Technology and Website

Author Archive: avi maxwel

Russia Promises to ‘Reverse-Engineer’ Captured Western Technology

Moscow will “reverse-engineer” Western technology its forces have captured in Ukraine, according to Russian state media.

“If there is an opportunity to look inside and see if there is something that can be applied to us, well, why not?” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the state-run Russia-1 channel.

It is not clear which technologies the Kremlin leader referred to in his comments, although he did praise Russia’s T-90M Proryv-3 tank, designed to be a “main competitor” to the US Army’s Abrams M1 tank. Washington pledged 31 Abrams to Ukraine earlier this year, and they are expected to arrive in the coming weeks and months.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 27, 2023 in Moscow, Russia. “If there is an opportunity to look inside and see if there is something that can be applied to us, well, why not?” told state-run Russia-1 channel about Western technology captured in Ukraine, state news agency Tass reported on Sunday.
Contributor/Getty Images

Putin described the T-90 as “the best tank in the world, without any exaggeration,” before adding: “But the enemy also produces modern equipment.”

Ukraine has received deliveries of Western-made Leopard 2 tanks, which have made their debut on the battlefield. However, according to Dutch open-source intelligence outlet, Oryx, Ukraine has lost eight Leopard 2A4 and 2A6 tanks so far, but none of these are registered as captured by Russian forces.

Earlier this month, Russian state media reported that Moscow’s authorities had retrieved and were studying a Storm Shadow cruise missile which its air defenses had intercepted in the annexed southern Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia region.

Britain said it was sending an unknown number of the long-range cruise missiles to Kyiv in May, and Russia has since repeatedly said it has intercepted them in Ukraine. The Anglo-French weapon, also known as SCALP, has the longest-range capability known to have arrived in Ukraine courtesy of Kyiv’s Western ally, and France confirmed on Tuesday it would also send Storm Shadows.

In a clip posted to Twitter the day before Paris committed their missiles, a Russian state media commentator said Russia had “problems with long-range weapons” on the frontlines in Ukraine.

Russia’s long-range strike capabilities are “probably the main issue to pay attention to at the moment,” Russian parliament member and former military commander Andrey Gurulyov said on the Russia-1 channel, in a clip posted by Ukrainian Internal Ministry advisor, Anton Gerashchenko.

Russia continues to use Western technology in

Read more

Oppenheimer offers lessons on technology’s ‘unintended consequences’: Full Christopher Nolan

IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

  • Michigan AG charges 16 people in election interference investigation

    03:34

  • Judge in classified docs case brushes aside arguments that Trump can’t get ‘fair trial’

    01:54

  • DeSantis: Trump ‘should have come out more forcefully’ against January 6th

    04:05

  • DeSantis became Trump’s ‘defense attorney’ in response to criminal probe: Panel

    15:26

  • Tensions over American soldier held in North Korea ‘could really escalate quickly’

    05:47

  • Gephardt accuses No Labels of playing presidential spoiler

    07:23

  • McCarthy defends inviting RFK Jr. to testify: ‘Censoring someone’ isn’t the answer

    02:23

  • Manchin: ‘It’ll be next year’ before deciding on a presidential run

    06:52

  • Iowa judge issues temporary injunction blocking the state’s new abortion law

    03:11

  • McCrory: No Labels will not select presidential candidate until 2024

    07:49

  • Full Panel: DeSantis has ‘a month to 6 weeks’ to fix the woes campaign

    09:57

  • DeSantis super PAC focuses on canvassing amid financial troubles

    03:21

  • Now Playing

    Oppenheimer offers lessons on technology’s ‘unintended consequences’: Full Christopher Nolan

    34:43

  • UP NEXT

    Christopher Nolan warns of AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: It will ‘be in charge of nuclear weapons’

    03:42

  • Full Panel: FEC report ‘confirmed’ DeSantis campaign donors’ concerns

    06:42

  • The White House highlights how Tuberville’s military blockade correlates with the GOP as a whole

    00:59

  • Summer heat wave sends temperatures and economic costs soaring

    02:08

  • Mon. Sullivan: GOP lawmakers will have a ‘strong impact’ on the next president’s Ukraine decisions

    02:03

  • Meet the Press Minute: Jimmy Carter calls for depoliticizing the FBI in 1976

    01:15

  • Full Duckworth: ‘I’m not opposed to court expansion but I’m not certainly there’ to fully support it

    06:45

On a panel of physicists moderated by Chuck Todd, Christopher Nolan discusses the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer 78 years after he led a group of scientists to gather at the Trinity site to test the first atomic bomb.

Get more newsliveonNBC News Now
Get
Read more

Advancements in prosthetics limb technology allow feeling, control | 60 Minutes

We don’t often think about how the sense of touch makes our lives possible. We grip a paper coffee cup with perfect force to hold it but not crush it. Our feet always find the floor. But for people with artificial limbs, or those with spinal injuries, the loss of touch can put the world beyond their grasp. Seventeen years ago, the Defense Department launched a $100 million projects to revolutionize prosthetic limbs. The robotics you’re about to see is amazing- but as we first reported earlier this year, even more remarkable is how the ‘feeling of feeling’ is returning to people like Brandon Prestwood.

Brandon Prestwood: For me, it was, it’s a battle if I wanted to live or die.

Scott Pelley: You weren’t sure you wanted to live?

Brandon Prestwood: No. I didn’t know if I wanted to or not.

Brandon Prestwood’s battle began with the loss of his left hand. In 2012, he was on a maintenance crew reassembling an industrial conveyor belt when someone turned it on.

Brandon Prestwood: And my arm was dragged in pretty much up to the shoulder. It crushed my bones in my arm and fed my arm through a gap of about one inch.

Scott Pelley: How did they save your life?

Brandon Prestwood: The other maintenance guys jumped in. They started basically takin’ the machine back apart. Once we got it back apart, I could look in and see what was there. And one of the gentlemen was a Vietnam veteran…

Scott Pelley: And the Vietnam veteran knew what to do.

Brandon Prestwood: yeah.

The Vietnam veteran knew tourniquets, but Prestwood lost his hand and couldn’t return to his job.

After four years with a hook, he told his wife, Amy, he wanted to volunteer for experimental research involving surgery at the VA

Amy Prestwood: I wasn’t 100% on board to begin with. But I knew he had his mind set that he was– he had to do this. And I couldn’t hold him back.

Six years later, thanks to the Defense Department and VA Projects, Prestwood controls this hand with nothing but his thoughts.

touch-seq-0322-2. jpg
Brandon Prestwood explores the feeling of touch with a prosthetic hand

60 Minutes


Lab tech: Everything still feels good?

Brandon Prestwood: Probably, when I got her around here…

Electrodes, implanted in muscles in his arm, pick up his brain’s electrical signals for movement. A computer

Read more

Google is using laser technology to bring a new, cheaper Internet to remote areas

The tech – which uses a stop sign-sized terminal which beams lasers carrying data to a corresponding terminal – will provide high-speed Internet access.

This is not the first time that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has embarked on a mission to bring reliable, cheap Internet to communities in rural and remote areas.

But this time around, the team at the tech giant’s innovation hub X-lab has learned from past failures.

In 2016, the lab sought to broaden Internet access by using stratospheric balloons but that project was ultimately wound down due to high costs.

Now they’ve turned to a new technology for what they call the Taara project: using neatly designed terminals that beam data-carrying lasers to corresponding terminals over fixed distances – essentially fiber-optic Internet without the cables.

According to the head of Taara, Mahesh Krishnaswamy, things are progressing better this time around.

And now telecommunication partners like Bharti Airtel in India are using the machines to build out Internet infrastructure in hard-to-reach locations.

Taara executives and Bharti Airtel say they are now moving toward larger-scale deployment of the new laser Internet technology in India.

Beyond that, Krishnaswamy adds that Taara is helping to link up Internet services in 13 countries so far, including Australia, Kenya and Fiji.

High-speed Internet by laser

At Project Taara’s lab in Mountain View, California, Krishnaswamy and his team of engineers experiment with mirrors of different focal lengths as well as special tables designed to recreate conditions that terminals would be subjected to out in the field, such as shaking from wind, animals or traffic.

Krishnaswamy said he had an epiphany for this new initiative while working on the failed balloon Internet project, called Loon, which used lasers to connect data between balloons.

Krishnaswamy was recently in Osur, an Indian village where he spent his childhood summers, three hours south of Chennai, for the installation of Taara equipment. Osur will be receiving high-speed Internet for the first time this summer, he said.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of these villages across India,” he said. “I can’t wait to see how this technology can come handy to bring all of those people online.”

According to Astro Teller, the CEO of Alphabet’s X-lab, ‘Taara is moving more data every single day than Loon did in its entire history”.

In July 2020, Google committed $10 billion (€9.1 billion) to digitizing India. It invested $700 million (€639

Read more

American Technology Found in Chinese Spy Balloon Debris

the Chinese spy balloons captured images and video surveillance using American technology, US officials reported on Thursday. The balloon, which was shot down off the coast of South Carolina earlier this year, likely didn’t transmit the information back to the Chinese government based on a preliminary investigation, although the investigation is still ongoing.

in Februarythe Chinese government denied the balloon was intended for surveillance, claiming instead that it was a weather balloon that had blown off course. But when the US military retrieved the debrisit found technology suitable for capturing information from the ground including tools that are designed to gather and transmit data.

that technology has now been identified as commercially available in the US, with some of the technology readily available online, officials told the Wall Street Journal. The gear found in the debris supported the government’s belief that the balloon was intended to spy on the US and contradicted China’s claims that it was used for weather monitoring.

The latest reports that the balloon did not transmit valuable information to China contradicting an earlier piece by NBC in April which stated that sensitive military information was transmitted by the spy balloon overseas. The outlet cited two unnamed senior US officials and one unnamed former senior administration official, who reportedly said the balloon passed over multiple military sites and sent real-time information back to Beijing despite the Biden Administration’s best efforts to prevent it.

At the time of its discoverythe US military had moved potential targets to stop the balloon from picking up electronic signalsand Pentagon officials issued a statement in February, they were days before the balloon was shot down, saying it didn’t believe the balloon was able to capture sensitive information. “We assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective,” officials said. “But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.”

The new findings now seem to mirror the statement, as unnamed officials told the WSJ that Beijing had not obtained any information, but did not tell the outlet whether the balloon had malfunctioned or if the US military’s quick reaction prevented it from collecting data. Beijing has warned that it will be forced to take extreme action if the US government releases its

Read more