Tag: MILITARY

Share When two Navy helicopters unexpectedly landed at Lake Tahoe Airport on September 13th, they did so with half a million dollars in damages. Even more unexpected, an ensuing Navy investigation has found that the damage was caused by the crafts' two pilots and their decision to hover just above the surface of Lake Tahoe -- so that they could post the pictures to Facebook, no less. (Did we ...

Anyone with an Internet connection and some extra time on their hands can access the secret diplomatic cables recently published by WikiLeaks -- except, of course, anyone who works for the Air Force. Yesterday, the Air Force confirmed that it had blocked all sites that had published the full cables, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and more than 25 other news organizations. ...

American soldiers could soon find smartphones in their standard-issue equipment packages. The Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) is examining ways to modernize the U.S. military using gadgets like the iPhone, iPad, Kindle and Android handsets. In February, the Army will start testing phones and applications, and, in January, will start testing iPhone-based Common Access Card readers. ...

Over the course of the past few months, the Egyptian government has taken a particularly hard-line stance against Facebook-based activism, many authorities believing it to pose a legitimate threat to President Hosni Mubarak. In March, a military tribunal unsuccessfully attempted to silence a controversial blogger named Ahmed Mustafa, barely three years after Egypt had jailed another writer for ...

Israeli law requires all citizens to spend some time doing military service, but women who claim to be observant Jews typically get a pass. Understandably, many women in Israel take full advantage of this loophole, even if they're not all that Jewish. Unfortunately for them, though, the Israeli military recently caught onto their scheme, and, with a little help from Facebook, has now outed 1,000 ...

The U.S. Air Force is apparently concerned that its troops aren't the brightest crayons in the box. Officials are worried that careless updating of social networks that compile geolocation data -- like Foursquare, Facebook's Places and Twitter -- could reveal the forces' locations. Concerns about social media are nothing new in the military, but location-based services pose a particular problem ...

For about 18 minutes on April 8th, 2010, China proved just how easy it would be to hijack the Web. The country redirected 15-percent of global Internet traffic through its servers, affecting both commercial sites and government agencies. A report being published by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says that sites for NASA, the Senate, all four branches of the military and ...

We've seen Google Maps misplace cities and mislead pedestrians, but we never thought the navigational service's occasional inaccuracies could spark an international conflict -- until now. It all began when Nicaraguan military commander Eden Pastora sent a group of troops into a region around San Juan Lake, near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Upon arriving, the soldiers promptly ...

As part of a DARPA initiative, Boeing is developing a search-and-rescue aircraft that combines a helicopter's hovering capabilities with an airplane's long flight range. According to Aviation Week, Boeing will test a 20-percent scale model of the disc-rotor aircraft, called the CSAR DiscRotor, in a wind tunnel sometime next year. The aircraft uses rotor-mounted blades, much like a chopper, so ...

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 ...

The powerful and dynamic Stuxnet worm has completely baffled security experts since its discovery in June. The mysteriously imperceptible and untraceable mega-malware has disseminated through various machines and facilities in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Russia, but a recent attack on an Iranian nuclear facility has sparked a global firestorm of publicity and conjecture. Now, some analysts ...

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 ...

Later this year, U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan will have a new method for detonating improvised explosive devices (IEDs). According to The Daily Mail, troops will expand their arsenals with a device called The Stingray, which uses H20 and a small amount of munition to create a 'blade' of water capable of penetrating steel. The Stingray, small enough to be carried by robots, can be placed far away ...

When will it end, DARPA? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has cursed the earth with unmanned missile systems, all-terrain robots and machines that feast upon -- and then fuel themselves with -- human flesh. The group, which works directly for the U.S. Department of Defense, now hopes to turn actual humans into controllable, mindless and murderous cyborgs. The organization has ...