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Comment Re:No rule of law in America (Score 1) 391

by chromakey (#35304634) Attached to: Army Psy Ops Units Targeted American Senators

At best it is some pogues in the woods with loudspeakers on thier HMMWV trying to make the enemy scouts tell their commander that they hear tanks when there really aren't any.

As a former Tactical PSYOP Team Leader, I take offense to your pogues comment. Tactical PSYOPers are on the ground every day with the infantry guys going through the same crap that they are. You can look up the list of awards given to PSYOPers for valor as well as the number of KIA/WIA relative to our size in the Army. Not to mention that they're held to SOF certification standards, jump qualified, as well as some going through SERE school and having Ranger tabs.

Playing tank noises over the loudspeaker is just one thing in the PSYOP toolkit. We're also your cultural experts on the ground and/or your linguists (I was an arabic linguist) and are pretty darn useful in a COIN environment. We also keep the civilians away from the infantry guys so that they don't wind up on CNN for causing collateral damage.

In regards to the article, I don't know any LTC that ever received much practical PSYOP training. From the sound of the article, he only had 3 people in his group, so it sounds like a staff officer rated his skillset a bit higher than it actually was. In a tactical unit, officers don't really do anything other than just provide overwatch of their NCOs and handle admin/supply stuff.

Comment Re:Not true (Score 1) 973

by chromakey (#31766470) Attached to: How Did Wikileaks Do It?

Agreed. Wikileaks has been good about not editorializing in the past, but they wanted to make a big splash with this. Even going to the length of creating a special URL and website for it. One of the Wikileaks spokespeople was on the BBC yesterday and made no bones about them having an agenda on this. Here is a write up:

http://www.dissectednews.com/2010/04/wikileaks-monday-morning-quarterbacking.html
Games

New WoW Patch Brings Cross-Server Instances 342

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
ajs writes "World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion was staggered into 4 phases. The fourth and final phase, patch 3.3, was released on Tuesday. This patch is significant in that it will be the first introduction of one of the most anticipated new features in the game since PvP arenas: the cross-realm random dungeon, as well as the release of new end-game dungeons for 5, 10 and 25-player groups. The patch notes have been posted, and so has a trailer. The ultimate fight against the expansion's antagonist, the Lich King a.k.a. Arthas, will be gated as each of the four wings of the final dungeon are opened in turn — a process that may take several months. The next major patch after 3.3 (presumably 4.0) will be the release of Cataclysm, the next expansion."
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.
bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."
The Internet

Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table 327

Posted by timothy from the look-at-our-semi-clean-hands dept.
think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."
Security

FAA Network Hacked 110

Posted by CmdrTaco from the in-good-company dept.
coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration has joined the growing list of government agencies that have had their supposedly safe systems hacked. The agency this week notified about 45,000 employees that one of its servers was hacked into and employee personal identity information was stolen. The FAA was quick to say the server that was accessed was not connected to the operation of the air traffic control system or any other FAA operational system. It did say two of the 48 files on the breached computer server contained personal information about more than 45,000 FAA employees and retirees who were on the FAA's rolls as of the first week of February 2006."

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