Tomorrow is Today

Here Come The Laser Jeeps: Navy Working on Vehicle-Mounted Lasers For Mobile Anti-Drone Warfighting

Today, the Office of Naval Research revealed its latest energy weapon craving: vehicle-mounted lasers that shoot down drones.

Dubbed Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-The-Move, the project is offering private outfits up to $400,000 each to develop such a system that blasts at full power for 120 seconds and juices back up to 80 percent after a 20 minute charge. The beam is required to pack a punch of at least 25 kilowatts, while the ability to ratchet up to 50 kilowatts is optional.

Given that kind of power, Wired points out that making such a solution fit in a Humvee is going to be a feat — especially when the Navy says it can’t weigh more than 2,000 pounds and must fit entirely within a vehicle’s cargo area. 

(via US Navy to fund development of vehicle-mounted, drone-shooting lasers)

DARPA’s “Augmented Cognition” Program Raises Ethical Problems for Neuroscientists

The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.

But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.

While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).

[This raises] questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.” In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”

(via Ten extraordinary Pentagon mind experiments | KurzweilAI)

Is the US Waging Cyberwar Against Our French Allies?

French website L’Express has a story about the sophistication of the attack. It’s clear from this description that the attack doesn’t fit China’s MO.

Instead of sheer brute force, the attack used social engineering tactics to gain access to accounts held by top French leaders. From there, computers were then infected with an advanced virus that is described as similar to the US-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course, the United States is denying involvement. The Verge has received an outright denial from the US Embassy in France: “We categorically deny these allegations from unnamed sources, published in L’Express, that the United States government has participated in a cyberattack against France.”

It doesn’t make much of a difference, though. Regardless of guilt, the US would undoubtedly react the same way. It’d be quite silly for the US to cop to an attack on an ally publicly. This might even be a case of the right hand purposefully not knowing what the left is doing. Some black ops squad of hackers attacking an ally would almost certainly be well hidden from the rest of the government.

(via Tensions rise as the US is accused of cyberwarfare with France | ExtremeTech)

US Army to Focus on Wireless Charging for Wired Troops

Leaving home while carrying a phone, an iPad and a laptop might also mean lugging along several tangled power cords. Now add radios and GPS devices. Now strap them to your person and wrap the cords around your body beneath your 30-pound armored vest. Oh, and you’re on patrol in Afghanistan, which means there’s no place to plug in when your phone’s batteries start to die. This explains why the Pentagon is keen on eliminating those cables with wireless chargers, and now wants to boost the range to more than 50 feet. 

[read more] [Army News] [image credit: army.mil]

(via dangerroom, ht futurescope)

Flame Malware Could be Repurposed Against Its Creators

Flame, as it’s called, is a whopper of a program—20 megabytes, the size of a video file, and 40 times bigger than the Stuxnet virus that took down Iranium centrifuges back in 2010. But Flame is not just another cyber weapon—it could greatly expand the scope of nations capable of carrying out cyberattacks.

Flame bears many similarities to Stuxnet. Both are specimens of highly advanced programming and detailed expertise in many specialized areas. Both programs are the products of large teams of experts working hundreds of hours on development and testing. Only a handful of nations have the technical capacity to do this kind of work. The list would include the United States, the UK, Germany, China, Russia, Israel and Taiwan, says Scott Borg, head of U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a security consulting firm.

But Flame differs from Stuxnet in many important respects. Whereas Stuxnet was designed for a specific purpose—infiltrating and destroying the centrifuges used in Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment facility at Natanz—Flame appears to be a general purpose tool for espionage. It has a broad ability to gather data from screenshots or through Bluetooth connections with other devices.

Once Flame makes it onto a computer, it begins “sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard, and so on,” says a May 28 report by security firm Kaspersky. It can compress and encrypt the information it captures and hold onto it until it has a reliable Internet connection to send it Flame was apparently targeted to countries in the Middle East—it was showed up mainly in Iran, with infections also in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and Syria.

Perhaps the biggest potential problem is that the programmers who designed Flame did not try and disguise the code in a way that makes it difficult to reverse engineer. The practice, known as “code obfuscation,” is common among commercial software developers as a way to keep competitors from being able to figure out how software products are designed. Flame programmers apparently didn’t take such measures, which means a knowledgeable programmer wouldn’t have too much trouble extracting the pertinent design of Flame and making use of it. Flame, in other words, is a boomerang.

(via “Flame” malware greatly expands the scope of cyber warfare | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network)

Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber

At the heart of the two PVAC [Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber] units were two back-mounted carpet extractor motors. These each created suction with a three-stage impeller, were powered by seven lithium-polymer batteries, and created a seal against the wall using connected handheld pads lined with closed-cell foam. A pressure release lever on each pad allowed it to be secured against the wall when being used by the climber to pull themselves up, then released so it could be lifted higher.

A gauge indicated safe vacuum levels, while a volt meter let climbers know if they were about to run out of juice (as it turned out, they just made it).

Hanging beneath each pad was a stirrup, with a foot rest made from fiberglass rebar. Users placed one foot in each stirrup, then set to climbing the wall. “The motion of the system is like that of climbing a ladder,” team leader TJ Morton told us. “The only difference is the climber must learn to correctly distribute his weight as he climbs.”

[read more] [Wright-Patterson Air Force Base] [Photo: USU]

(via futurescope)

(via Future war: drones that talk to each other and coordinate an attack - The Washington Post)

Navy Testing Fully-Autonomous Drone Aircraft:

The Navy’s new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It’s designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation’s most difficult maneuvers.

What’s even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all. The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone’s ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

Although humans would program an autonomous drone’s flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.

“Lethal actions should have a clear chain of accountability,” said Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert. “This is difficult with a robot weapon. The robot cannot be held accountable. So is it the commander who used it? The politician who authorized it? The military’s acquisition process? The manufacturer, for faulty equipment?”

(via New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who’s accountable? - latimes.com)