With pinpoint accuracy, this electronic warfare drone can black out opposing forces at will.
Boeing’s “CHAMP” (Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project) is a one-missile, flying blackout. Image source:Category: military – Page 268
Inside America’s Next Spyplane
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Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.
Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.
Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.
Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France.
The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems.
The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons — 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
For my CISO/ CSO friends.
It is believed that Russia has the Internet that is considered as impenetrable. Such technology protects Russia from hacking attempts.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is prone to hacking, as shown in the recent cyber attacks on the US which led to outages on giants including Twitter, Amazon and Spotify, for which Russia has been largely blamed, so the Eastern European powerhouse has upped its security measures.
The electronic communication system is independent from the WWW and is unable to be connected to unless it is from a verified and licensed computer.
What does the future hold for computing? Experts at the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub (NQIT), based at Oxford University, believe our next great technological leap lies in the development of quantum computing.
Quantum computers could solve problems it takes a conventional computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to solve. This could bring new possibilities, such as advanced drug development, superior military intelligence, greater opportunities for space exploration and enhanced encryption security.
Quantum computers also present real risks, but scientists are already working on new forms of encryption that even a quantum computer couldn’t crack. Experience tells us that we should think about the applications and implications of quantum computing long before they become reality as we strive to ensure a safe future in the exciting new age of quantum computing.
Heading to Russia anytime soon? Well, that cell tower that you see in Russia may actually be a missile jammer.
Missile jammers aren’t exactly new as far as technology is concerned, but Russia’s implementation of it might. According to a report from Motherboard, it seems that over in Russia, the government is apparently considering stepping up their military defense by equipping civilian cellphone towers with missile jammers.
According to a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman who spoke to the Izvestiya newspaper, “At the present time, the tests of the item have been completed and the system has been accepted into the inventory.” Dubbed Pole-21, these missile jammers can be mounted onto cellphone towers and given the spread of cellphone towers, the end result could be a dome-like defense system that can cover entire regions and protect it from satellite navigation signals.
However it should be noted that the US already has cruise missiles like the Tomahawk which has been designed specifically to counteract against GPS jammers, meaning that it is unclear as to how effective this setup will be, but Russian military analyst Anton Lavrov seems to think it will be good enough.
The ALIAS system, developed by DARPA, could cut down on crew requirements in military and civilian small aircraft by taking control with a robotic arm. Although it’s still a ways off production, the system has been successfully demonstrated on a Cessna Caravan aircraft.