Tag: IRAQ

If you're a spectacularly average guy looking for love on Facebook, you could spend some time meticulously crafting your profile with Photoshopped self-shots, or quirky interests, in an attempt to make yourself seem more handsome and/or interesting than you really are. Or, if you have absolutely no soul whatsoever, you could just pretend that you're a dead soldier, and use someone else's heroism ...

After the break, you may watch an interview with the world's strangest cameraman (conducted by CNN's strangest reporter, no less). We mentioned him a while back, but artist Wafaa Bilal has successfully implanted a camera in his noggin. Having named his project 'The 3rd I,' Bilal will transmit the once-a-minute snapshots to a display at the Mathaf: The Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. ...

Yesterday, Wikileaks published its long awaited 'Iraq War Logs,' a collection of nearly 400,000 classified military documents covering the controversial war in Iraq. According to the Guardian, the logs consist of verified first-hand accounts from coalition soldiers on the ground, and give a chilling "glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to ...

What's better than a machine gun-equipped military boat? A machine gun-equipped military boat that flies, of course -- and, apparently, Iran now has one. As part of the country's Sacred Week of Defense, which commemorates its eight-year war with Iraq, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled three squadrons of new flying boats yesterday to the delight of the handful of people who actually ...

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 ...

A U.S. soldier stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska could be in hot water over a video posted on his Facebook page. According to the Associated Press, Specialist Robert A. Rodriguez is under investigation by the U.S. Army, and was recently ordered to remove the 30-second video, which featured an unidentified voice asking two Iraqi children if they were going to grow up to be terrorists, if they were gay ...

We like to believe that the U.S. military knows a thing or two more than the rest of us. Your devoted Switched team, for example, would be hard pressed to dismantle an IED, no matter how many times we've seen 'The Hurt Locker.' But it turns out that the men and women in uniform are entangled in the simplifying software magic known as PowerPoint, no different from the soporific strategy meetings ...

We'll bypass both the criticisms and the flag waving for now, and establish one simple fact about the Iraq war: we found and captured Saddam Hussein. It's a success that is often lost in the sea of critiques (deserved and otherwise) and overshadowed by our failure to do the same with Osama Bin Laden. What makes this success particularly interesting, however, is how the military utilized what were, ...

Years of top secret R&D and millions of dollars of military hardware has been thwarted -- by a $26 program you can buy on the Internet. Insurgents in Iraq have figured out how to use off the shelf software to intercept video feeds from unmanned drones, like the Predator, on the battlefield. Yesterday, Lt. Gen. David Deptula announced that this summer, American military personnel found ...

Last May, after a series of blogs created by U.S. Army soldiers on deployment gained worldwide notoriety and popularity, the military cracked down, effectively putting an end to the practice. Now one of the most popular of those silenced bloggers, Colby Buzzell, has written a book and continues to speak out about his experiences there and his hopes for the future. Buzzell, who operated a blog ...

Earlier this week, on Veteran's Day, the U.S. Army's Web site debuted its newest addition: Web interviews with soldiers on active duty in Iraq, the New York Times reports. This section of the site, called Straight From Iraq, allows visitors to ask questions of soldiers serving in Iraq, who, in turn, respond with YouTube-style video messages. As they have with their forays into robotics and ...

Good news for those of you spending this autumn in sunny Iraq: According to Aruba Networks, the company has installed a secure Wi-Fi network in Iraq to provide Internet access for U.S. soldiers. The service is being provided to 20,000 U.S. soldiers serving at Joint Base Balad (the largest U.S. military base in the region). For the first time since the start of the war, soldiers are now able to ...

Friday, the Web site of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- Iraq's most prominent Shiite cleric -- was hacked by the mysterious Group XP, CNN reports. As a result of the hack, the Web site displayed -- instead of al-Sistani's usual words of moral guidance -- a video of Bill Maher mocking the cleric and advice he had given on said Web site. Claiming to be offended Sunnis, Group XP supplemented the ...

Losing data without a backup is a painful scenario, but some people have seriously difficult backup scenarios. Case in point: Students in Iraq are using the Internet to back up even more documents: their passports. It seems that there is a disturbing trend where insurgents kidnap students and take -- or destroy -- their passports along with other official Iraqi documentation. With the number of ...

The U.S. government is continuing its march towards an all-robot army. The Predator drones, featured heavily in the Afghani campaign, strapped with missiles was just the beginning. The next step are the Special Weapons Observation Remote reconnaissance Direct action Systems, or "SWORDS" robots. SWORDS are modified bomb disposal robots mounted with M249 light machine guns. The robots were ...