Researchers Say they Found Spyware Used in War

ACM NEWS

Researchers Say they Found Spyware Used in War for the First Time

By TechCrunch May 25, 2023

Said Samvel Farmanyan, co-founder and host of an opposition television program in Armenia, “It is not only a clear violation of human rights, my rights of privacy and private communication, but it had [an] enormous psychological effect.”

Security researchers and digital rights organizations believe the government of Azerbaijan used spyware produced by NSO Group to target a government worker, journalists, activists, and the human rights ombudsperson in Armenia, as part of a years long conflict that has at times broke out into an all-out war.

The cyberattacks may be the first public cases where commercial spyware was used in the context of a war, according to Access Now, a digital rights group that investigated some of the cases. The hacks happened between November 2021 and December 2022. The skirmish between Armenia and Azerbaijan — known as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict — has been going on for years, and it flared up again in May 2021, when Azerbaijani soldiers crossed into Armenia and occupied parts of its territory.

"While a number of infected individuals are also members of the Armenian opposition or are otherwise critical of the current government, the infections took place at critical times in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and a deep political crisis caused by the conflict, which resulted in a significant uncertainty over the future of the country's leadership and its position on Karabakh," Natalia Kariva, the tech legal counsel at AccessNow, told TechCrunch. "Some of the victims worked closely in or with [Armenia's] Nikol Pashinyan's administration and were directly involved in the negotiations or investigation of human rights abuses committed by Azerbaijan in the conflict."

The Azerbaijani embassy in Washington D.C. did not respond to a request for comment.

NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Pentagon and Joint Operations

Worked there long before such applications could be reasonably considered. How/why is quite interesting and inevitable.

Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint war-fighting operations  in https://www.c4isrnet.com/

By Nathan Strout, , Jul 8, 2020

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is focusing its efforts on building AI for the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. (Getty)

The Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts.

“As we have matured, we are now devoting special focus on our joint war-fighting operation and its mission initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its goal of preserving America’s military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors,” Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. “The AI capabilities JAIC is developing as part of the joint war-fighting operations mission initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the American war fighter.”  ... ' 

Metal Detecting from the Air

Recall a DOD project looking a a related problem.   Hope this does not become an issue in greater Europe.

Metal-Detecting Drone Could Autonomously Find Land Mines A drone with 5 degrees of freedom can safely detect buried objects from the air.  By Evan Ackerman 

Several stitched-together photographs of gray three-propellered drones with metal detectors hovering just above grass

This composite photo shows how a tricopter drone with a lidar and metal detector can fly around an obstacle close to the ground.

Metal detecting can be a fun hobby, or it can be a task to be completed in deadly earnest—if the buried treasure you’re searching for includes land mines and explosive remnants of war. This is an enormous, dangerous problem: Something like 12,000 square kilometers worldwide are essentially useless and uninhabitable because of the threat of buried explosives, and thousands and thousands of people are injured or killed every year.

While there are many different ways of detecting mines and explosives, none of them are particularly quick or easy. For obvious reasons, sending a human out into a minefield with a metal detector is not the safest way of doing things. So, instead, people send anything else that they possibly can, from machines that can smash through minefields with brute force to well-trained rats that take a more passive approach by sniffing out explosive chemicals.

Because the majority of mines are triggered by pressure or direct proximity, it may seem that a drone would be the ideal way to detect them nonexplosively. However, unless you’re only detecting over a perfectly flat surface (and perhaps not even then) your detector won’t be positioned ideally most of the time, and you might miss something, which is not a viable option for mine detection.

But now a novel combination of a metal detector and a drone with 5 degrees of freedom is under development at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. It may provide a viable solution to remote land-mine detection, by using careful sensing and localization along with some twisting motors to keep the detector reliably close to the ground.  ...' 

Security in Cyberspace

Considerable piece in Fraunhofer mag,  intro below

More security in cyberspace

Web special Fraunhofer magazine 2.2022

The invasion of Ukraine shows that fighting is no longer just on the battlefield, but also in virtual space - with highly professional hacker attacks and targeted disinformation. How can Germany become more defensive?

Months before Putin gave his troops the marching orders, the war on the Internet began. Hackers have been preparing the Russian invasion since at least December of last year. This is the conclusion of Prof. Haya Shulman, who studied the cyber attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Shulman heads the "Cybersecurity Analytics and Defences" department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt, coordinates the "Analytics Based Cybersecurity" research area at the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and holds a chair at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

One of their findings: The malware that caused the systems of the communications satellite KA-SAT to fail on the day Russia invaded Ukraine was smuggled in months ago. KA-SAT provides broadband internet to customers across Europe and is used by the Ukrainian Army for emergency communications. »The goal of the hackers was to stop the communication – and they succeeded.

It took a month for the damage to be repaired, at least for the most part,” says Shulman. The Russian attack on KA-SAT was also not without consequences in Germany and all of Central Europe: 5,800 wind turbines could no longer be maintained and controlled remotely. Systems in remote locations that are connected to the Internet via a satellite connection were affected. They continued to supply electricity. However, technical problems could only be identified and rectified on site.  ...... ' 

Ukraine's Wounded Soldiers to Get Bionic Arms

Three dimensionally printed,  use of sensors, 

Ukraine's Wounded Soldiers to Get Bionic Arms

London Daily Express (U.K.)

Jacob Paul, January 18, 2023

U.K. technology company Open Bionics plans to fit two Ukrainian soldiers with three-dimensionally-printed bionic prostheses to replace hands lost to explosive injuries. In addition to providing custom-made Hero Arms to soldiers Andrii Gidzun and Vitalii Ivashchuk next month, the Open Bionics team has provided clinical training to three Ukrainian doctors. Open Bionics' Joel Gibbard explained the company designed the robotic hand, which can grasp objects with movable digits, using sensors triggered by muscles in the wearer's forearm "for activities of daily living. We're aiming for it to be able to hold objects of different sizes, to pick things up, hold a cup of coffee, tie shoelaces, brush teeth — these are the kind of things that we focused on in the design."  ... 

Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring

Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring   By The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2023

Ukrainian troops operated a telescopic tower with a remote camera on a Soviet car that was recast to observe and correct fire on the front line near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Christmas Day.

Ukraine has digitally networked its fighting forces, intelligence, and weapons on the cheap through satellite communications and custom software.

Veterans of U.S. and allied digitization projects see Ukraine's patchwork command-and-control system as embodying the need to experiment and involve nonmilitary experts.

Ukraine's domestic technology-outsourcing industry and hacker community have proven invaluable by repurposing commercial technologies for the insurgency.

Examples include consumer drones modified to drop grenades, software to automate payroll on the front lines, and real-time battlefield intelligence relayed to local commanders from drones and spotters.

Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said on Twitter last week, “The enemy has been preparing for full-fledged [technology] war for 20 years. We made a technological leap in 10 months.”

From The Wall Street Journal   

View Full Article  

Russia Is Jamming More GPS Satellite Signals

Use of Jamming versus Sat Signals, GPS

Russia Is Jamming More GPS Satellite Signals Around Moscow

By New Scientist, December 27, 2022

Map of GPS Interference near Moscow for 26 December 2022.

Credit: GPSJam

Russia has accelerated its jamming of global positioning system (GPS) satellites around Moscow, apparently to deter long-range strikes by Ukrainian drones, according to the GPSJam monitoring website.

The ramp-up followed drone strikes on two Russian airbases earlier this month, says Dana Goward at the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, Alexandria, VA. Russia has jammed satellite navigation following drone strikes before, and it has various military mobile jamming systems that broadcast radio noise to disrupt weak signals. Operators directly pilot short-range drones, making GPS use unnecessary. However, long-range strikes generally need GPS to navigate, so jamming would thwart remotely orchestrated strikes.

Jamming won’t protect against all drones, however. Shahad-136 drones, for example, which Russia has used against Ukraine, are equipped with navigation units that allow them to pass through areas of jamming.

From New Scientist   View Full Article

Virtualizing Nuclear War?

Happy thoughts here, not sure talking or virtualizing does much.  But consider all the war games that have been played,    Including civilians.   Serious stuff.

Nuclear War Simulator Creator Says Public Must Know Potential Destruction

Newsweek, Aristos Georgiou, October 19, 2022

A computer scientist created a nuclear war simulator to demonstrate atomic weapons' destructive potential to the public. Christopher Minson said Russia's war in Ukraine has elevated traffic to his website, which hosts a map tool for modeling an attack on the U.S. involving approximately 1,200 nuclear warheads. Minson based the tool on databases of warhead yields and targets derived from declassified information; he then compiled a database of census data, and mapped populations to target sites. Minson said the system correlates this data and executes a two-hour attack, calculating casualties from known impact and population size, and modeling the spread of fallout. "It is critical that the public understands this threat," he said. "They need to see, clearly and viscerally, just how universal and destructive a nuclear war would be."  ... 

AI Supports Displaced Peoples, Refugees in Ukraine and Beyond

Impressive depth of applications.  Good examples to consider for the future. 

AI Supports Displaced Peoples, Refugees in Ukraine and Beyond

By Karen Emslie

Commissioned by CACM Staff, September 15, 2022

The United Nations (U.N.) reported in May there were around 7.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine, people who have been forced to leave their homes but who remain in the country. Meanwhile, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency) recorded over 5.9 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled their country to locations across Europe.

The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is part of a global situation in which over 89 million people worldwide were found to be "forcibly displaced" due to persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations at the end of 2021, according to UNHCR.

Displaced peoples and refugees face a multitude of difficulties, from poor living conditions and loss of identity documents to longer-term resettlement, discrimination, and employability issues. Researchers and technology companies have been working with relief organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and governments to develop solutions, some of which are based upon artificial intelligence (AI), to support IDPs and refugees worldwide.

Ukraine: Responding to the immediate crisis

Palo Alto, CA-based Orbital Insight is using AI and geospatial data to monitor the movements of displaced peoples and refugees in Ukraine. The observations support agencies involved in the relief effort— including the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAid)—to deploy aid and emergency resources where and when they are needed.

Orbital Insight operates a cloud-based platform that uses data including vehicle,  foot-traffic, and land-use observations to provide insights on global economic, societal, and environmental trends. Its clients typically come from sectors like defense and intelligence, energy, and financial services.

The platform's raw data is obtained from multiple sources. It includes high-resolution electro-optical (EO) satellite imagery (which includes information from beyond the visible spectrum) supplied by satellite manufacturer and operator Satellogic, as well as data from connected vehicle sensors and anonymized geolocation sensors on mobile devices. Customized algorithms are used to analyze the data and perform specific tasks, like computer vision-based classification and object detection.

When war broke out in Ukraine, Orbital Insight CEO Kevin O'Brien and his team adapted the platform's capabilities to the conflict. Foot-traffic algorithms, for example, can track the volume, direction, and speed of displaced peoples' movements. The company's analysis showed how foot traffic dropped off dramatically in eastern Ukraine as people fled intense fighting in the region—  and how it then grew in cities in the west of the country as displaced peoples moved to those safer areas.

Such insights support humanitarian organizations' decision-making, such as whether emergency shelters and food should be redeployed to areas that people are moving towards. "Some of the first use-cases were to help manage relief resources both in Ukraine and at border locations," explained O'Brien. "The next was safe exit, safe passage: how do you get people further away from the fighting?"

Satellite imagery gives an aerial view of the situation at borders as refugees cross into neighboring countries like Poland and Moldova. Computer vision provides further insights by automatically counting the number of vehicles at border crossings. The results can be downloaded as geoJSON files, loaded onto a Geographic Information System (GIS), and visualized on maps for further analysis by relief organizations.

Alongside contracts with governmental agencies, Orbital Insight donates analytics via the Data Partnership, a collaborative platform that allows tech companies to share data with international development organizations for research and humanitarian purposes. The company also works directly with partners in Ukraine, including with Reface, a Kyiv-based AI startup that developed a popular face-swapping app and content creation platform. Reface has redirected its focus towards the conflict via numerous initiatives, including developing algorithms to identify Russian troops in satellite imagery and using data to fight disinformation.  ...   (more detail) 

Karen Emslie is a location-independent freelance journalist and essayist. 

3D Printing in War

New uses for 3D Printing continue to surprise me

Ukrainian Volunteers Use 3D Printers to Save Lives They churn out bandages and periscopes for fighters on the frontlines manufactured and supplied a number of 3D-printed products to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Territorial Defense Force, and the Air Forces. For security reasons, this group does not disclose most of their work. But they do share common achievements.

One month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of more than 100 makers from all over Ukraine manufactured and supplied a number of 3D-printed products to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Territorial Defense Force, and the Air Forces. For security reasons, this group does not disclose most of their work. But they do share common achievements.

According to their data, 3,019 individual parts were 3D printed in the first 16 days of the war, which were used for 930 finished products. This is data from only one group of volunteers, and it is very difficult to track the total amount of help in the form of 3D-printed products. However, it is safe to say that fast, flexible 3D-printing production has shown all its advantages in Ukraine.

This is a startling accomplishment considering that before 24 February 2022, 3D printing was very rarely used in manufacturing components for military equipment in Ukraine..... '

Crowdfunding a War

 ACM NEWS

Crowdfunding a War: How Online Appeals Are Bringing Weapons to Ukraine   By The New York Times, May 11, 2022

A Ukrainian drone operator demonstrates a modified racing drone in a workshop in western Ukraine that is providing support to the country’s military.

In a workshop in western Ukraine, a technician adjusted a metal bracket that had been attached to a racing drone so that it could carry a grenade, turning an aircraft sold in hobby stores into a lethal weapon.

Standing nearby were two American entrepreneurs, who had arrived at the workshop bearing gifts of a dozen other drones, a small installment in what has becoming a torrent of military aid to Ukraine. But this is not part of the state-sponsored arms shipments being raced into Ukraine to help the country fight a more powerful Russian army in the east.

Instead, the drones are part of a multifaceted, multimillion dollar crowdfunding campaign that is producing millions of dollars in donations, as well as a bounty of smaller weapons and other military equipment for the Ukrainian military. To drive donations, Ukrainian officials and private companies are making direct online appeals to sympathetic foreign citizens, even as they continue to press governments for heavier weaponry, too.   .... ' 

Emerging Drone uses in War

Cheaper and increasingly autonomous, they will be in our  future.  For war and for humanitarian aiding  in its aftermath. 

The Drones of War

By Esther Shein, Commissioned by CACM Staff, May 10, 2022

North American professional drone maker Draganfly has sent the first of nearly a dozen humanitarian drones to the non-profit Ukraine organization Revived Soldiers Ukraine (RSU) in Europe, to be used to deliver insulin to hard-to-reach hospitals in the war-torn country.

RSU has ordered 200 medical response drones from Draganfly, each costing $30,000 and equipped with temperature-managed payload boxes that can transport up to 35 pounds of blood, pharmaceuticals, insulin/medicines, vaccines, and wound care kits, the drone maker said. Because insulin is a temperature-sensitive product, quick and safe transportation is a top priority.

There are roughly 2.3 million people living with diabetes in Ukraine, according to the International Diabetes Association, many of whom have Type 1 diabetes and require multiple daily injections of insulin to survive. For those living in high-conflict areas of the country, access to life-saving insulin is limited or non-existent.

Draganfly's drones are equipped with temperature-managed payload boxes that can transport blood, pharmaceuticals, insulin/medicines, vaccines, water, and wound care kits. 

Also aiding in the delivery of medical supplies in Ukraine is Coldchain Delivery Systems, a Spring Branch, TX-based company that provides logistics services and connected RSU with Draganfly to deliver the medical equipment to people in besieged areas.

Because Draganfly's drones are equipped with thermal cameras, they can "look through debris to see if there are heat signatures, meaning a warm body,'' according to CEO Cameron Chell.

So far, RSU has purchased 10 drones and Draganfly has donated three, he said. There are three types of Draganfly drones being sent to Europe, ranging in price from $7,500 to $30,000, Chell said.

Other organizations have reached out to offer to provide insulin and other medical suppies, and "We're going to work with Revived Soldiers Ukraine and help them continue to do what it takes to accept donations and let people be involved,'' he said. "I suspect it will become a long-term thing for us."

After seeing how Draganfly's advanced drones were being used to deliver temperature-sensitive medical supplies and to assist search-and-rescue operations, "We knew they would be invaluable to our crews on the ground,'' said RSU president Iryna Vashchuk Discipio. She added that Draganfly is providing its drones at cost. ... ' 

War and Technology

 Good piece on the topic and related implications. 

War and Tech (and ACM)

By Moshe Y. Vardi  Communications of the ACM, May 2022, Vol. 65 No. 5, Page 9  10.1145/3528570

As COVID-19 surged around the globe two years ago, I reflected on a fundamental lesson that we must learn from our pandemic unpreparedness. I quoted the economist William A. Galston, who asked: "What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?" arguing that efficiency, which comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, can be at the expense of resilience, which requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment.

But in those early days of the pandemic, I grossly underestimated how much our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. At that point, the main symptoms of our fragility were the shortage of paper products and personal protective equipment. But by late 2021, we were all talking about the supply-chain crisis, described by the New York Times as "Ships stuck at sea, warehouses overflowing, trucks without drivers: the highly intricate and interconnected global supply chain is in upheaval, with little end in sight." A specific aspect of the supply-chain crisis was the global chip shortage—everything "smart" requires a chip, but demand outstrips supply. .... ' 

NOKIA Leaving Russian Market

Late to this.  We will at least have some measures about how global sanctions work and further change global business.

Ukraine War Update: Nokia to fully exit the Russian market  via SeekingAlpha

Apr. 12, 2022 3:55 PM ETNOK   By: Yoel Minkoff, SA News Editor305 Comments

Here are the latest headlines in the Russia-Ukraine crisis:

Nokia to completely exit the Russian market

Finnish telecom giant Nokia (NOK) announced plans Tuesday to completely exit the Russian market. NOK, which previously took such steps as suspending deliveries and moving R&D operations out of Russia, said a complete cessation of business there shouldn't impact the firm's previously announced 2022 outlook.

Putin says talks are at a 'dead end'

Vladimir Putin said peace talks with Ukraine are "at a dead end" and that Russia's military operation is going according to plan, Bloomberg reported. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said talks continue and Russia is trying to put pressure on peace negotiations.

Ukraine war will curb trade, growth - WTO

In the latest grim economic outlook to emerge, the Geneva-based trade body pointed to multiple uncertainties in its forecast over the next two years because Russian and Ukrainian exports of items like food, oil and fertilizers are under threat from the war.

Chemical weapons?

As Russia prepares for a significant new offensive in eastern Ukraine, allegations have surfaced that Ukrainians in the besieged city of Mariupol came under a Russian chemical weapons attack on Monday. The Azov battalion claimed a Russian drone dropped a "poisonous substance of unknown origin" on troops and civilians, while Ukrainian lawmaker Ivanna Klympush said people were suffering from respiratory failure and neurological problems. No independent evidence of the attack has yet emerged, though Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. will "continue to monitor the situation closely." .... ' 

Russia Said to be Jamming GPS Signals

More about uses of digital at war.

Russia is jamming GPS satellite signals in Ukraine, US Space Force says   By Elizabeth Howell published,   about 21 hours ago

'Ukraine may not be able to use GPS,' a Space Force official told

Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report.

Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellites that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force.  "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). .... 

"Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities. .... '

Clocks of War

Wars invite the establishment of clocks of action, expectations and results.  And here?   By each of  the major players.

The Ukraine War's Three Clocks   in Rand (who we used over the years as consultants)

As the war in Ukraine creeps into its second month, perhaps the most common question is: How will it end? Ultimately, the answer comes down to three internal clocks—Ukraine's, which is counting down in years, Russia's, in months, and the United States and NATO's, which is stalled at the moment but could restart quite quickly.

Ukraine's clock revolves around how long it will continue to fight. Ukraine successfully blunted Russia's ground offensive, which has led Russia to adopt a strategy of punishment, indiscriminately bombarding cities to try to break Ukrainian will. In Mariupol, an estimated 80 percent of the houses have been destroyed. While official civilian casualties still estimate a number in the hundreds, the fluidity of the situation may mean that the true death toll is much higher. Ukraine's military losses are similarly hazy. Officially, the Ukrainian government admits that thousands of its soldiers have been killed in the fighting. This, too, could be an underestimate.

And yet, history suggests that Ukraine's clock could run on for years. Great Britain endured nine months of German area bombing during “the Blitz,” between September 1940 and May 1941, at the cost of 43,500 civilians. North Vietnam lasted through a decade of American bombing despite suffering the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. And most recently, the Syrian civil war claimed over 600,000 lives and yet, the war went on for years. Time and again, populations have shown the willingness to fight on, against the odds, if they believed could win—or at the very least felt they had no other choice but to persevere.   ....' 

War and Crypto

As expected.

War Is Calling Crypto's 'Neutrality' Into Question

By Wired, March 10, 2022

Whose side is cryptocurrency on? If you had asked Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person (or persons) who created the Bitcoin platform in 2008, he/they likely would have rejected the question. The whole point of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin was neutrality—the fact that no government, bank, or entity could prevent you from using it, whether you were paying for a pizza, a forbidden book, or a bag of cocaine.

That, of course, started changing as soon as crypto's value made it the perfect medium for criminal transactions, from ransomware to dark net marketplaces. Regulators around the world demanded that exchanges and other "off-ramps" blacklist cryptocurrency from accounts linked to criminal activities or individuals, despite illicit trades accounting for just 0.15 percent of global crypto movements in 2021.

But Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a different matter. Crypto's nature as borderless money, and the abundance of youngish, passionate people sitting on troves of crypto-millions made it a go-to method for Ukraine to raise funds from people outraged by Moscow's actions. At the same time there were fears that government officials and Russian president Vladimir Putin's moneyed inner circle might side-step western sanctions by moving their assets into crypto.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are reportedly blocking all transactions from accounts known to be linked to sanctioned individuals.

Full Article

Book: The Age of AI and Our Human Future: Drones as Early Interactions?

Finished the below book, excellent,  useful read, especially in the later chapters as it relates to human future.    Was written before the Ukraine conflict which would have been a good example.  Note my recent posts on drone use.    I note that during the era of AI development, we also touched on such concerns, but it is clear we are much closer to needing to globally understand an age of AI now.   - FAD 

The Age of AI and our Human Future     by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher

Artificial Intelligence (Al) is transforming human society in fundamental and profound ways. Not since the Age of Reason have we changed how we approach security, economics, order, and even knowledge itself. In The Age of Al, three deep and accomplished thinkers come together to consider what Al will mean for us all.

An Al learned to win at chess by making moves that human grand masters had never conceived. Another Al discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties human scientists did not understand. Now, Al-powered jets are defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. Al is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality.

The Age of Al is an essential road map to our present and our future; an era unlike any that has come before.  ...   

Advances in Flexible Drone Warfare

 It has been been mentioned in a number of press sources that so-called 'Switchblade' drones are now being used and provided by the US, and are being used in the Ukraine.  These are small,  single use, anti-armor, readily carry-able by troops that are difficult to defend or detect against at a distance of 10 km.  More about them in the WP.   See also here:  Aerovironment Switchblade 300.

Global Chip Shortage from Ukraine War

New element of our supply chainto consider.

Russia's War in Ukraine Could Spur Another Global Chip Shortage  By Wired, March 2, 2022

Ukraine is just one of a series of choke points in the global semiconductor industry.

On Thursday morning, explosions rocked at least seven cities in Ukraine, heralding the start of a full-scale Russian invasion. Among Putin's first targets was Odesa, a seaside city huddled around the Black Sea, and one of the country's busiest ports. But it is also home to a little-known company called Cryoin, which plays a big role in the global production of semiconductors.

Cryoin makes neon gas, a substance used to power the lasers that etch patterns into computer chips. It supplies companies in Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, but most of its neon is shipped to the US, the company told WIRED. Now analysts are warning that the ripple effects caused by disruption to Cryoin's supply could be felt around the world.

From Wired    View Full Article