Tag: TALIBAN

The Taliban has begun sending gruesome "night letters" -- violent videos meant to intimidate and control Afghans -- en masse via SMS. Historically written threats posted on buildings, night letters have long been a successful means of coercion by the Taliban. The video form has cropped up in the last couple of years on Facebook and YouTube, and tends toward the extreme, such as interviews of ...

Captain Jonathan J. Springer reached into his own pockets to produce the $26,000 needed to develop a new iPhone app, one specifically designed for American soldiers battling the Taliban. The 31-year-old soldier worked with programmers to bring his idea of a navigation and targeting app to life. The result, called 'Tactical Nav,' should soon be available in the iTunes App Store for $0.99. The app ...

When the newest version of 'Medal of Honor' hits living rooms on October 12th, users will still be able to spend hours of their lives shooting at each other in a hostile, virtual rendering of Afghanistan. One thing they won't be able to do, though, is play for the Taliban, as producer Electronic Arts, has now decided to pull the highly controversial option from the game's multi-player feature. ...

In an effort to exert greater control over militant groups in Afghanistan, several governmental ministries, in conjunction with NATO forces, are now hoping to issue biometric ID cards to over 1.65 million Afghan citizens by May. Local and foreign forces have already begun compiling biometric files on policemen, criminals, insurgents and normal citizens, and are currently collecting information ...

Video game playing soldiers looking forward to the upcoming 'Medal of Honor' will have to go elsewhere for a dose of non-lethal action. The game has been banned from all GameStop stores located on military facilities, due to its inclusion of Taliban forces as playable characters in multiplayer shoot-outs. The ban has been enforced by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which operates ...

With the release of its Afghan War Diary, Wikileaks has just perpetrated what many are calling one of the largest leaks in military history. Comprising nearly 92,000 classified reports from Afghanistan, the Diary sheds new light on the challenges that the U.S. and coalition forces face on the ground, exposing the conflict as more dire than most may have imagined. The documents reveal, among other ...

If you happen to be a fan of the Taliban, you may now have another thing to worry about besides your psychological well-being: hackers. As Wired reports, a Taliban-endorsed, online jihadi forum has apparently come under cyber-siege from people who, shock of shocks, disagree with what the radical Islamic organization espouses. Abu al-Aina'a al-Khorasani, the administrator of the belligerent forum ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The FCC is expected to present its national broadband plan to Congress this month, and the program will reportedly cost $25 billion. The FCC is hoping to help finance the proposition by auctioning frequencies, or "underutilized spectrums," to various wireless broadband services. [From: Yahoo! News] Twitter users tweeted more than ...

Last we checked, Afghanistan's government had been freed from the iron grip of the Taliban, but it seems as if its ideals are alive and well in the former front-line in the War on Terror. A 23-year old student is being held on death row in Kabul for downloading an article on the role of women in Islam from the Internet. While we wish this were a joke, but it isn't -- in a government backed by ...

Last month, the Taliban issued warnings to mobile phone service providers in Afghanistan. It said that any cell tower that was not shut down by 5 PM for a period of 10 hours would be destroyed. Providers did not take this threat kindly and have not shut anything down. Well, as of this morning, it would seem that the Taliban wasn't kidding, since it has done its best to punish mobile phone ...

Taliban militants are threatening to blow up the radio towers of cell phone companies in Afghanistan if they don't shut down their networks for ten hours, starting at 5 P.M, according to the Associated Press. Zabiullah Mujaheed, a Taliban spokesman, has said the networks have three days to comply with the demands. The Taliban believes that the U.S. military is using the cell phone signals to ...

British soldiers deployed in Afghanistan have been ordered to no longer use their cell phones to call home. According to reports Taliban insurgents managed to track their calls and nab soldiers' home numbers to make bogus calls to their homes. One such caller, made to the wife of an Air Force officer, frighteningly said "You'll never see your husband alive -- we have just killed him." The call ...