Author: Thomas J Ackermann

What better tool to stop a drone than a drone? While the Carnivora won’t be catching any Predators, the new counterdrone robot is built to hunt much smaller, more immediate airborne pray. Announced on Dec. 13, 2018, the robot is produced by Russia’s Mikran and has a stated mission to devour the competition. “This drone…

Since the early 1990s, guided munitions have allowed the U.S. military to precisely strike targets from afar. Today, in an era of robust electronic warfare and GPS-denial, that capability is no longer assured. DARPA created the Precise Robust Inertial Guidance for Munitions (PRIGM) program to develop inertial sensor technologies that enable positioning, navigation, and timing…

The Tor Project, the organization behind the Tor anonymity network, has published financial documents for the past two years, and while they show that its revenue has increased significantly, it’s still small compared to the budgets of potential adversaries. According to the Tor Project, its revenue in 2015 and 2016 was roughly $3.2 million, but…

LONDON — As U.S. President Donald Trump re-imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iran last month, hackers scrambled to break into personal emails of American officials tasked with enforcing them, The Associated Press has found — another sign of how deeply cyberespionage is embedded into the fabric of U.S.-Iranian relations. The AP drew on data gathered…

Researchers borrowed equations from calculus to redesign the core machinery of deep learning for modeling continuous processes. by Karen Hao December 12, 2018 David Duvenaud was working on a project involving medical data when he hit upon a major shortcoming in AI. An AI researcher at the University of Toronto, he wanted to build a…

Bolivien mit dem Salzsee ‘Salar de Uyuni’ gilt als eines der Länder mit dem größten Lithium-Vorkommen weltweit   Mittwoch, 12. Dezember 2018 Griff nach “weißem Gold” Deutschland sichert sich Lithium-Zugang Für die Elektromobilität ist es eines der wichtigsten Rohstoffe überhaupt: Lithium. Erstmals gründet Deutschland nun eine deutsch-bolivianische Firma – und sichert sich damit den direkten…

European Commission – Press release EU negotiators agree on strengthening Europe’s cybersecurity Brussels, 10 December 2018 . This evening, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission have reached a political agreement on the Cybersecurity Act which reinforces the mandate of the EU Agency for Cybersecurity, (European Union Agency for Network and Information and…

By Kenneth L. Williams, Ph.D., CISSP, ITiLv3 Executive Director, Center for Cyber Defense, American Public University System The threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) event and its potential impact on millions of people is highly probable and currently unmanageable. This reality is amplified, given the level of dependency of the world population on the uninterrupted…

Intelligence analysts and soldiers on the battlefield could have access to near real-time imagery from commercial satellites as soon as 2021 thanks to new industry partnerships. Amazon Web Services unveiled Nov. 28 a new product named AWS Ground Station, which includes parabolic antennas at 12 locations across the globe. Those ground stations can download imagery…

  from: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6476269122387873792/

Creating a human-on-a-chip is the goal What if we could test new drugs without human and animal trials? See also “Lung On A Chip” by Harvard’s Wyss Institute (below)   Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with funding from the Department of Defense, want to speed up the clinical trial process with a device…

Internal Facebook documents highlight how valuable user data is The social network denies selling people’s data, but documents show the company considered charging developers access to its platform. by Katie Collins, Queenie Wong December 5, 2018 6:37 AM PST Facebook isn’t just a social network for posting vacation photos or cat videos. It’s a multi-billion…