US Navy and the World Wide Web....not always online

The US Navy focuses technology as it's strategic advantage, except if you want to connect with those on land. The Ship is a self contained world that manages information to allow it to carry out the mission. That works for the battlespace but not so much for those who want to get information from the World Wide Web.

Guess that really cuts into the Facebook time, eh? As the officers would tell you, the mission comes first.
I was always amazed at the technology we used as it seemed to be rooted in the past but part of that is because it has to be built to take a lot of abuse, especially in battle.


On Navy Warships, the Web Slows to a Crawl
By Spencer Ackerman - Wired.com

ABOARD THE U.S.S. WASP — This 40,000-ton assault ship can launch deadly sea and air attacks against enemies ashore and afloat. Just don’t expect it to load a website in under three minutes.

The big-deck ship is a formidable floating base for sailors and Marines — who had better prefer to stay in limited contact with the outside world in their off-hours. The communications infrastructure onboard is a reminder that the Wasp began its service to the Navy in 1989: the flight control station has a big, black telephone with a big, black spiral cord attached. Marines temporarily stationed to the Wasp for this week’s giant Navy-Marine war game, known as Bold Alligator, sigh when they need to get online and say that the best way to get in touch with their comrades aboard is to walk the narrow metal halls until they physically find them.

But looks can be deceiving. The ship’s communications gear feels like a throwback to a pre-wired era, and it runs up against some serious bandwidth limits. But it’s also got advantages on civilian communications infrastructure: Iridium satellite hookups mean that the Wasp can sail around the globe and never encounter a dead zone.

The Wasp presents a microcosm of the strengths and the limitations of communications infrastructure aboard Navy ships. And to understand both, those serving aboard her say, it’s best to remember first what a ship is and isn’t.


The Wasp’s top communications officer, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Angela W. Elder, points out that her ship is a self-contained organism. Its on-board generators have to power everything from the communications gear to the propulsion systems to the navigation systems to the fluorescent lights. “It’s one system, and everything connects into it,” Elder says.

When we civilians on dry land make a cellphone call or send a text, we don’t have to worry about draining our car batteries. Navy ships don’t have that luxury.

That helps highlight the differences with the other military services. The Army has prioritized developing its data networks in the hope of rapidly getting tactical information down to low-ranking soldiers, possibly through smartphones in the future. The Air Force hearts bandwidth, in order to stream video captured by its family of surveillance tools, from drones to giant blimps to manned spy planes. All that is less feasible aboard a ship commissioned in the Reagan era.

Then there are the security restrictions. For most of Sunday, the Wasp switched off its internet access for hours as part of the Bold Alligator exercise, to simulate the precautions the ship would take in a real amphibious assault. “Sometimes we don’t want information to leave the ship,” Elder says, “so we’ll take down information that’s not vital to what’s going on. That impacts our NIPR net,” an unclassified military network.

If the unclassified web feels like a non-priority aboard, that’s because for the most part, it is. With limited bandwidth for voice, text and data — Elder won’t disclose specific connection speeds — the ship must prioritize the communications channels that sailors and Marines need to do their jobs. “This [ship] is designed to support the warfighter,” says Marine Maj. Robert Evans, the communications chief for Expeditionary Strike Group 2, which is headquartered on the Wasp for Bold Alligator. “Facebook, Twitter — that’s not taken into account.”

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. military extended enormous effort and treasure to allow troops could email at home. Even at the lonliest, tech-starved outposts, there was access to the unclassified internet. At sea, it’s a very different story.

There are exceptions, though. The Wasp rations access to the broader civilian web through judicious disbursement of logins. But Marines and sailors can relax or eat through their downtime by playing Call of Duty in the ship’s library computer lab.

Communications upgrades are a long time in coming, usually occurring during the six to nine months the Wasp spends in the shipyard between deployments. Patches are more typical than comprehensive upgrades. The last one aboard this ship occurred 18 months ago — and the Wasp has better bandwidth than many other ships, Elder and Evans say.

But don’t think for a second that the Wasp — which Evans calls a “giant floating tactical electromagnet” — is out of touch. The Navy needs very, very badly to stay in touch with the approximately hundred ships it always has deployed around the world. The satellite connections aboard the Wasp make sure that the ship is always communicating with the chain of command, absent a major power failure. “No dead zones. Ever,” says Evans.

Still, both Evans and Elder concede that bandwidth limitations are a challenge — especially as newer intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance gear comes online to give the fleet more persistent pictures of what’s over the horizon. The Navy’s Fire Scout drone is already used in Latin America to help spot drug-mule ships; more sea-based drones are on their way. “The ship is not equipped to receive full-motion video on demand,” Evans says. “I would think, eventually, that would need to change.”

But it’s not as if extracurricular web browsing is impossible. Login, click on Internet Explorer, and prepare to wait. “You may not hit the website you need on the first, second, third try,” Evans says, “but it’ll get done.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies(and online programs) do....

Let me start by saying I am not afraid of technology....I embraced the use of computers as far back as the late 1970s when a computer was a huge teletype at the High School and the computer it communicated with was a bigger mainframe miles away...I bought an Apple Mac (Mac Plus) back in the mid 80s.. I find them to be useful tools and like any other tool, if misused, it can injure you.

I am no fan of Facebook and it's pervasive intrusion into all aspects of online life...updates available through your car's computerized systems are obnoxious...The ability for others to gain info is bad enough but people willingly sign up for this crappola...and pay for it too! My vehicle needs to start, run and get me from point " A" to " B " and back again....If I need to let people know where I am, I can call them or text them.....Having the car update them or getting updates from my car is plain stupid. Do yourself a favor and KILL your Facebook account while you can....really...you'll thank me later on.

So now we get to the cell phone....a necessity these days....I have a non-GPS phone that texts and calls but not much else....It works fine and I really don't need mobile games or e-mail....I have the IPAD for that stuff...as needed.

Well owners of the so called " Smartphones" might want to read this....they are tracking your every move and you are enabling them to do so....Like anything else, that info is fine as long as it isn't misused....just like the rest of the technology helpers we have....makes you think about it, eh?

One Politician in Germany decided to find out what they were tracking about himself...the picture he paints ain't pretty.....

It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know
By NOAM COHEN - NT TIMES
Published: March 26, 2011

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

Malte Spitz was surprised by how much detail Deutsche Telekom had about his whereabouts.

But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”

Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.

Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.

Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”

“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.

Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.

For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.

Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.

And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”

While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.

“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

The XM25 - A perfect weapon for street-to-street fighting - a "game-changer "

LOVE THE TECHNOLOGY....This is the stuff that will give us an edge out there....Brilliant!

From the UK Daily Mail

No hiding place from new U.S. Army rifles that use radio-controlled smart bullets
By Daily Mail Reporter
8:25 AM on 30th November 2010

Weapon hailed as a game-changer that can fire up and over barriers and down into trenches

Soldiers will start using them in Afghanistan later this month

The U.S. army is to begin using a futuristic rifle that fires radio-controlled 'smart' bullets in Afghanistan for the first time, it has emerged.

The XM25 rifle uses bullets that be programmed to explode when they have travelled a set distance, allowing enemies to be targeted no matter where they are hiding.
The rifle also has a range of 2,300 feet making it possible to hit target which are well out of the reach of conventional rifles.

The XM25 is being developed specially for the U.S. army and will be deployed with troops from later this month, it was revealed today.

The XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System has a range of roughly 2,300 feet - and is to be deployed in Afghanistan this month

The rifle's gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to determine the exact distance to the obstruction, after which the soldier can add or subtract up to 3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier and explode above or beside the target.

Soldiers will be able to use them to target snipers hidden in trenches rather than calling in air strikes.

The 25-millimetre round contains a chip that receives a radio signal from the gunsight as to the precise distance to the target.

Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, project manager for the system, described the weapon as a ‘game-changer’ that other nations will try and copy.

He expects the Army to buy 12,500 of the XM25 rifles this year, enough for every member of the infantry and special forces.

Lehner told FoxNews: ‘With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever.

‘Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away.’

Experts say the rifle means that enemy troops will no longer be safe if they take cover

The XM25 appears perfect weapon for street-to-street fighting that troops in Afghanistan have to engage in, with enemy fighters hiding behind walls and only breaking cover to fire ocasionally.

The weapon's laser finder would work out how far away the enemy was and then the U.S. soldier would add one metre using a button near the trigger. When fired, the explosive round would carry exactly one metre past the wall and explode with the force of a hand grenade above the Taliban fighter.

The army's project manager for new weapons, Douglas Tamilio, said: ''This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we've been able to develop and deploy.'
A patent granted to the bullet's maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the chip can calculate how far it has travelled.

Mr Tamilio said: 'You could shoot a Javelin missile, and it would cost £43,000. These rounds will end up costing £15.50 apiece. They're relatively cheap.

Lehner added: ‘This is a game-changer. The enemy has learned to get cover, for hundreds if not thousands of years.

‘Well, they can't do that anymore. We're taking that cover from them and there's only two outcomes: We're going to get you behind that cover or force you to flee.’

The rifle will initially use high-explosive rounds, but its makers say that it might later use versions with smaller explosive charges that aim to stun rather than kill.