defense

A week after Wikileaks' 100-megabyte disclosure of Afghan war files appeared, anger in U.S. political circles continues to grow, with some commentators calling for the U.S. government to find a way to pull the plug on the group's Web site.

On Fox News Sunday, conservative commentator Liz Cheney said that Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange clearly has "blood on his hands" and that Wikileaks.org should be taken offline.

"I would really like to see President Obama move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that Web site down," Cheney said. "I'… Read more

Trenches is a fun and challenging World War I-themed trench-warfare arcade game with strong elements of real-time strategy and unit and resource management.

With its killer combination of winning art direction, well-designed gameplay, and a shallow but steady learning curve, Trenches is hard to put down. You control British troops advancing from trench to trench, left to right, across a long, scrolling map (which you can tilt to scroll, or touch and drag the skyline to move). You touch and drag units to determine their path, and you can use a two-finger motion to direct all onscreen units to retreat, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The United States should decide on rules for attacking other nations' networks in advance of an actual cyberwar, which could include an international agreement not to disable banks and electrical grids, the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency said Thursday.

Michael Hayden, who was the principal deputy director of national intelligence and retired last year, said the rules of engagement for electronic battlefields are still too murky, even after the Defense Department created the U.S. Cyber Command last spring. The new organization is charged with allowing the U.S. armed forces to conduct "full-spectrum … Read more

During the last 24 hours or so, official Washington has erupted with volcanic denunciations of Wikileaks, the document-sharing group that released about 75,000 military reports regarding the war in Afghanistan on Sunday.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called it "alarming" to find so many "top secret documents" publicly available on the Web. (See transcript.)

National security adviser James Jones "strongly" condemned the release in a statement that was reprinted on the U.S. Embassy Web sites for Afghanistan and Turkey.

Over at the Pentagon, spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said it could take weeks … Read more

Dozens of National Security Agency, DARPA, and other Pentagon officials purchased and downloaded child pornography over the Internet, according to a report in The Boston Globe on Friday.

The newspaper said it obtained more than 50 pages of documents revealing that the government workers identified in an internal probe included NSA contractors with top secret clearances, one of whom has fled the country and is believed to be hiding in Libya.

Another involved a person working at the supersecret National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the military's spy satellites, who was transferred to a field office and has not been … Read more

Routine use of robotic lift trucks may not be far off.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with a team of engineers, have transformed a Toyota 8-Series lift truck into an autonomous bot capable of working alongside human supervisors using voice commands or hand gestures.

The 3,000-pound-capacity lift truck from Toyota Material Handling (TMHU) is capable of locating, lifting, moving, and placing supplies while traversing just about any type of terrain. It was demonstrated last month at an event hosted by the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee, in Virginia.

"Robotic forklifts have the potential to protect both military and civilian personnel working in high-risk environments, such as hazardous material storage facilities, said Brett Wood, president of TMHU.

The demo included a review of the robot's safety features, sensor capabilities, and human-robot interface.

The researchers and engineers developed a complex network of systems to enable the lift truck to navigate real-time conditions faced by lift truck operators (navigating obstacles and interacting with other moving vehicles, for example). To do this, they added a camera, sensors, laptops, servomotors, Wi-Fi, and a PDA.

"We chose the internal combustion Toyota lift truck because it can be operated outdoors on packed earth or gravel and because, with mini-lever control some of its functionality can be controlled electronically rather than solely mechanically," said MIT Professor Seth Teller, who headed the project.

The modified vehicle wirelessly exports video from its own point of view, so the human supervisor, even if hundreds of miles away, can see whatever is nearby (provided there is network connectivity between the lift truck and supervisor's tablet).

In September 2009, for example, the team demonstrated the lift truck operating autonomously at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., while under the supervision of an operator in Washington D.C.… Read more

Five words that may make your day: Star Wars meets Tower Defense.

That's Star Wars: Battle for Hoth in a nutshell. The game combines obvious elements of Tower Defense with one of the franchise's all-time greatest action sequences.

In other words, it's up to you to defend Echo Base against endless hordes of droids, snow troopers, Imperial AT-ATs, and the like.

To do that, you'll deploy infantry, towers, snow speeders, and even X-Wings.

The game spans 15 levels and offers two modes of play: Classic and Fortress. It also treats you to clips, music, and sound … Read more

The U.S. Defense Department and State Department are allowing greater use of Facebook and Twitter, while warily noting that social media can be a boon for spies and "compromise operational security."

Last week, the State Department released a manual (PDF) saying that personal use of Facebook and Twitter is permitted on work computers, and the agency "will not arbitrarily ban access to or the use of social media."

It came with the usual caveats for employees: don't disclose classified information; maintain a distinction between an official and personal account; and "be alert to … Read more

BioDefense: Zombie Outbreak is a one-player zombie-survival game that mixes elements of real-time strategy with an open-map tower-defense game.

The core of BioDefense is a survival mode, in which you protect your base from random waves of zombies. You have to juggle several interdependent factors as you construct and defend your base: you have to build collectors on top of "toxium" deposits (toxium is the game's currency, and a finite resource on the map), but you can only build where you have light--so you also need to build spotlights. Predictably, spotlights are fragile, so you need to … Read more