Immersive Panorama

Google I/O 2013 Opening

With New Mini-Satellites, Special Ops Takes Its Manhunts Into Spac

• BY NOAH SHACHTMAN
• 05.21.13
• 6:30 AM

A U.S. soldier participates in a night-raid training mission during Emerald Warrior 2012, an exercise put together by U.S. Special Operations Command. Photo: USAF

Updated 8:05 a.m.

In September, the U.S. government will fire into orbit a two-stage rocket from a Virginia launchpad. Officially, the mission is a scientific one, designed to improve America’s ability to send small satellites into space quickly and cheaply. But the launch will also have a second purpose: to help the elite forces of U.S. Special Operations Command hunt down people considered to be dangerous to the United States and its interests.

For years, special operators have used tiny “tags” to clandestinely mark their prey — and satellites to relay information from those beacons. But there are areas of the world where the satellite coverage is thin, and there aren’t enough cell towers to provide an alternative. That’s why SOCOM is putting eight miniature communications satellites, each about the size of a water jug, on top of the Minotaur rocket that’s getting ready to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. They’ll sit more than 300 miles above the earth and provide a new way for the beacons to call back to their masters.

The officers in charge of SOCOM say their forces will soon do less manhunting, and more training of foreign troops. Perhaps so. But with senior Pentagon officials predicting “at least another 10 to 20 years” of combat with al-Qaida, these special operations forces will continue with their mission of “tagging, tracking, and locating” suspected militants. In this fiscal year alone, SOCOM will spend $88 million on new tagging gear.

This isn’t SOCOM’s first mini-satellite. In December of 2010, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket put into orbit a $25,000 special operations spacecraft small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. The satellite stayed more than 170 miles up for about a month. But that first flight was mostly a proof of concept that something so cheap and small could have any military value at all. (“Just to test the theory that we could do it,” Douglas Richardson, SOCOM’s executive in charge of Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Exploitation Technologies, explained in 2011.)

The Operationally Responsive Space-3 mission (.pptx) will carry eight satellites for SOCOM (plus another 20 for other government agencies). This array of configurable “cubesats” is designed to stay aloft for three years or more. Yes, it will serve as further research project. But “operators are going to use it,” Richardson promised an industry conference in Tampa last week. His presentation showed a cubesat under the heading “tagging, tracking, and locating.”

Special operators are already using a dizzying panoply of equipment in order to perform “TTL,” as it’s called within the military. Last fiscal year, SOCOM put into the field 7,000 TTL kits, Jennifer Powers, the project manager in charge of tags, tells Danger Room. Those kits are individually tailored to the environment – jungle or desert, urban or rural — and can be filled with a mix of 190 different pieces of gear. While SOCOM funds mid-term research to make the beacons more compact and less power-hungry, new gear can also be fielded in as little as three days.




A slide on TTL (tagging, tracking, and locating) technology presented at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference. Photo: SOCOM

Some of the beacons use infrared flashes to signal their location; in 2009, al-Qaida propagandists claimed they found them all over villages that had been hit with U.S. drone strikes. Others are implanted into seemingly-innocent commercial electronics. Under “TTL examples,” Richardson’spresentation (.pdf) showed pictures of a cell phone and a key fob, like the kind used to open a car. Still other tags are affixed to cars or people, and transmit their whereabouts using satellite or CDMA, GPRS, and other cellular networks.

Until 2009, the market for these tags was dominated by the secretive, Virginia-headuqartered Blackbird Technologies, Inc., which counts a former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center as a executive. That year, the firm won a contract from the Navy for up to $450 million in TTL equipment.

But since then, SOCOM has decided to introduce some competition into the tagging market. (Blackbird, meanwhile, saw one of its employees fall victim to a gruesome murder-suicide last fall.) Cobham Plc, a British firm, is now one of several firms supplying American special operators with TTL gear.

Cobham claims its UniTrac system can perform “tracking and command/control of over 70 different tracking devices and communications networks.” The 2.5-inch GPS tags themselves weigh about 2.5 ounces and can send out SMS messages when someone walks or drives nearby. ”These solutions give valuable intelligence as to the ‘pattern of life’ of subjects, as well as being used for live tracking, location and apprehension of criminals,” the company promises in an online brochure.

TTL also means keeping tabs on targets’ data, in addition to the people themselves. So Virginia-based EWA Government Solutions, Inc. not only markets a line of radio frequency tags for “High-Value Target Tagging Missions” and “Intelligence Operations.” (.pdf) The firm also sells a “Black Hole” wi-fi intercept system (.pdf), which is allegedly able to crack the encryption keys protecting 802.11 networks, and suck up all the traffic being communicated therein.

That gives operators “the ability to filter, display, and reconstruct e-mail messages (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), instant messaging (Yahoo, ICQ, AOL, MSM), or web page (HTTP) activity,” EWA asserts. “A simple double-click will reconstruct e-mail messages, web pages, and instant message conversations.”

EWA says its technology is being used in “real-world operations with various Department of Defense and national- level agencies.” The company won’t say which agencies or which divisions of the Pentagon, exactly, have used their technologies. But a look in a federal purchasing database shows that the company has signed multi-million dollar contracts in recent years with the Army, Navy, and, of course, U.S. Special Operations Command.

The commandos were already using all the gear they could in order to zero in on their targets. Come September, they’ll have even more, orbiting at 300 miles up.

Field Power for a (few) Song(s)

EasyAcc 12000mAh 4-Port External Battery Pack Is Just $40 On Amazon, With Refreshed Hardware After Customer Feedback

 

Posted by Jeremiah Rice in Accessories

We're featuring this external battery charger for three reasons. One: it's a pretty neat piece of kit in its own right, with a huge 12000mAh capacity (4-8 charges for most recent Android phones) and four USB charging ports, three of which can be active simultaneously. Two: the manufacturer made some small but pertinent additions to the hardware design after receiving feedback from a knowledgeable customer. Three: at $40, it would be a pretty good deal even for a basic 1-port charger of this capacity. With the extra features, it's a downright bargain.

The EasyAcc charger's biggest differentiator is its four standard USB charging ports ,which are set to amperage outputs between .5A and 2.1A. That means that it supports charging for tablets on the higher ports, plus the "rapid charging" feature of some smartphones. For most hardware, the charger can simultaneously power two tablets or three phones at the same time. Adapters for MicroUSB, standard USB, MiniUSB, Samsung tablets, iDevices, and a few others are included in the box.

But what's really impressed us about this particular unit is that the manufacturer saw one of the more detailed reviews on Amazon and decided to amend the hardware to address it. After Amazon user "Aragorn" posted an exhaustive review of the charger in October, EasyAcc added amperage labels for the four USB ports (5v/0.5A, 5v/1.3A, 5v/1.0A, 5v/2.1A) and a handy bag for holding all the cables and adapters. We're happy to support any manufacturer, big or small, that takes customer feedback seriously. Aragorn's review was updated in March - unfortunately, the current Amazon product shots don't reflect the changes. The charger has a 4.6 star rating after 300 reviews.

The EasyAcc 12000mAh battery pack is a whopping .7 pounds, and uses a lithium polymer battery for more lifetime recharge cycles. The plastic body is available with either black or white panels. It's currently listed at $39.99 on Amazon, and qualifies for free 2-day shipping for Amazon Prime members - which you'll definitely want if you're heading to Google I/O next week.

BYOD - Sort of...?

“Bring Your Own Device” Evolving From Trend to Requirement

MAY 1, 2013 AT 2:30 PM PT

Here’s an unexpected twist in the growing trend at companies that support employees who bring their own devices to the office: By 2017, more than half of companies will require their employees to supply their own devices on the job.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

Streaming from the ether cloud getting better and better... thunderstorm or fluffy summer clouds?

With New Service, Any Device Could Run Almost Any Program From Anywhere

from TechCrunch by Gregory Ferenstein

In the near future, the only difference between a smartphone, tablet, and a laptop will be the size of the screen. Hardcore gamers could play 3D intensive games in a smartphone, and Michael Bay could render “Transformers 4″ from his iPad. Otoy, an LA-based software company, has discovered a way to stream any application to any device, completely through a web browser. It’s difficult to overestimate the potential disruptiveness of Otoy, as a breakthrough streaming service could, in the near future, end the need for app stores and computer upgrades (see a demo below).

Otoy has a habit of impressing the tech press with its surprising ability to stream 3D intensive graphics to devices that shouldn’t be able to run them. Since Otoy’s 2009 demo, there’s been a rush of companies in the ever more crowded “cloud” services industry, such as Onlive’s streaming video gaming. Up until now, video games were shackled to certain consoles, mobile apps to particular app stores, and software to particular operating systems. If we didn’t own an iPhone, Windows, and or an Xbox, we couldn’t use a lot of cool applications.

But, every device runs Internet browsers, and specifically, the JavaScript which Otoy utilizes to render the software. Soon, the monopoly that iOS, Windows, and Xbox wields over users will end, and the freedom to use any piece of software on any device will become the norm.

Even cooler, we may no longer need to shell out $3,000 on a high-end laptop to run games or graphics software. At Otoy’s media event with Mozilla and Autodesk at San Francisco headquarters, we saw the graphics-hungry first person shooter, Unreal, run seamlessly on an iPhone. In essence, Otoy brings a supercomputer to your phone or tablet.

“That’s going to have huge implications in my business” said celebrity talent agent and Otoy investor, Ari Emanuel, who sees the ability of more filmmakers to make movies in less time and for less money. Currently, it takes an entire day to render movie-quality scenes. With Otoy, globally distributed teams could work in real time (some at the beach) without having to stagger their work for an entire day between revisions.

So, how much will it cost if Otoy completely replaces my computer needs? About $300, estimates Urbach, based on 8 hours of use per day for consumer applications (Otoy charges by computing power and is currently targeting artists).

There is one more implications of note: Otoy could dramatically reduce Internet congestion. Cellular networks are overloaded, in part, because multimedia takes up a huge chunk of the available bandwidth. Netflix, alone, hogs an estimated 32% of total U.S. bandwidth during peak hours. Otoy and Mozilla estimate that the enhanced streaming technology could reduce the total bandwidth needs by a sizable 25%.

In order for Otoy, or any cloud rendering service, to completely service all our computing needs, the Internet must get much more reliable. At the demo, a standard 4G cell network could stream a video game. But, spotty coverage around cities, on airplanes, and in rural areas will be a serious bottleneck for Otoy. Additionally, it’s unclear whether current U.S. bandwidth could actually handle everyone moving to the cloud.

So, while we don’t know the implications in the short term, the implications a few years down the road are very exciting.

Smartphones and Tablets are open to Enlistment

In Two Weeks, Your iPad Can Be Used on Military Networks

• BY SPENCER ACKERMAN
• 05.03.13
• 10:00 AM

By the middle of the month, iPhones and iPads will likely pass a Pentagon security review that will result in their use, for the first time, on military networks.

As part of the Pentagon’s big push into the mobile-device market, the Defense Department has already issued so-called Security Technical Implementation Guides, or STIGs, for BlackBerry 10 phones and Playbook tablets, and for Samsung’s Android-powered Knox phone. Apple will not be left out.

“We expect to release the iOS STIG sometime in the next two weeks,” says Air Force Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Pentagon spokesman.

The Pentagon still has “a few open questions” about how Apple’s operating system — and the high-end devices it powers — will lock down its sensitive data, Pickart says. But it’s issued an “interim STIG” for the latest version of iOS, iOS 6, indicating that the obstacles are minor. It’s a bureaucratic irony of the mobile age: Apple desktop and laptop computers still aren’t cleared to access military networks, but iPhones and iPads will be.

None of this means the Pentagon is actually buying troops any tablets or smartphones — yet. But military “user groups” interested in accessing Pentagon networks on the move now have approval to use these select devices. For instance: the Army’s Combined Arms Center, which recently developed a book about Afghanistan for the iPad, or whomever will end up using the Pentagon’s experimental biometrics-scanning smartphone.

As might be expected, the military is moving very cautiously into the mobile market. The vast majority of mobile devices already in use in the Department of Defense are BlackBerrys, much like with the rest of the government — some 470,000 of them. The first new devices with security clearances for military networks? Um, BlackBerry phones and tablets.

To think, just months ago, a rumor circulated that the Pentagon was ditching BlackBerry for iPhones and iPads. LOL.

It’s not clear when the Pentagon will use that market power to finally issue orders for specific smartphones and tablets. The Pentagon’s top information-security officials speak about purchasing a “family of devices” for military use, yet it’ll be weeks or months before any of those devices actually make their way to troops’ pockets and backpacks. Most likely, by the time the first military mobile orders get issued, Apple products will be among them.

Droid, GoPro, and Nikon... Stills and Video Kit Lens and Sensors

The essential kit

Blue2CAN

Nikon D800 Lens

Several new lenses were announced since and recently Nikon published an updated new list of "lenses that offer excellent resolution" for the D800E:

• AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED ($1,996.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED ($1,886.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II ($2,396.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/4G ED VR ($1,396.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR ($1,256.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5G ED VR ($596.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR ($1,296.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II ($6,749.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 24mm f/1.4G ED ($1,999.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 28mm f/1.8G ($696.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 35mm f/1.4G ($1,619.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 85mm f/1.4G ($1,649.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 85mm f/1.8G ($496.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 200mm f/2G ED VR II ($5,819.95)
• AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8G ED VR II ($5,799.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 400mm f/2.8G ED VR ($8,999.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/4G ED VR ($8,399.00)
• AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR ($9,799.00)
• AF-S Micro NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8G ED ($549.00)
• AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED ($899.00)
• PC-E NIKKOR 24mm f/3.5D ED ($1,999.00)
• PC-E Micro NIKKOR 45mm f/2.8D ED ($1,899.00)
• PC-E Micro NIKKOR 85mm f/2.8D ($1,829.00)

SHP2KML - Free at last, free at last. God All Mighty Free at Last!!!

Good buy ESRI...

The $79 Solution 

Convert Shapefiles to KML for Google Earth

It's an easy, two-step process to convert any shapefile to KML with ExpertGPS Pro. View your GIS layers over Google Earth's color imagery, and create KML files from your shapefiles to share with clients or to publish online.

The first step in converting shapefiles to KML is to Import your Shapefile, using Import on the File menu. ExpertGPS Pro automatically reprojects your shapefile from UTM, state plane coordinates, or any other projection into Google Earth's native format (latitude and longitude in decimal degreees, in WGS84 datum).

To finish the KML conversion of your shapefile, press F7, the View in Google Earth command, and ExpertGPS will convert your GIS data to KML and automatically launch Google Earth to view your KML data. You can also click Export on the File menu to convert your shapefile to KML.

The Google Earth PRO Solution...

Drag and drop the SHP file set into Google Earth and - you go KML

OR 

SHP2KML Freely if you don't have Google Earth Pro

shp2kml 2.0: Shape-file to Google Earth

Shp2kml is a stand alone tool that transforms GIS layers to Google Earth. It
uses as input the most common format file for GIS (ESRI shapefile) and
generates a KML File.

Google Earth requires coordinates to be in Lat/Lon and referenced to the
WGS84 datum. Shp2kml is able to transform the coordinate system. The input
file can be Lat/Lon (Geographic) or UTM (Projected) coordinate system. Also
shp2kml will change datums if required. It contains a list of around 200
datums.

Some of the supported features are:

Lat/Long or UTM (meters)

Any Datum

Point, Lines, Polygons

Symbol properties: by Single Symbol, Unique value, Graduate Value

Labeling from attributes table

Balloon creation from attributes table

Samsung Galaxy and iOS6 to get DoD Nodd...

DoD set to approve iOS 6 devices, Samsung Galaxy phones

US Department of Defense should grant two separate security approvals to iOS 6 devices and Samsung Galaxy phones in the coming weeks, according to sources for the Wall Street Journal. Apple's iOS 6 is expected to be vetted as safe for non-classified data uses, namely email and web browsing. Galaxy phones, meanwhile, will allegedly be judged as conforming to the DoD's Security's Technology Implementation Guide, allowing use by some military agencies for sending and receiving internal email.

The separate approval processes are necessary because as a locked-down, proprietary platform, iOS is seen as more secure. Android by contrast is a more "open" OS modified by many different phone makers, which may make it riskier. Samsung Galaxy phones are, however, preloaded with the company's Knox security software.

Getting the new security clearance should pave the way for the DoD to adopt Galaxy and iOS devices at more agencies. Electronista recently reported that the DoD is planning to acquire some 650,000 iOS devices, including iPod touches -- but that it was waiting for security testing, as well as the end of the sequestration currently crippling government budgets. That could cause problems, because iOS 7 is predicted to arrive in September or October, at which point more testing may be needed.

BlackBerry has long been a mainstay of DoD agencies because of the tight security protocols the company uses. BlackBerry 10 devices are currently undergoing testing, though, because of the radical upgrades in their operating system. The company says it is working with the DoD to get approval as soon as possible.

Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/05/01/platforms.getting.separate.approval/#ixzz2S9H8VVdi
Read more at http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/05/01/platforms.getting.separate.approval/#5hkqHMbRc3odc7S5.99

Sick and Poor versus Rich and Healthy