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Electronic warfare, known as the battle in the electromagnetic spectrum, relies on data and signals to survey, fight and defend and the complex mission executed by the Army’s electronic warfare Soldiers – which includes detecting and responding to enemy jamming attempts and other electronic interference – is intensifying. Currently, the Army is developing an Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, to manage and control electronic warfare assets in support of unified land operations. According to Army News Service, through the EWPMT, the Army can now visually synergize its EW attack, targeting, and surveillance capabilities to enable the maneuverability...

Something very strange and disturbing happened to me recently. If it was just relevant to me, it wouldn’t be that important (except perhaps to me), and I wouldn’t be writing this column. But it’s something that is likely more important and more ominous than we can even imagine.There are already common fraudulent schemes being perpetrated by both telephone and internet. One known as the “Grandparent Scam” is particularly reprehensible, first because it is perpetrated on elderly people who are, in general, more susceptible to tech-savvy criminals and second because it is based on the manipulation of familial love, trust and...

European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump’s trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies. The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades. They’re also advocating for Europe to show more grit in Trump’s trade war,...

The US Navy is to replace touchscreen controls on destroyers with physical systems in 2020 after a report into the fatal 2017 USS John S McCain collision branded the controls ‘unnecessarily complex’. The investigation into the accident that resulted in the deaths of 10 sailors said that the complexity of the control system and a lack of training led to the collision. Bridge design on US naval vessels is largely uncontrolled by the military, with a lack of specific requirements leaving design decisions to shipbuilders. The step-back in technology will give sailors more tactile feedback and remove the ambiguity and...

Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, is teaching police how to convince residents to share camera footage with them. When police partner with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance camera company, they get access to the “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal,” an interactive map that allows officers to request footage directly from camera owners. Police don’t need a warrant to request this footage, but they do need permission from camera owners.Emails and documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that people aren’t always willing to provide police with their Ring camera footage. However, Ring works with law enforcement and gives them advice on how to persuade people to...

Could an emerging technology reshape the battle lines in the abortion debate? Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, that fight has been defined by the interlocking, absolute values of choice and life: For some, a woman’s right to choose trumps any claim to a right to life by the fetus; for others, it’s the reverse. But what if we could separate those two — what if a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy no longer meant terminating the fetus itself? That is the promise of artificial wombs, a technology that has already shown some success in tests on...

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is out today with a new investor note covering Apple’s supply chain and how President Trump’s latest rounds of tariffs might affect things. Kuo says that he believes “the tariff may not impact the prices of Apple’s hardware products” in the United States.... ...Kuo writes that Apple has likely made “proper preparations” for such a tariff, and he predicts that Apple will “absorb most of the additional costs” in the mid-short term. Thus, Kuo believes that “prices of hardware products and shipment forecasts for the U.S. market will remain unchanged” despite the tariff. In the...

...Moments before the El Paso shooting on Saturday, a four-page message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his “brothers” on the site to spread the contents far and wide. In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.... Mr. Brennan...

The Air Force announced Friday it will soon deploy two ground-based laser weapons to an undisclosed location to test how they can be used against small drones, the service’s first “operational field test” of an experimental “directed energy” weapon. Because laser weapons could fire constantly without wasting ammunition, military technology experts have theorized they could one day be useful in combating the small, remotely operated quadcopter drones that ISIS has used. They are also expected to be an effective counter against swarming attack drones, a concept that a handful of countries are exploring.

Peter Thiel is doubling down on his criticism of Google. The Silicon Valley investor wrote in a New York Times op-ed Thursday that the search giant is hurting the US by sharing its artificial intelligence technology with China. Thiel, one of President Donald Trump's highest-profile supporters in the tech industry, said it's "shocking" that Google would work with a rival country, because AI is such a beneficial military tool. He wrote that AI is "valuable to any army -- to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are...

On a Friday afternoon in late July, a crowd of techies, military types and a few civilians deployed to the new Irvine, Calif., headquarters of Anduril Industries, a defense tech start-up, to sip hibiscus margaritas and admire the sensor towers and carbon-fiber drones on display. Dave Brubeck tinkled over the sound system, and the dress code skewed office casual and pastel, offset by the bright red pop of a lone “Make America Great Again” hat by the taco bar. After an hour of socializing amid surveillance equipment, Palmer Luckey, the company’s 26-year-old near-billionaire founder, mounted a stage for the ribbon-cutting....

First Amazon, then Google, and now Apple have all confirmed that their devices are not only listening to you, but complete strangers may be reviewing the recordings. Thanks to Siri, Apple contractors routinely catch intimate snippets of users’ private lives like drug deals, doctor’s visits, and sexual escapades as part of their quality control duties, the Guardian reported Friday. As part of its effort to improve the voice assistant, “[a] small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation,” Apple told the Guardian. That involves sending these recordings sans Apple IDs to its international team of contractors...

[R]esearchers discovered how to trigger the body ownership illusion using visual cues alone. They did this by tracking the subject’s body movements in microfine detail, the level of hand and finger movements. They then reproduced these movements exactly in the virtual body. ...work focuses on three types of virtual bodies—a four-legged animal in the form of a tiger, a flying animal in the form of a bat, and a creature with an entirely different exoskeleton in the form of a spider. Their goal is to explore the limits of body ownership with challenging examples that differ from human bodies in...

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that, based on sources and documents it had obtained from a former Huawei employee, the company had “secretly helped” Pyongyang build and maintain North Korea’s commercial wireless network. Huawei partnered with Panda International Information Technology, a Chinese state-owned firm, on a number of projects spanning at least eight years, according to The Post’s report. The revelations raise questions about whether Huawei, which has used American technology in its components, violated US export controls to furnish equipment to North Korea, where the isolated regime has faced extensive international sanctions over its nuclear weapons programme and...

Spalding continued, “When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.” “We fell into this trap of believing that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy, and, therefore, if we just open ourselves up to the world, that the world would automatically democratize,” noted Spalding. “In the space of that 20 years, we essentially deindustrialized...

“Deepfakes” refers to media that has been altered by artificial intelligence to make it appear that a person is doing or saying something that, in fact, that person has never done or said. The technology first began appearing a few years ago, with crude deepfake tools allowing users to make it look like celebrities were recorded engaging in sexual activities they actually didn’t take part in. But deepfakes are now moving past the porn realm and into the criminal world where bad actors are using the tech to impersonate CEOs, Axios reports. However, for now, it appears criminals are using deepfake...

There’s something about cameras that seems to divide our nation, while at the same time pointing out dizzying differences in terms of how we evaluate the technology based on who is using it. We already know that privacy advocates (for lack of a better term) hate facial recognition software when it’s used by law enforcement of any kind. However, most of them don’t seem to have any problems with Facebook and other social media apps “tagging” them and their friends at the latest party. Speed cameras are also seen as being evil, even if they do occasionally catch violent felons...

Back in the day, I was one of the first people to start using Google as a search engine. I liked it’s clean interface, and simplicity. Of course, over the years, other people also found this to be the preferential search engine. Unfortunately, Google became big, powerful and yes, evil. They siphon up your personal information with zero regard to fourth amendment protections. They sell the information to the highest bidder, and give it away for free if the person is part of a government agency. Unfortunately, people like myself VALUE privacy. And that means that I no longer can...

Lawmakers are questioning the extensive use of facial recognition technology after the Government Accountability Office revealed that the FBI can scan about 640 million pictures, to include drivers licenses, passport photos and mug shots. Further, recent reports revealed that federal law enforcement agencies are mining driver’s license databases in 21 states for information without the consent or knowledge of American’s in the system. Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, warned on Twitter Tuesday that the government’s unlimited and unauthorized access to private information “should concern every American.” He linked a fantastic story...

Australian researchers describe the first observation of a native ferroelectric metal: a native metal with bistable and electrically switchable spontaneous polarization states—the hallmark of ferroelectricity. The study found coexistence of native metallicity and ferroelectricity in bulk crystalline tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) at room temperature. A van-der-Waals material that is both metallic and ferroelectric in its bulk crystalline form at room temperature has potential for nano-electronics applications. The study represents the first example of a native metal with bistable and electrically switchable spontaneous polarization states—the hallmark of ferroelectricity. "We found coexistence of native metallicity and ferroelectricity in bulk crystalline tungsten ditelluride (WTe2)...