29 septembre 2024 | International, Terrestre
Crypto Scam App Disguised as WalletConnect Steals $70K in Five-Month Campaign
Malicious Android app steals $70K in cryptocurrency by posing as WalletConnect. Over 150 victims impacted.
16 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre
Japan suspends Aegis Ashore deployment, pointing to cost and technical issues
By: Mike Yeo
MELBOURNE, Australia — Japan has abruptly suspended the planned deployment of the Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense system, which will drastically alter the U.S. ally's plans for defending itself against such threats.
Defense Minister Taro Kono cited cost and technical issues as the reasons for the suspension of Japan's plans to deploy two Aegis Ashore systems at Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, or JGSDF bases at Akita Prefecture in the north of Japan's main island of Honshu and at Yamaguchi Prefecture in the south.
He explained during today's announcement that that the main technical issue was the need to ensure that the rocket boosters of the interceptor missiles, which are used to accelerate the missile to supersonic speeds following their launch, will fall on its designated areas following separation from the missile.
Attempts to modify the software on the SM-3 Block IIA missiles to ensure correct booster separation so as to not put civilian lives and infrastructure at risk have not been successful so far, with modifications to the missile hardware likely to be needed, the minister said.
Kono added that Japan has already spent the equivalent of $1.02 billion on the development of the SM-3 Block IIA so far, which is being developed jointly by Japan and the United States. The missiles can also be fired from the Aegis equipped ships of both countries to intercept short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Japan's Aegis Ashore deployment plans have been controversial, with the defense ministry facing strong opposition from local governments and residents at both sites, citing concerns about the radiation from the system's Lockheed Martin Long Range Discrimination Radar.
The news of the suspension comes a little over a month after local media reported that the ministry will cancel the planned Aegis Ashore deployment at Akita and choose another site. However, this was swiftly denied by Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who said at the time no decision had been made.
In announcing the suspension of the Aegis Ashore deployment, defense minister Kono said that Japan will continue to rely on its Aegis-equipped destroyers to provide ballistic missile defense against North Korea's missiles in the meantime.
Japan operates seven such destroyers and is building another, although the Aegis Ashore radars are more advanced than that used on the ships. The land-based systems also reduce the demands placed on the ships and their crews by the missile defense mission.
The latest developments come as Japan announces completion of the deployment of an upgraded Patriot Missile Segment Enhancement, or MSE, interceptors at four different locations throughout the country earlier this month.
The announcement was made during a media briefing by Gen. Yoshinari Marumo, chief of the Air Staff of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, or JASDF, last Friday. The missile batteries, which can be used against aircraft or short-range ballistic missiles, are located at JASDF bases at Narashino, Hamamatsu, Ashiya, and Tsuiki.
Sur le même sujet
-
-
13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre
DARPA wants commanding robots to work like a video game
By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game
-
10 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
U.S. Army Reveals Mystery UAS Payload Called Blasphemy
Steve Trimble September 09, 2020 The U.S. Army has revealed a mysterious new payload called Blasphemy for the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. MQ-1C Gray Eagle. The name of the payload appeared in public for the first time on a presentation slide displayed by a panel of Army unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) program managers during the virtual AUVSI Defense Systems conference on Sept. 9. Blasphemy appeared as one of several payloads listed on the slide, but no other information about it was provided. When asked a follow-up question during the question-and-answer period seeking details about the new payload, the Army program manager demurred. “I think we're going to skip that one,” said Lt. Col. David Benjamin, the Army's product development manager for the MQ-1C program. The slide showed the Blasphemy payload loaded on to the same pylon as the Multi-Function Electronic Warfare (MFEW) pod. The Army plans to deploy the MFEW-Air Large pod on the MQ-1C next year, but hasn't before revealed any plans for a payload called Blasphemy. The slide showed a list of “integrated capabilities” for the MQ-1C in fiscal 2020. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/sensors-electronic-warfare/us-army-reveals-mystery-uas-payload-called-blasphemy