Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Interesting dilemma

believe it or not, it's not just phones that "you own the hardware, but you don't control the device" applies to

The USA retains the "ignition keys" to every F35 sold.

There are rolling codes required to be entered into the flight control computers in order to start the engines and operate the avionics which are keyed to every airframe/engine serial number and are obtained upon request from the Department of State. These codes are valid for a few hours each time

The RAF (as codevelopers of the F35 via BAE) were one of the few air forces which the US was going to sell code generators to, but those plans were axed in the early 2000s in favour of the USA retaining total control over who can fly their F35s today

Re: “What they were able to do we do not know”

"Add in the cost overruns and it is clear the plug should have been pulled a long time ago."

Emphasising this: The Expensive F22 was supposed to establish air superiority and allow the Cheap and Plentiful F/A35 to go in for support work, where stealth was incidental and mainly intended to provide an element of surprise going against mopping up ground defences missed by the F22s

The Expensive F22 got cancelled for being TOO expensive and the resulting mission creep resulted in the Cheap F35 costing more per unit than the Expensive F22 as well as being sold to allies as an air-to-air fighter it was never intended for and needed far more expensive modifications to fulfill. The airborne communications platform role came later and could be better fulfilled by a number of cheaper airframes

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

Re: And I believe none of it.

You don't even need to directly target the PEBKAC. Just track the promising academics as they go through university, then see where they go to live - you don't overly need to worry about who they're working for if they're all clustering in the same areas. Just see what their published papers were about

Re: I believe some of it.

"that's how we used to describe the US."

It wasn't that long ago (50 years) that Britain was paiting japanese technology as threats to national security and forcing its trading partners to buy STC telephone exchanges instead of the far superior NEC ones they wanted to buy.

The fact that the STCs never worked properly, took 5 years longer to deploy than the NECs and ended up costing more than 3 times as much is irrelevant, unless you work on the basis that sucking money out of your vassals makes them less independently minded (ie: economic warfare)

Re: Really?

"For attacking more or less defenceless nations, the F-35 is good enough."

For that kind pf purpose a Super Tocano is more than enough and you can buy 18 of them for the price of ONE F-35

Re: International Rescue, They Only Had To Worry About Kyrano's Half Brother.

"Or the times that a supplier called the FBI because some unknown company with a PO box "

In UFO, the cover story is a movie studio. Somehow I doubt that would work in real life

Re: Now I read

"If the UAV is packed to the max with explosives,"

They don't need much explosive. A precision hit on optically recognised radar antennas or a thermite charge on a munitions dump is sufficient. All you really need to do is render the defenders blind in most cases. In the case of a ship, targetting the vulnerable rotating assembly of rotating radar heads with a thermite charge will put them out of action for days

Big explosions are for poorly targetted devices - one of the smallest explosions I know of involved less than a gram of C4 - in a booby-trapped phone(one of hundreds deployed) pressed against the ear of a Taliban commander in 2003. Once it was confirmed he was the correct target and using the phone... *pop"

For what it's worth: The "drone dropping a grenade on a munitions dump" scenario already happened in Georgia in 2017 and the drone attacks on facilities in Saudi Arabia were using $700 commercial devices.

As one bad guy put it in the 1980s - "You have to defend against every attack. We only have to succeed ONCE"

Re: Now I read

http://www.swarm-troopers.com/scenarios/

(excerpted for those who can't be bothered to follow the link. There's even more there worth reading - and this is only the first chapter of the book itself)

"The official response was an elaborately diplomatic refusal. The British Admiral commanding the Task Force made an unofficial but widely-reported response:

“I’m damned if we’re going to run away from some tinpot dictator with a lot of toy aircraft.”

The first wave of Hong Jian drones attacked just after dawn. There were over two hundred of them, and they converged from all points of the compass. They flew straight at the vulnerable parts of the ships, the radar domes, radio masts and antenna arrays. The straight lines and flat planes of the ships were simple geometric patterns that made it easy for the drones’ cameras to locate their programmed point of attack.

Although too small to be hit by anti-aircraft missiles, many of the drones fell victim to the radar-guided 30mm Oerlikon cannon and multibarrel Phalanx guns on the British destroyers, as well as the numerous rapid-fire miniguns mounted on deck rails and manned by sailors.

Video analysis showed that about a dozen of the attackers got through. There was virtually no damage, except for an F-35 which has been preparing for take-off on the flight deck of the HMS Queen Elizabeth. A drone had skimmed over the carrier’s deck and struck one side of the plane. The subsequent fire had been quickly brought under control and there were no casualties, but the £100m aircraft would require days of repairs before it could fly again."

.....

"Two hours later radar detected a second force of drones assembling to the West of similar size to the first. The drones were spaced about a hundred meters apart, forming a spherical cloud almost a kilometre across.

When an aircraft was sent up to monitor them, the entire cloud started converging on it. The pilot flew around the swarm and watched it gradually change direction to chase him. The drones could never catch the fast jet, and the pilot shot down a couple of drones with cannon fire, but he had to be wary of flying too close to the swarm."

....

"A smaller cloud of several dozen drones then appeared in a loose formation between the carrier group and the airborne F-35. They had been skimming the sea at low level and had not been appeared on radar until they were a mile or two away. They were set on ambushing the pilot as he tried to return to the HMS Queen Elizabeth. When the pilot was redirected to approach from the opposite direction, half of the drones moved to block his approach.

The F-35’s fuel was approaching a critical level. Rather than run any risk of losing a plane for no advantage, the pilot was ordered to divert away from the carrier group and land in a neighbouring African country. The plane sped away from the swarm at four hundred miles an hour while the necessary diplomatic arrangements were made.

Running away might look bad, but losing an aircraft would be worse, and the Admiral could always say that the plane was diverted for technical reasons. The plane might be saved, but with the increasing number of Hong Jian, now forming several swarms in all directions, it was not safe to fly from the carrier.

Bad news was to follow: several hours after the F-35 landed, twenty drones caught up with it while it was parked on the tarmac. A film crew had just arrived to shoot a wildlife documentary, and were filming the plane and trying to interview the pilot when they spotted small drones circling overhead. The drones made several passes, apparently making sure of their target before diving en masse at the F-35. After the tenth hit the plane disappeared in a massive fireball."

The scenario might have been science fiction in 2015, but these (and many more items discussed in the book) are the subject of a lot of military discussion and sleepless nights

As I said, you can buy a lot of drones for the price of 1 F35 - and ships only have so much defensive ammunition

Re: Now I read

"approach path" == not in phalanx range - and in any case it's considered unsporting to shoot in the same direction as one of your own your aircraft approaching for a landing

they don't need to be fast moving if they're widely spaced and can use solar power to stay aloft indefinitely

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-rise-of-the-drone-swarm/

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a24494/chinese-drones-swarms/

as for colliding, you're 10 years behind the times:

https://www.popularmechanics.co.za/tech/intels-world-record-for-most-airborne-drones/

https://www.suasnews.com/2016/05/43890/

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18577/isis-packing-drones-with-explosives/

Tactical drone swarms are already a "thing" and US military research on these projects mostly went "dark" in the mid 2000s

http://www.swarm-troopers.com/ is attempting to track this, including the virtually unlimied duration aloft swarms.

Airspace denial is relatively easy by sheer weight of numbers - quantity has a quality all of its own - and as at least one US guided missle carrier captain has pointed out, if you have to defend against a $25k drone attack by loosing $2million worth of munitions, if he was an attacker those are odds he'd take on for the simple purpose of bankrupting the defender

Re: Really?

The F35 took on board the primary lesson of the F111B - which was how to avoid getting your project cancelled

Re: Now I read

"Sacrificing a $35M unmanned aircraft to take out a $70M fighter is probably a victory of sorts."

You can buy an awful lot of $700-1200 drones for $35million. This is a scenario raised by at least one military planner

can you shoot down 1000-10,000 semi-autonomous drones swarming the approach path to a carrier? or attempting to take out your radar systems with simple thermite loads?

Re: 'We are now adjusting our offerings to enable customers to enjoy more flexibility and options.'

Share and enjoy...

They've also recently acquired the most popular open switching distribution - and promptly dropped support for all non-Nvidia parts

Re: Many years ago ...

I knew spooks from my own country who privately said they suspected their encrypted comms were bugged by the americans and layered their own crypto over the top (including one time pads - which are still hard to breach)

The problem with using crypto is that unless you use high level crypto for EVERYTHING (including the laundry list), then everything encrypted is obviously a high value target woorthy of expending effort to obtain

Re: Wider government only told of encryption machine nobbling a year after it ended

"I think the Russians and the Chinese avoided them anyway because they were suspicious anyway."

Pretty much this. On the other hand the British and CIA heavily pushed these things on their "allies"

HINT: if someone's really keen for you to use something, there's usually an ulterior motive.

Re: Cheese

wristwatches frequently made from near-complete chinese blanks

Yes really

It was all midget porn - everything was highly compressed

Re: And the next story will be ....

In the case of the marbles, they were purchased and would most likely have been destroyed if left where they were(everything left behind was)

That doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be returned now. Times have changed and there's an appreciation forthe items that didn't exist then

Re: Hmm ...

If a plaque is legally required, just put a noite that the display of the plaque is required for legal reasons

Most people will put 2+2 together fairly quickly, especially if there's a note saying that things went missing ni 1984

The Mega raids happened when Mega announced it was setting itself up as its own media provider and had signed up various content providers

Up to that point the MPAA/RIAA were quite happy with the arrangement. This was all about losing their monopoly - and New Zealand police's armed raid - with FBI agents illegally along for the ride - was utterly over the top.

The cops jumped at the chance to play Gene Hunt(*) and NZ's standard tactic is to confiscate everything then force the accused to rely on state-supplied (underpaid) lawyers. KDC was able to get a competent defence and the police were obviously upset at having to hand back the confiscated hardware instead of being able to sell it and pocket the cash

(*) Gene is alive and well in New Zealand

Re: Portland

"It's the fact that police, particularly in the USA isn't by consent and holds itself separate from the society it was created to police."

Which is in direct opposition to the police as created by Peel.

Police are CIVILIANS, part of the community, with extra privileges, but ALSO held to higher standards

In the USA they have become a hired paramilitary occupying force

Re: AI face recognition of cops

"Local 'businesses' may well be making Mr Howell a very compelling offer..."

When the police facial recognition stuff started hitting the news I was wondering how long it'd take for the boot to end up on the other foot (especially with regard to exposing undercover cops)

This could get..... interesting

Re: A sign of the times

"People identifying as 'religious' are down, as well as membership in churches. . ."

and one of the things that goes with the religious becoming "outnumbered" as they see it is them becoming both louder and more obnoxious to try and make up for the loss of numbers

Once the general population sees the loons are a tiny minority, they lose their power and it happens rapidly - look at what happened when the "million moms" organisation was exposed as ONE mom

Re: A sign of the times

I think it's looking more like "It can't happen here" - where Buzz Windrup is in the Oval Office right now

Re: A sign of the times

"Surely you can post at least two videos where he inappropriately touches someone."

The ones usually pointed out are where he hugs his granddaughter at his son's funeral

Re: A sign of the times

"Harris is frankly bonkers"

less bonkers than Pence?

Re: King Donald

Empire: Emperor

Kingdom: King

America is a Country.

well we know who rules countries (with apologies to Kenny Everett)

Re: Be careful what you wish for

"WISP has been promised for years, but the first company went bankrupt and the next one has delivered nothing more than promises."

Standard procedure in the UK was for BT to blitz areas where WISPs were setting up and sign them up to DSL - even if they then took 3-5 years to install the DSL, the fact that customers were signed up for it would kill the WISP's ability to sell at all

Starlink can't be slowed or blocked by local politiicians, which means that incumbent cable/telcos across the USA are about to face the first real competition they've had to deal with in more than 30 years. There are fewer CLECs _NOW_ than there were before AT&T was broken up and DSL has allowed AT&T to reconsolidate itself without the pesky "universal service" obligation from those 1930s antitrust settlements.

Once Stalink is less "beta" and more "available" it's going to be causing a lot of telcos to pull their collective fingers out of their arses - and not just in the USA

It's amazing what the threat of ACTUAL competition can do to energise a monoply incumbent (although, stateside, they've been astroturfing fake astronomy activist groups - much to the annoyance of real astronomers who are affected but also see the benefits of the extra bandwidth)

Re: Cisco Vs Aruba

Cisco discount the hardware but the support price is ALWAYS based on list figures

It pays to be very careful before signing on the dotted line as to what any ongoing charges might be