Tag: us military

Are the US Military’s GPS Tests Threatening Airline Safety?

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco quotes a new report from IEEE Spectrum: In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew…

How the US Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard at Vice: The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include…

Your Computer Isn’t Yours

Security researcher Jeffrey Paul, writes in a blog post: On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored. It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique…

SpaceX Now Valued at $46 Billion, Making It America’s Top ‘Unicorn’

“SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company that recently became the first business in history to send astronauts into Earth’s orbit, is parlaying its successes into big money,” reports CNN Business: The company recently finished a $1.9 billion funding round, one of the largest single fundraising pushes by any privately held company, according to public filings and data aggregated by venture capital data…

Should the US Military Be Recruiting On Twitch?

The U.S. military has for years been using streaming channels and video gaming to recruit people. “Several branches of the military — with the exception of the Marines — have had esports teams since 2018,” reports The Verge. “And according to Military.com, the Army’s esports efforts alone generated 3,500 recruiting leads in fiscal year 2019.” But the question is… should they…

Hackers Broke Into Real News Sites To Plant Fake Stories

A disinfo operation broke into the content management systems of Eastern European media outlets in a campaign to spread misinformation about NATO. Wired reports: On Wednesday, security firm FireEye released a report on a disinformation-focused group it’s calling Ghostwriter. The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops…

How a Chinese Agent Used LinkedIn to ‘Lure’ American Targets

Today the BBC told the story of Jun Wei Yeo, “an ambitious and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD student” who was gradually recruited by Chinese intelligence. Yeo “would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.”
Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were…

Thousands of Contracts Highlight Quiet Ties Between Big Tech and US Military

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…

US military electroshock weapon can hit a person 100 metres away

The US Marine Corps is testing a long-range alternative to stun guns – it is a projectile that can be fired from a shotgun and that uses a parachute to slow down before delivering an electric shock Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2247049-us-military-electroshock-weapon-can-hit-a-person-100-metres-away/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…