TECH NOTES

HMS Daring eases through first sea trials
Click title for source at Telegraph.Co.UK…

By Thomas Harding on HMS Daring
10:58am BST 16/08/2007

A warship that can defend the entire city of London from missile and aircraft attack successfully completed its first Royal Navy sea trial yesterday.

The £1 billion HMS Daring will become the most advanced warship in the world when it enters service with the Navy in 2009.

The Type-45 destroyer, which is already exceeding targets, will now start taking on board Aster missiles, which are capable of knocking down a cricket ball-sized object travelling at three times the speed of sound.

It is also the most eco-friendly ship ever produced for the Royal Navy, with a unique electric propulsion system that can ferry it from New York and back without refuelling.

The most powerful front-line warship since the Second World War has missiles capable of striking the most advanced “intelligent” anti-ship missiles that can travel at Mach 4.

Daring is crowned by a huge 30-metre high Samson radar that can track more than 1,000 targets at once.

The system is so powerful it can monitor all take-offs and landings from every major European airport within 200 miles of Portsmouth.
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Cyberwar: Is This The First Salvo?
Click title for source at BaselineMag.com…

May 30, 2007
By John McCormick and Deborah Gage

Estonia claims that Russia launched a virtual attack this past month against government agencies, followed by cyberassaults on its newspapers and TV stations, schools and banks. If true, this would represent the first cyberattack by one nation on another. Should Americans and American business be concerned?

Two of the nation’s leading security experts, Ira Winkler and Alan Paller, spoke to Baseline this week and gave their perspectives.

Ira Winkler, one of the nation’s leading computer security experts, is the author of Zen and the Art of Information Security. He is also president of Internet Security Advisors Group, a security consultancy that specializes in vulnerability assessments and penetration testing services. He sits on the board of advisers at Securify, a computer monitoring and security company.
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Pentagon Preps Mind Fields
Click title for source at Wired.com…

By Noah Shachtman
05:00 AM Mar, 21, 2007

The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking.

Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what’s occupying their operators’ attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It’s all part of a broader Darpa push to radically boost the performance of American troops.

“Computers today, you have to learn how they work,” says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa’s first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. “We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you.”
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