Interestingly, I went the other way. Once I found myself ‘addicted’ to screens I got a nice automatic to check time with, and found that it really helped wean me off screens (I can set down my phone now and not look at it all day, and my quality of life and sleep have improved)
This isn’t necessarily true outside the US. The running joke about Greeks is that they are 98% Greek Orthodox (official stats from a while ago) and 40% atheist. You might be atheist and communist (a fairly common combo in Greece) but will still probably roast a lamb on Easter with your family.
Having married into a Greek family, I can certainly attest to this, but I'll shed a bit more light to the sentiment behind that statement. To the Greeks, the Greek church is part of their cultural identity, rather than a purely religious entity. There is a community that stems from the church, traditions that are intertwined in it, and just a general presence in their daily lives in a way that I don't think I've really observed in the US. Oddly enough, it doesn't really outwardly express itself as dogma or doctrine, in the way that I've noticed with a lot of Evangelicals or Catholics in the states. The church is more of an ever present fixture in Greek life than a strong belief in Orthodox teachings.
Turkey is the same way. The government says 99.8% of the population are Muslim by default but it’s probably closer to 60%.
Until a few years ago religion was listed on government identification cards. When you’re born your parenrs must state a religion for your birth certificate or it is automatically listed as Muslim.
You had to go through a burdensome official process as an adult to change this, and once you did this you legally admitted to Apostasy, which opens you up to discrimination (and future consequences if the government were to fall to islamists or neo-ottomans).
Furthermore, it was very common to be discriminated against by HR departments / hiring managers if Islam was not present on your Kimlik (government ID).
This only went away with recent passport and national id standards changing in their futile attempts to join the EU.
(Consider that Turkey is by far the most liberal and secular Muslim nation.)
Based on the flight times and 100 mile flights ~100 miles off the coast and the investigated boats in the area...they couldn't be small. At least not with current consumer battery technology. Maybe if they were launched by a sub?
There's a youtuber that has a multi-hour autonomous drone, but it's solar powered and this was at night.
US Navy destroyers are equipped with CIWS and AA missiles designed to engage multiple supersonic sea skimming cruise missiles simultaneously. If the destroyers had felt that they were in any danger they would have quickly made mincemeat out of the UAVs. Still curious to know who operated their (fairly capable) drones in such a brazen manner though.
With so many civilian vessels nearby, and so near the coast, it seems like "shoot first and ask questions later" might not be the way to go in cases like this. A Phalanx CIWS round can travel over 5 km if it doesn't hit anything.
Do those things have the capability to attack such tiny targets that are already close in? We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird. By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you. Moreover, they're small enough that they wouldn't represent a substantial threat to a ship in and of themselves (as compared to, say, an explosive-laden dinghy), and so perhaps not necessarily the kind of target that would've been specified for these weapons systems. I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
> Do those things have the capability to attack such tiny targets that are already close in?
Yes
> We're talking about something the size and speed of a bird
Birds have nothing on stealthy, supersonic anti-ship missiles.
> By the time you realize it's not a bird it's probably already on top of you
In a war scenario all wildlife gets shot first. Modern systems developed in the past ten years also commonly have the capability to discern bird wings from propellers for this scenario. Hurray cheaper compute, everybody can run a SVM classifier in real-time now. Without spending too much money on your radar (40k USD? parts only) you can classify birds at about 0.5-1km away, who knows the exact capability of people with money to spend on the problem.
> I would imagine defenses for such small UAVs would be more in the vein of electronic countermeasures.
I don't think they can afford to see every bird as a threat during a battle. That means they'll also see every piece of shrapnel as a threat. And every piece of outgoing large munitions. I got the impression that speed and direction of travel are common filters. So something that's slow, tiny, and changing direction a lot is legitimately going to be hard to distinguish from a lot of non-threatening things.
I can't speculate on what's actually on US Navy warships right now, but I'm telling you commercially you can distinguish birds from drones under a kilometer away today. The knowledge has been around on how to do so with radar since 2006 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402, but even without that, there are numerous combined radar-camera surveillance systems out there for accurate target classification. Not like you don't have time to cue a camera to look at an interesting radar target when it's travelling slowly like a UAV might.
The military’s been able to distinguish this since the early 90s — at least. And yes modern drones didn’t exist in the 90s but other similarly-sized machines did, eg balloon-mounted telemetry devices.
Citation: personal experience with those sensor systems.
The parent is correct. They have considerable capacity to accurately classify everything in their regional vicinity in milliseconds. This is old capability.
Tracking millions of entities in your general space in real-time is definitely possible today. I have little reason to believe the US Navy cannot do it too.
Unless wildlife is wearing armor, the radar and even polarimetric light signature is vastly different between a bird and shrapnel even if it's not moving at all. Not all detection methods are heuristic.
An eg Exocet missile is only 12" in diameter when it's approaching you head-on. So optically it would be similar to a DJI-size drone. Thermal will be vastly different ;)
So I thought about it, and even if a small drone was loaded with explosives it really couldn’t damage a war ship. Unless it attacked the sensors.
A shaped charge hitting the EOSS, the radar dome, or parts of the Aegis system’s sensor array could potentially cripple the ship’s ability to defend itself.
No not by itself. Honestly I know very little about modern explosives but I could imagine a swarm of drones, made of or carrying explosives could converge on a critical section of a target additively making a substantial explosive force.
I know just enough about material science to say probably not. A munition needs to break or penetrate a surface to be effective. To do that it needs to apply a great deal of force in a short period of time- spreading the force out over space or time reduce the destructive capability of the munition. So getting hit 500 times by 1 lbs bombs is not the same as getting hit once by a 500 lbs bomb- it’s not additive, the 500 lbs destroys things the 500 1 lbs can’t.
That being said, I’d imagine being on the receiving end of 500 1 lbs explosives is still a very bad day.
Right, if I apply 1 pound of force to your head 520 times, you’ll be really annoyed with me. If I apply 520 pounds of force to your head once, I’ve just crushed your skull.
If each of those 1 lb bombs lands precisely on one of the ship's sensors, then that ship is out of action, even if its hull has not been breached anywhere.
One could imagine other payloads like chaff, smoke, or even paint or flash bangs to disable equipment and injure the crew perhaps. Not sure how efficient that would be though.
Fair point. Based on the admittedly thin circumstantial evidence in the article, I assumed relatively small craft. For example,
1) Why would a Carnival cruise ship feel the need to disclaim involvement for anything except a small, COTS drone? (IOW, presumably they at least believed they could have been such small drones.)
2) 4+ were spotted together. Wouldn't those be audible, especially if much larger than COTS drones?
3) The lights ("white light", "red flashing light") suggests COTS drones, especially because the cruise ship also noticed them. If they were special purpose military or intelligence drones, why keep the lights on?
Granted, the supposed distances involved suggest otherwise, but the article never establishes why they believed the drones were necessarily flown such distances. Rather, it seems those distances are based on the presumption that the drones were flown from one of the ships with active AIS. But that's a rather dubious assumption in the context of someone buzzing military ships w/ multiple drones.
Most target shooters couldn't hit a drone that wasn't hovering let alone a sailor who had guns training several years back. A shotgun would be the way to get these guys when they got in close enough.
i don't think the officers in charge of protecting the ship generally factor the material costs of doing so in to their decisions. they've got standing orders from above, and somewhere far up the chain, somebody traded off costs, lives, reputation, etc, etc. dude at the bottom has a set of rules.
Well they should factor in strategic loss by attrition. If you shoot a $1 million dollar missile at every $100 dollar drone, that’s a good way to lose a war.
Not sure about mid ranking officers, but captains who are in charge of ships think about such things.
HN conveniently forgets that a $100 dollar drone has a $100 performance. Smaller range, smaller payload, worse navigation electronics. You can probably kill unprotected civilians and protected soldiers if the explosives reach the head. That's scary for civilians but for the military? It's only as bad as bullets and missiles.
But does the 1 million dollar missile cost 1 million to build a second one?
Often times military cost per unit factors in a fixed R&D cost. It doesn't necessarily mean it literally cost 1 million in parts and labor to assemble the single missile.
All the Destroyers listed in the article definitely have 1 or 2 CIWS on board. I'm confident that would do the trick -- having seen them in action.
Additionally, each of those Destroyers have 7 (if I recall correctly) .50 caliber machine gun mounts around the perimeter of the ship, which could also probably handle the drones.
They could go to anyone important who is under investigation/has been indicted but doesn’t know it yet, tell them, then have them do things (data dump from your employer, etc) in exchange for help fleeing the US to Russia.
Good question. Treasury and FCC are VERY different departments. FCC is ~1k people and dominated by political commissioners. Treasury is ~80k people and has politically appointed leadership but also a much deeper bench of career civil servants. Those people will read those comments and will make changes to their proposed rules based on thoughtful comments and feedback from stakeholders. They may not make the change you want, but they will read your feedback and take it into account. If you do choose to comment, DO NOT use form letters or go on rants. Establish your interest, perspective, and authority, and state your position clearly with supporting data. And remember: everything you say goes into the public record
Source: got a large US govt to tweak regs based on data, common sense, 0 lobbying and 0 money.
Speaking from personal experience, it is necessary to update these references, because people implementing them have no choice but to follow the letter of the law. I have worked on govt projects where we had to downgrade to an insecure cipher suite to comply with outdated regulations.
Putting on my govt contractor hat, there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law. Could charge a pretty penny too - it’ll all get budgeted as “Brexit compliance” costs.
> there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law.
The text quoted in the linked article in no way mandates the use of Netscape Navigator or Mozilla Mail - it merely references them as being widely distributed software capable of using RSA 1024 and SHA-1 (which it does appear to mandate).
> Speaking from personal experience, it is necessary to update these references, because people implementing them have no choice but to follow the letter of the law.
Another example related to children - in 1993 guidance changed from having children sleep on their front to having them sleep on their backs. The result was a reduction in SIDS deaths from 0.13% to 0.035%. However the rate of kids having a flat spot on the back of their heads increased to 47% of 2 month olds. That flat spot pushes the rest of their skull forward and can result in a prominent forehead and misshapen features (iow, makes your kid ugly). Is the trade off between a 0.1% reduction in death rate worth a 50% chance of being ugly?
If you ever tried to console a parent who lost a child while he was sleeping, you would want to reduce the death rate as much as possible, no matter how many extra uglies we get.
The bigger problem from a societal perspective is that the “people cowering in fear” often includes the Dept of Justice. Prosecutors are assessed based on win rates, and they know how hard it is to go after a large company with the best lawyers. In some cases, the prosecutors personally know the people at those law firms, and remember them as the best students in their law school class. Would you go after a large firm protected by someone you know is smarter (and better at law) than you? Much easier to focus on the obvious scams and easy wins. This was part of how Goldman got away scot free with extremely questionable behavior like betting against their clients during the Great Recession, or UBS got away with just a fine for laundering cartel money (they sized their teller windows to fit the shoeboxes full of cash that the cartels were bringing in!).
I used to work at a company that hired temps off Craigslist to do fairly sensitive healthcare work. The economics and extreme seasonality made that the only viable approach. Software like this was absolutely critical to limiting what people could do and preventing things like identity theft etc. Strong deterrent effect too- during orientation they would show people exactly what they could see. Not great in a general work environment with FTEs but these tools have legitimate uses.
Unfortunately everyone in the space does it. Hiring 200 FT with benefits that you only have work for during two months a year will quickly put you out of business.
I'm sorry, that company does what? It is absolutely insane that temps off Craigslist could be trusted with such sensitive information under any circumstances. That company is asking for a data breach and to be sued into oblivion.
The fundamental problem here is that that company is cutting corners to save money. Full stop.
Under HIPAA laws, basically any healthcare data is "sensitive" data. An "extremely seasonal" healthcare job that deals with "sensitive data" could be someone that works in a call center that answers questions about health insurance -- just my guess.
Per other note, everyone in the space does it. It’s a fairly commodity business so paying more or keeping people all year when there are only two months of work would put them out of business quickly. If anything it’s a flaw in the underlying law that creates that seasonality
A trained ape reading a script for insurance enrollment is handling "sensitive" data, but your prescription history is sold in real-time to data brokers.
They could, but since so much of healthcare sits inside Citrix these days, it's unlikely that in OP's scenario it would've mattered. It's pretty easy to find out if you are running in a VM on Windows though, so I bet they do.
I work for a HIPAA covered entity - software such as this is not even close to required to meet our compliance obligations. If I found we were trying to deploy it I would fight tooth and nail to protect the dignity of my coworkers and myself, and if they failed you better believe I would have a new position lined up within a week.
“Bossware” like this is not a security tool, it’s a way for micro-managers and ass-in-seat bosses to be more effective in their misguided management styles.
