. "We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source."

Spokesperson of Tatmadaw, Myanmar's official military, said the leaking of sensitive information about military operations and positions was one of the primary reasons for an internet ban in parts of Arakan State that entered its second year over the weekend. From a report: The secretary of the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, was speaking at a news conference in Nay Pyi Taw on June 23. "Military information such as which military column is moving from what location to which area is uploaded on social media," he explained. "And there is some information that makes people in the country and abroad misunderstand the Tatmadaw. So, we have to shut down the internet in the region for security reasons." Zaw Min Tun described the internet embargo as also intended to put a stop to the dissemination of extremist rhetoric, hate speech and misleading information, saying the Tatmadaw had no plan as yet to recommend a lifting of the ban to the government. June 21 marked the one-year anniversary of the internet blackout, imposed in seven Arakan State townships and Chin State's Paletwa Township.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration has determined that top Chinese firms, including telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies and video surveillance company Hikvision, are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, laying the groundwork for new U.S. financial sanctions, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday. The list of 20 companies that Washington alleges are backed by the People's Liberation Army also includes China Mobile Communications Group and China Telecommunications Corp as well as aircraft manufacturer Aviation Industry Corp of China.

The designations were drawn up by the Defense Department, which was mandated by a 1999 law to compile a list of firms "owned or controlled" by the People's Liberation Army that provide commercial services, manufacture, produce or export. The Pentagon's designations do not trigger sanctions, but the law says the president may declare a national emergency which would allow him to penalize any companies on the list that operate in the United States.

China sent the last satellite to space on Tuesday to complete its global navigation system0 that will help wean it off U.S. technology in this area. From a report: The network known as Beidou, which has been in the works for over two decades, is a significant step for China's space and technology ambitions. Beidou is a rival to the U.S. government-owned Global Positioning System (GPS), which is widely-used across the world. Experts previously told CNBC that Beidou will help China's military stay online in case of a conflict with the U.S. But the launch is also part of Beijing's push to increase its technological influence globally.

Space Force, the branch of the US armed services established by the Trump administration last December, now shares a name with a Netflix comedy starring Steve Carrell. From a report: The military reportedly isn't too concerned about possible confusion over the fictional show's name. Netflix, however, has reportedly secured trademark rights in Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere for Space Force. Currently, the Air Force only owns a pending application for registration of the name Space Force in the US based on intent to use, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Records obtained by the publication showed that Netflix was submitting applications for the name "Space Force" internationally back in January 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Cyber-attacks against anti-racism organizations shot up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a leading provider of protection services says. Cloudflare, which blocks attacks designed to knock websites offline, says advocacy groups in general saw attacks increase 1,120-fold. Mr Floyd's death, in police custody, has sparked nationwide civil unrest in the US. Government and military websites also saw a notable increase in attacks. Cloudflare says that after Mr Floyd's death and the ensuing violent clashes between police and protesters, it saw a noticeable jump in the amount of requests it blocked -- an extra 19 billion (17%) from the corresponding weekend the previous month. That equates to an extra 110,000 blocked requests every second, it said.

The problem was particularly acute for certain types of organizations. One single website belonging to an unnamed advocacy group dealt with 20,000 requests a second. Anti-racism groups which belong to Cloudflare's free program for at-risk organizations saw a large surge in the past week, from near-zero to more than 120 million blocked requests. Attacks on government and military websites were also up — by 1.8 and 3.8 times respectively.

At least 45 companies now advertise real-time facial recognition. From a report: More than a decade before Spotify, and years before iTunes, there was RealPlayer, the first mainstream solution to playing and streaming media to a PC. Launched in 1995, within five years RealPlayer claimed a staggering 95 million users. [...] RealPlayer is still very much alive. Now called RealNetworks, a vast majority of its revenue still comes from licensing media software. But the company has also begun dabbling in an industry that's suddenly attracting hundreds of firms, most of which operate outside public scrutiny: facial recognition. Through a startup subsidiary called SAFR, RealNetworks now offers facial recognition for everything from K-12 schools to military drones. The company even claims to have launched a surveillance project in Sao Paulo, Brazil that analyzes video from 2,500 cameras. SAFR has also licensed its technology to Wolfcom, a body camera company that is currently building real-time facial recognition into its products. As first reported by OneZero, Wolfcom's push to bring live facial recognition to hundreds of police departments represents the first such effort within the United States.

Though RealNetworks' earnings reports say SAFR doesn't generate significant revenue yet, RealPlayer's evolution is part of a trend of both large global tech companies and small upstart firms becoming key players in the sprawling facial recognition industrial complex. Over the last decade, Japanese tech firm NEC grew a burgeoning division focused on biometrics, alongside its 100-year-old hardware business. Toshiba, best known for making PCs, claims to be running more than 1,000 facial recognition projects around the world, including identity verification systems at security checkpoints in Russia and for law enforcement in Southeast Asia. Even software contractor Microfocus, one of a handful of companies keeping the aging COBOL language alive, is working on making facial recognition that can scale to thousands of CCTV cameras. While many of these companies sell facial recognition technology to verify people's identities in an app, an increasing number are investing in a burgeoning subset of the industry: real-time surveillance, or the ability to recognize individuals in live video footage. Such systems are being sold for law enforcement, military, and security purposes. Many of these companies operate in obscurity, and have never been profiled or scrutinized before.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has published a security alert warning of a new wave of cyberattacks against email servers, attacks conducted by one of Russia's most advanced cyber-espionage units. From a report: The NSA says that members of Unit 74455 of the GRU Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), a division of the Russian military intelligence service, have been attacking email servers running the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA). Also known as "Sandworm," this group has been hacking Exim servers since August 2019 by exploiting a critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-10149, the NSA said in a security alert shared today with ZDNet. "When Sandworm exploited CVE-2019-10149, the victim machine would subsequently download and execute a shell script from a Sandworm-controlled domain," the NSA says.

Twitter placed a notice on a tweet from President Trump, shielding it from view for breaking what the company said are its rules about glorifying violence [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Mr. Trump's tweet was a comment on the violent protests in Minnesota. The post can now only be seen after users click a box with a notice saying it violated Twitter's rules against encouraging violence, but it otherwise remains visible. "We've taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance," Twitter said on its official communications account.

This is the first time such a step has been taken against a head of state for breaking Twitter's rules about glorifying violence, a company spokesman said. The company said users' ability to interact with the tweet will be limited, and that users can retweet it with comment, but not like, reply to, or otherwise retweet it. "...These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!," Mr. Trump's tweet said. The official account of the White House, which tweeted Trump's message, has been flagged as well.

In response to a cyberattack on the German Parliament in 2015, Germany wants to impose a European travel ban and asset freeze on those responsible. Reuters reports: Russia has rejected allegations that its military intelligence was behind the cyber attack after media reported that data had been stolen, including emails from Chancellor Angela Merkel's constituency office. State Secretary Miguel Berger told the ambassador that the government would call for the EU's cyber sanctions mechanism to be invoked against those responsible for the attack, said the German ministry in a statement. The EU last year approved a system to freeze hackers' assets in the bloc and banning them from entry.

Federal prosecutors issued an arrest warrant on May 5 for Russian national Dmitry Badin over the attack and the German ministry said there was credible evidence that he was part of the GRU military intelligence service at the time of the attack. "The arrest warrant against Mr Badin was issued on the basis of the strong suspicion that the accused conspired with other hitherto anonymous persons to carry out intelligence activities against Germany on behalf of the secret service of a foreign power," said the ministry. In a statement on Wednesday, the Russian embassy in Berlin said German officials so far had not been able to present facts to underpin the accusations against Moscow.

The U.S. National Security Agency on Thursday warned government partners and private companies about a Russian hacking operation that uses a special intrusion technique to target operating systems often used by industrial firms to manage computer infrastructure. Reuters reports: "This is a vulnerability that is being actively exploited, that's why we're bringing this notification out," said Doug Cress, chief of the cybersecurity collaboration center and directorate at NSA. "We really want... the broader cybersecurity community to take this seriously." Cress declined to discuss which business sectors had been most affected, how many organizations were compromised using the Russian technique, or whether the cyber espionage operation targeted a specific geographic region.

The NSA said the hacking activity was tied directly to a specific unit within Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate, also known as the GRU, named the Main Center for Special Technologies. The cybersecurity research community refers to this same hacking group as "Sandworm," and has previously connected it to disruptive cyberattacks against Ukrainian electric production facilities. A security alert published by the NSA on Thursday explains how hackers with GRU, Russia's military intelligence, are leveraging a software vulnerability in Exim, a mail transfer agent common on Unix-based operating systems, such as Linux. The vulnerability was patched last year, but some users have not updated their systems to close the security gap.

Russia "is now challenging the United States' long-standing supremacy in space and working to exploit the U.S. military's dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting."

That's the argument made in The Bulletin by a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who writes about technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs (in an article shared by Lasrick). Moscow is developing counter-space weapons as a part of its overall information warfare strategy. For example, Russia just tested an anti-satellite missile system designed to destroy satellites in low earth orbit. Moreover, military leaders in Russia view U.S. satellites as the key enablers of America's ability to execute rapid, agile, and global military operations; they are intent on echoing this success and modernizing their own military satellites to more effectively support Russian forces.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries with space programs has markedly increased. Many of them are actively developing space weapons. China, for example, has an operational ground-launched anti-satellite system, according to the U.S. intelligence community. India successfully tested its own space weapon in 2019. France announced that it will launch a series of armed satellites. Even Iran is believed to be able to develop a rudimentary anti-satellite weapon in the near term... Space systems are essential for warfighting on Earth and the large growth in the number of countries fielding space weapons means the likelihood that outer space will be transformed into a battlefield has increased... Russia is the only country, however, that is reportedly approaching U.S. satellites in an aggressive manner...

Moscow's destabilizing behavior could prompt the United States to take a more aggressive posture in space in the future... Russia has been taking advantage of the lack of international consensus on what constitutes acceptable behavior in space... It seems clear that Russia is likely testing how the United States and its allies might react to aggressive space behaviors and is gaining important insights into American national security space capabilities...

In 2019, former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said that at some point, the United States needs the ability to "hit back." Russia's destabilizing actions in space could, therefore, fuel a dangerous arms race in space.