An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: China will place export controls on drone and drone equipment in order to "safeguard national security and interests," its commerce ministry announced Monday, in a move that could impact the war in Ukraine. The restrictions on equipment will require vendors to seek permission to export certain drone engines, lasers, imaging, communications and radar gear, and anti-drone systems. Consumer-grade drones with certain specifications are also subject to the controls, which come into effect September 1. All civilian drones not included in the controls are prohibited from being exported for military purposes, an unidentified ministry spokesperson said in an online statement. "China's modest expansion of the scope of drone control this time is an important measure to demonstrate its commitment as a responsible major country to implement global security initiatives and maintain world peace," the statement said, adding that China has "consistently opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes."

More than 50% of drones sold in the US are made by Shenzhen-based DJI, the world's top drone manufacturer, with DJI models popular among US public safety agencies, according to two US lawmakers. They earlier this year introduced legislation that would restrict the company from operating on US communications infrastructure. The US last year placed sweeping controls banning Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. Beijing last month imposed export controls on two elements essential for manufacturing semiconductors. The controls go into effect August 1.

Drones have already figured into US-China tensions. The US added DJI to an investment blacklist in 2021, alleging that the firm played a role in facilitating human rights abuses against China's Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities in the far western region of Xinjiang. The company was already on the US entity list, barring it from buying American technology. DJI denied having done anything to justify being placed on the list. On Tuesday, following the ministry announcement, DJI released a statement on its website saying it has never designed or marketed equipment for military purposes and would "actively cooperate" with the new export control policy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: President Joe Biden has determined that Colorado Springs will be the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command, reversing a Trump administration decision to move the facility to Alabama, the Pentagon announced Monday. The decision will only intensify a bitter parochial battle on Capitol Hill, as members of the Colorado and Alabama delegations have spent months accusing each other of playing politics on the future of the four-star command.

The command was reestablished in 2019 and given temporary headquarters in Colorado while the Air Force evaluated a list of possible permanent sites. With an eye on Russia and China, its job is to oversee the military's operations of space assets and the defense of satellites. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Biden notified the Department of Defense on Monday that he had made the decision, after speaking with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and weighing the input of senior military leaders. "Locating Headquarters U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs ultimately ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period," Ryder said in a statement. "It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute and integrate military spacepower into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests." Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and U.S. Space Command chief Gen. James Dickinson all support Biden's decision, Ryder added.

The most significant factor Biden weighed in making the decision was the impact such a move would have on the military's ability to confront the changing threat from space, according to a senior administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. Keeping the headquarters at Colorado Springs "maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel," according to the official. The command is set to achieve "full operational capability" this month, the official said. A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced the command to transition to a new headquarters in the mid-2020s, and the new site would not have been open until the early to mid-2030s, the official said. "The president found that risk unacceptable, especially given the challenges we may face in the space domain during this critical time period," according to the official.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: U.S. and European officials are growing increasingly concerned about China's accelerated push into the production of older-generation semiconductors and are debating new strategies to contain the country's expansion. President Joe Biden implemented broad controls over China's ability to secure the kind of advanced chips that power artificial-intelligence models and military applications. But Beijing responded by pouring billions into factories for the so-called legacy chips that haven't been banned. Such chips are still essential throughout the global economy, critical components for everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware. That's sparked fresh fears about China's potential influence and triggered talks of further reining in the Asian nation, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The U.S. is determined to prevent chips from becoming a point of leverage for China, the people said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo alluded to the problem during a panel discussion last week at the American Enterprise Institute. "The amount of money that China is pouring into subsidizing what will be an excess capacity of mature chips and legacy chips -- that's a problem that we need to be thinking about and working with our allies to get ahead of," she said. While there's no timeline for action to be taken and information is still being gathered, all options are on the table, according to a senior Biden administration official. The most advanced semiconductors are those produced using the thinnest etching technology, with 3-nanometers state of the art today. Legacy chips are typically considered those made with 28-nm equipment or above, technology introduced more than a decade ago.

Senior E.U. and U.S. officials are concerned about Beijing's drive to dominate this market for both economic and security reasons, the people said. They worry Chinese companies could dump their legacy chips on global markets in the future, driving foreign rivals out of business like in the solar industry, they said. Western companies may then become dependent on China for these semiconductors, the people said. Buying such critical tech components from China may create national security risks, especially if the silicon is needed in defense equipment. "The United States and its partners should be on guard to mitigate nonmarket behavior by China's emerging semiconductor firms," researchers Robert Daly and Matthew Turpin wrote in a recent essay for the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University. "Over time, it could create new U.S. or partner dependencies on China-based supply chains that do not exist today, impinging on U.S. strategic autonomy."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A specially illustrated BBC story created by artist/writer Ben Platts-Mills tells the remarkable story of how a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist in 1946.

"Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test," Platts-Mills writes, "a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life. In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later."

In an interesting follow-up story, Platts-Mills explains how he pieced together what happened inside the room where 'The Blue Flash' occurred (it has been observed that many criticality accidents emit a blue flash of light).
15 years later there were more fatalities at a nuclear power plant after the Atomic Energy Commission opened the National Reactor Testing Station in a desert west of Idaho Falls, according to Wikipedia: The event occurred at an experimental U.S. Army plant known as the Argonne Low-Power Reactor, which the Army called the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1)... Three trained military men had been working inside the reactor room when a mistake was made while reattaching a control rod to its motor assembly. With the central control rod nearly fully extended, the nuclear reactor rated at 3 MW rapidly increased power to 20 GW. This rapidly boiled the water inside the core.

As the steam expanded, a pressure wave of water forcefully struck the top of the reactor vessel, upon which two of the men stood. The explosion was so severe that the reactor vessel was propelled nine feet into the air, striking the ceiling before settling back into its original position. One man was impaled by a shield plug and lodged into the ceiling, where he died instantly. The other men died from their injuries within hours. The three men were buried in lead coffins, and that entire section of the site was buried.
"The core meltdown caused no damage to the area, although some radioactive nuclear fission products were released into the atmosphere."

This week Idaho Falls became one of the sites re-purposed for possible utility-scale clean energy projects as part of America's "Cleanup to Clean Energy" initiative.

An effort by United States lawmakers to prevent government agencies from domestically tracking citizens without a search warrant is facing opposition internally from one of its largest intelligence services. From a report: Republican and Democratic aides familiar with ongoing defense-spending negotiations in Congress say officials at the National Security Agency (NSA) have approached lawmakers charged with its oversight about opposing an amendment that would prevent it from paying companies for location data instead of obtaining a warrant in court. Introduced by US representatives Warren Davidson and Sara Jacobs, the amendment would prohibit US military agencies from "purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena" to obtain. The ban would cover more than half of the US intelligence community, including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the newly formed National Space Intelligence Center, among others.

The House approved the amendment in a floor vote over a week ago during its annual consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, a "must-pass" bill outlining how the Pentagon will spend next year's $886 billion budget. Negotiations over which policies will be included in the Senate's version of the bill are ongoing. In a separate but related push last week, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to advance legislation that would extend similar restrictions against the purchase of Americans' data across all sectors of government, including state and local law enforcement. Known as the "Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act," the bill will soon be reintroduced in the Senate as well by one of its original 2021 authors, Ron Wyden, the senator's office confirmed. "Americans of all political stripes know their Constitutional rights shouldn't disappear in the digital age," Wyden says, adding that there is a "deep well of support" for enshrining protections against commercial data grabs by the government "into black-letter law."

An hours-long discussion on Capitol Hill captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and how authorities investigate such reports. From a report: A small group of House lawmakers called Wednesday for greater transparency in the government's reporting on encounters with unidentified phenomena, in an unusual congressional hearing featuring the testimony of UFO witnesses. But the hearing, which one freshman Democrat remarked was the most bipartisan discussion he'd seen in his seven months on Capitol Hill, oscillated between statements of concern about the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects flying close to U.S. military aircraft and more extreme allusions to government conspiracies to hide the existence of alien lifeforms. Convened by a House Oversight subcommittee, the hours-long discussion captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and what federal authorities are doing to document and investigate such reports.

"We're not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing -- sorry to disappoint about half y'all," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said. "We're just going to get to the facts. We're going to uncover the cover up." In response to reported encounters by Navy pilots, the U.S. military and the intelligence community have sought to more closely analyze such incidents. The sightings, including some that are believed to be drones or unmanned craft -- like the Chinese surveillance airship shot down in U.S. airspace earlier this year -- have fueled concerns that American adversaries could have developed new technologies that pose a threat to U.S. security. The Pentagon has implemented new policies meant to encourage military personnel to come forward if they see something unusual so it can be investigated and accounted for, and last year established what it calls the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to further study such reports. NASA has undertaken a similar independent initiative.

A group of cybersecurity researchers has uncovered what they believe is an intentional backdoor in encrypted radios used by police, military, and critical infrastructure entities around the world. The backdoor may have existed for decades, potentially exposing a wealth of sensitive information transmitted across them, according to the researchers. From a report: While the researchers frame their discovery as a backdoor, the organization responsible for maintaining the standard pushes back against that specific term, and says the standard was designed for export controls which determine the strength of encryption. The end result, however, are radios with traffic that can be decrypted using consumer hardware like an ordinary laptop in under a minute. "There's no other way in which this can function than that this is an intentional backdoor," Jos Wetzels, one of the researchers from cybersecurity firm Midnight Blue, told Motherboard in a phone call.

The research is the first public and in-depth analysis of the TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard in the more than 20 years the standard has existed. Not all users of TETRA-powered radios use the specific encryption algorithim called TEA1 which is impacted by the backdoor. TEA1 is part of the TETRA standard approved for export to other countries. But the researchers also found other, multiple vulnerabilities across TETRA that could allow historical decryption of communications and deanonymization. TETRA-radio users in general include national police forces and emergency services in Europe; military organizations in Africa; and train operators in North America and critical infrastructure providers elsewhere.

Microsoft is on track to deliver an improved version of its combat goggles by July 31 for intensive soldier testing that will help the US Army decide whether to deploy the devices by 2025 or cancel the troubled program, according to the service. From a report: After delivery, the first 20 prototype IVAS 1.2 goggles will be assessed by two squads of solders in late August to check for improvements in reliability, low-light performance and how well they fit soldiers without repeats of the nausea and dizziness that halted the deployment of earlier versions. Microsoft said in a statement that the deliveries will be three months ahead of schedule.

"This initial assessment measures system performance to ensure engineering efforts are on schedule and meeting design objectives," the Army said. A decision to deploy the military version would unlock billions of dollars for procurement that Congress has become unwilling to free up pending improvements to the device, which is based on the company's HoloLens "mixed reality" goggles.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science: This week, the much anticipated movie Oppenheimer hits theaters, giving famed filmmaker Christopher Nolan's take on the theoretical physicist who during World War II led the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, is known as a charismatic leader, eloquent public intellectual, and Red Scare victim who in 1954 lost his security clearance in part because of his earlier associations with suspected Communists. To learn about Oppenheimer the scientist, Science spoke with David C. Cassidy, a physicist and historian emeritus at Hofstra University. Cassidy has authored or edited 10 books, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. How did Oppenheimer compare to Einstein? Did he actually make any substantiative contributions to THE Bomb? And why did he eventually lose his security clearance?

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a "typo leak" that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers. Financial Times: Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses. The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali's country domain.

Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages -- almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: "This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US."

New military and commercial craft aim to go far higher than jumbo jets and stay there for months, offering more flexible alternative to satellites. From a report: This month a drone took off from a missile range in New Mexico and climbed into the stratosphere, joining a race to deliver unmanned aerial vehicles that can fly higher and longer than ever before. Drones have already shaken up warfare, recently playing a prominent role in the war in Ukraine. But militaries have long sought craft that can provide intelligence at a height beyond the reach of most radar and missile-defense systems, and for extended periods. For commercial users, high-altitude drones can be a way to beam internet services into areas with low connectivity.

A handful of military drones have for years operated at some 60,000 feet, far higher than jumbo jets. Now companies are developing craft that can go even higher and stay there for months, offering a cheaper and more flexible alternative to satellites. BAE Systems, the British weapons maker that produced the drone that flew in New Mexico, said its solar-powered craft is designed to stay in the air for as long as a year. "It allows us to enter the race to operationalize the stratosphere," said Dave Corfield, chief executive of Prismatic, the BAE unit that developed the drone. In the recent test flight, the PHASA-35 drone climbed above 65,000 feet and flew for 24 hours before landing. It is expected to enter service as soon as late 2026. Elsewhere, a unit of plane maker Airbus has developed a drone called the Zephyr that has already flown up to 70,000 feet for 64 days.

Blue Origin's BE-4 rocket engine exploded during testing, causing significant damage and potential delays to the company's rocket launches, including those for its customer United Launch Alliance (ULA). CNBC reports: During a firing on June 30 at a West Texas facility of Jeff Bezos' space company, a BE-4 engine detonated about 10 seconds into the test, according to several people familiar with the matter. Those people described having seen video of a dramatic explosion that destroyed the engine and heavily damaged the test stand infrastructure. The engine that exploded was expected to finish testing in July. It was then scheduled to ship to Blue Origin's customer United Launch Alliance for use on ULA's second Vulcan rocket launch, those people said.

A Blue Origin spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC on Tuesday, confirmed the company "ran into an issue while testing Vulcan's Flight Engine 3." "No personnel were injured and we are currently assessing root cause," Blue Origin said, adding "we already have proximate cause and are working on remedial actions." The company noted it "immediately" made its customer ULA aware of the incident. ULA is the rocket-building joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which competes primarily with Elon Musk's SpaceX, especially going head-to-head over the most lucrative military launch contracts. Blue Origin also said it will be able to "continue testing" engines in West Texas. The company previously built two stands for the tests. "We will be able to meet our engine delivery commitments this year and stay ahead of our customer's launch needs," Blue Origin added.

BE-4âs test failure threatens to further push back the already-delayed first Vulcan launch -- which was recently rescheduled to the fourth quarter of this year -- while Blue Origin examines the cause of the problem. Each Vulcan rocket uses a pair of BE-4 engines to launch. ULA waited anxiously for years to receive delivery of the first set. A month ago, ULA completed a key milestone in preparation for the first Vulcan launch, known as Cert-1, with a short static fire test of the rocket using the first pair of BE-4 flight engines. [...] At the same time that Blue Origin needs to get BE-4 working well and humming off the production line for its main customer, the company also needs the engines for its own reusable New Glenn rocket that's in development. While Vulcan uses two BE-4 engines, each New Glenn rocket requires seven BE-4 engines, meaning Blue Origin needs to produce dozens a year to support both rockets.

The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.

2096 subreddits were still dark on Friday, as PC Magazine shared this update about ongoing protests at Reddit: To stamp out any remaining protests, Reddit is sending "final warnings" to subreddits that decided to permit NSFW content as a way to derail the company's advertising business.

Reddit sent warnings to subreddits including r/PICs, r/Military, r/dndmemes, and r/JustNoMil, which was first noticed by The Verge. The message states: "This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW, which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies."

The warning threatens to punish volunteer moderators of the affected subreddits. "Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week," Reddit told the moderators of r/PICs. "This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team..."

However, the r/PICs subreddit wants to remain a NSFW destination, citing the adult and profane content that users often post. "We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW," the moderators for r/PICs told Reddit.

Long-time Slashdot reader hpickens writes: Richard A. Muller Has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ that asserts that World War III may not be what you expect (Source paywalled; alternative source) and that a two-front biological and cyberattack could lead to a U.S. defeat before we know what hit us. Muller paints a picture of what such a dual attack would look like. "The great value to the attacker of a two-pronged biological and cyber attack is the possibility of achieving destructive goals while keeping the whole operation covert," writes Muller. "Covid wasn't a deliberate attack, but it quickly and successfully damaged the American economy. Any nation thinking of using a deadly virus as a weapon of war would first need to immunize its own people, perhaps under the guise of a flu vaccination. Long-term population-level immunity would require the virus be sufficiently optimized, before release, to reduce the probability of further mutation."

The second prong of the attack would target hospitals with ransomware viruses. "Ransomware could simultaneously target energy grids, power plants, factories, refineries, trains, airlines, shipping, banking, water supplies, sewage-treatment plants and more. But hospitals would be the most salient targets. Avoiding obvious military targets would enhance the illusion that World War III hadn't begun."

"Deterring such an attack will require a clear, credible and articulated promise to respond to aggression. It can't be covert. If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react? Policy makers need to come up with an answer. An economic embargo seems suboptimal. Many would interpret nuclear retaliation as disproportionate. Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space. But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV. And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

A new article in the Washington Post reports that even internally, "Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both?"

In April, the Washington Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and one possible Space Force counter-measure would "ensure that the United States avoids 'operational surprise,' by keeping track of other countries' satellites and movements in space while also being able to 'identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.'"

To address the possibility of enemies shooting down satellites, the Space Force is also "pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver." That's just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains "space superiority," as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space — why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission...?

[Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing] gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future. Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well? "In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. 'I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island.' And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance," he said. "It's a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response — you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area."

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground? Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moment's notice? Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. "Can we lease a room?" Purdy said. "Can we lease a module?"
A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believes the U.S. Space Force is misunderstood — at least partly because much of what it does is classified. "We fundamentally need to normalize the classification," he tells the Washington Post, "so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people."

Monday U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said government workers with high security clearances had made UFO-related claims, leading to a bill's provision to halt any reverse-engineering of alien crafts. News stories at the time noted "allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs" by former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Grusch, a story which Vanity Fair traced to a "little-known" site called The Debrief.

But that article's authors have some serious journalistic experience. Ralph Blumenthal spent more than 45 years on staff at The New York Times. Leslie Kean is an investigative science journalist known for her writing on UFOs. In 2017 they teamed up with a New York Times Pentagon correspondent for an "explosive 2017 UFO report," writes the Atlantic, "in which the journalists revealed a defunct secret Pentagon program — initially funded at the request of former Senate majority leader Harry Reid — to investigate 'unidentified flying objects.'" I've learned that Kean and Blumenthal did, in fact, bring the story to the Times, but the paper of record turned it down... The pair also pitched their story to Politico and The Washington Post. The Post had been trying to further report the story that the reporters had brought to the paper, but didn't think it was ready for publication; among its reservations, according to a source familiar, was that it was unclear what members of Congress made of Grusch's testimony... Politico — which, a source familiar noted, had the story for mere days, while the Post had the story for weeks — also wasn't able to turn around the story at the speed that Kean and Blumenthal wanted, Blumenthal said...

The writers' apparent time constraints have only raised more questions. "To be clear — the Washington Post did not pass on our story," Kean wrote on Facebook Monday. "Ralph and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly." Blumenthal told me that circumstances — including that Grusch's identity as the whistleblower had leaked out on the internet — pushed them to "publish sooner than we'd hoped." "If there had been no leaks, it might've been different," Blumenthal said. But "people on the internet were spreading stories Dave was getting harassing phone calls and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out...."

Now out in the world, the reporting process is raising even more eyebrows. During interviews on NewsNation with both Grusch and Kean, it became clear that neither had seen photos of the alleged craft. NewsNation's Brian Entin asked Kean about the lack of receipts: "He has the credentials, but there's no documents that he's handed over, there's no pictures, and as a journalist, you want to see documents; you want to see pictures." But Kean said the lack of documents or photographs did not raise red flags for her because "all of that information is classified." She believes it, she said, "because of all the sources I have who have told me the same thing... I don't think there's some conspiracy among all these people who don't know each other to make something like this up."

In response to the report, DoD spokesperson Sue Gough told NewsNation in a statement, "To date, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.

Joby Aviation has been cleared by the FAA to start flight tests on its first production prototype air taxi, the company wrote in a press release. Engadget reports: It's a large step in the company's aim to start shipping the eVTOL aircraft (electric vertical takeoff and landing) to customers in 2024 and launch an air taxi service by 2025. The aircraft can take off and land like a helicopter, then tilt its six rotors horizontally and fly like an airplane at up to 200 MPH. It's designed to carry a pilot and four passengers over a distance up to 100 miles on a charge -- enough range for most types of air taxi operations. At the same time, Joby claims it's nearly silent in cruise mode and 100 times quieter than conventional aircraft during takeoff and landing.

With the the FAA's special airworthiness certificate in hand, Joby can perform flight tests of full production aircraft, following tests with full-scale prototypes that began in 2017. In May last year, the company received another crucial permit, the FAA's Part 135 air carrier certificate for commercial operations. It recently teamed with Delta Air Lines to offer travel to and from airports, and its website shows a scenario of flying from downtown NYC to JFK airport in just seven minutes compared to 49 minutes in a car.

Now, Joby must clear the largest hurdle with full FAA type and production certification in order to take paying passengers on commercial flights. That's likely about 18 months away, aerospace engineer and Vertical Flight Society director Mike Hirschberg told New Scientist. Its first customer would be the US Air Force, as part of a $131 million contract under the military's Agility Prime program, with deliveries set for 2024.

"Smartwatches are being sent to random military members loaded with malware, much like malware distribution via USB drives in the past," writes longtime Slashdot reader frdmfghtr. "Recipients are advised not to turn them on and report the incident to their local security office." Defense News reports: The Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, in an announcement last week warned the watches may contain malware, potentially granting whoever sent the peripherals "access to saved data to include banking information, contacts, and account information such as usernames and passwords."

A more innocuous tactic may also be to blame: so-called brushing, used in e-commerce to boost a seller's ratings through fake orders and reviews. The CID, an independent federal law enforcement agency consisting of thousands of personnel, did not say exactly how many smartwatches were so far distributed.