Android Phones

[buglerbilly]

iPhone Likely Loser For DoD Biz



By Colin Clark Monday, June 14th, 2010 12:21 pm

White Sands Missile Range -- As the Pentagon and Boeing explore the best uses for smartphones on the battlefield, it looks as if the iPhone’s proprietary software may mean the military will give it a miss and gravitate to Android phones because of their open operating systems.

This comes even after the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, stood up last year, waved his own iPhone in the air and said it offered lessons to the Army for rapidly designing and moving equipment to the field. The potential military smartphone market is enormous since it could mean tens of thousands of Army and Marine troopers would be armed with phones designed to connect with secure mobile Internets created by the software radios, known generically as Joint Tactical Radio Systems.

Both the Army and Boeing are exploring how to use smartphones to improve soldiers’ performance on and off the battlefield. As Col. Marisa Tanner of the Army’s Future Force Integration Division puts it: smartphones provide each soldier with more sensors. The phones, coupled with those sensors and tied to a network, would also enormously increase the sharing of data between front-line troops, Special Forces operators and their commanders. In addition to the sensors on them, the phones could use custom-designed apps to speed data collection and sharing. The Pentagon’s advanced research arm, DARPA, is building an experimental app store, roughly modeled on Apple’s business model, which Tanner said “should open any day.” Soldiers would be able to build apps on the fly. Once they get approved for service-wide use, they could be shared online through secure Army portals.

The Army is trying Android, Windows Mobile and iPhones, Tanner said.

Boeing has already sunk some of its own research money into the idea of an app store, using iPhones to do it. They built, among other apps, one for processing detainees after hearing from an 82nd Airborne trooper that he regularly spent three to four hours to process detainees. That did not include the time he spent moving them from the field to a FOB or operations center where he could do the processing.

I tried the app out. It’s simple. Open it and there’s a button to use the iPhone camera to snap a shot of Osama bin Laden’s new driver. Another button allows you to grab a quick fingerprint. And there are fields to note exactly where, when and in what conditions the detainee was seized. If the smartphone was connected through a secure mobile Internet, that information could easily be shared with a Tactical Operations Center or with intelligence officers through something like the Army’s FBCB2 system.

Another promising app would be one for precision fires, Army and Boeing officials said. Imagine a smartphone in the hands of a Special Forces operator or a squad leader. The fight is in close, making a bombing run problematic or there aren’t any air assets available. The trooper uses the targeting app, feeds the data to the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative, the result of an urgent needs request from soldiers in Afghanistan, and wipes out a Taliban squad or sniper without killing or wounding civilians. Of course, that targeting data could also be fed to aircraft or even a Prompt Global Strike weapon for a strike on a High Value Target like Mullah Omar.

The Army is trying out 200 smartphones — Android and iPhones — here to see how soldiers use them, how effective they might be and how secure they can be made. There is no money in the budget to fund it yet, but if the test goes as well as Army officials here think it will, the fielding of smartphones would be made part of son of FCS’ (known official as Brigade Combat Team Modernization) Increment 2, the

The basic problem with iPhones, according to a Boeing source, is that Apple’s produt uses proprietary software. Each app would carry a $200 charge, the Boeing official said, posing what could be a significant costs to the services. On top of that, the Pentagon and the four services are trying to extricate themselves from closed systems — stovepipes — and use only open source systems to which they own the rights or are truly open, like Unix. And troops are showing a preference for a horizontal screen with real keys as they try to input information using gloves and one hand, according to Tanner.

Boeing’s opinion on the iPhone matters because Boeing built SOSCOE, the JTRS middleware that connects the radio’s waveform software to other software like applications. The Pentagon owns SOSCOE and wants to own or use an open source system so Apple would appear to be a deep disadvantage if it wants to supply the Army and other services with its product.

Making smartphones secure enough for military use is one of the biggest obstacles to their deployment. Col. Tanner and others noted. First, the network they operate on must be secure. Then the phones must make secure transmissions. And they must be made be made tactically secure, so that if a soldier is killed or wounded and the enemy grabs their phone they don’t get an open window into U.S. or allied operations, intelligence or capabilities. Tanner pointed to technologies like the Remote Wipe and Find My iPhone services that could be emulated. Also, biometrics such as fingerprint or iris scans could be build into phones so that no one but the user could access them. And there is the standard Common Access Card (CAC) card used across the military services to access computers that could be adapted to phone use.

[Full disclosure: Boeing paid for our flights to and from White Sands.]

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/06/14/iphone-likely-loser-for-dod-biz/#ixzz0qt5P6dhi

[buglerbilly]

Army Testing iPhones for Comms — But Apple Might Lose Out

by christian on June 18, 2010

Our boy Colin Clark reports that the Army is looking at using smart phones like the iPhone the Droid for communications and other tasks netted in with its secure comms networks in the field.

It’s an awesome story that shows how innovative the Army can sometimes (surprise) be…

“They built, among other apps, one for processing detainees after hearing from an 82nd Airborne trooper that he regularly spent three to four hours to process detainees. That did not include the time he spent moving them from the field to a FOB or operations center where he could do the processing.

I tried the app out. It’s simple. Open it and there’s a button to use the iPhone camera to snap a shot of Osama bin Laden’s new driver. Another button allows you to grab a quick fingerprint. And there are fields to note exactly where, when and in what conditions the detainee was seized. If the smartphone was connected through a secure mobile Internet, that information could easily be shared with a Tactical Operations Center or with intelligence officers through something like the Army’s FBCB2 system.

Another promising app would be one for precision fires, Army and Boeing officials said. Imagine a smartphone in the hands of a Special Forces operator or a squad leader. The fight is in close, making a bombing run problematic or there aren’t any air assets available. The trooper uses the targeting app, feeds the data to the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative, the result of an urgent needs request from soldiers in Afghanistan, and wipes out a Taliban squad or sniper without killing or wounding civilians. Of course, that targeting data could also be fed to aircraft or even a Prompt Global Strike weapon for a strike on a High Value Target like Mullah Omar.”

But don’t go jailbreaking your iPhone 4 and spooling up the Rock Band game just yet. According to Clark, Apple’s driving a hard bargain with Army contractor Boeing on this program, charging a setup fee of $200 per app they want to use for the DoD-type stuff. The Droid is more attractive since it’s an open architecture, but everyone knows the iPhone rocks the Droid out of the water.

Wonder if Boeing can drive an even harder bargain with Apple? But we all know how strange Jobs can be. Maybe he doesn’t want a company like Apple associated with killing bad guys. But hey, if Patagonia can do it, can’t Apple?

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz0rGDDCGhH

[buglerbilly]

Smartphones could be latest battle accessory


U.S. Army soldiers with the 1-320 Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, are covered in dust as a Chinook helicopter lands outside their base during a firefight at Combat Outpost Nolen in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar, July 19, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Bob Strong

By Golnar Motevalli

FARNBOROUGH | Wed Jul 21, 2010 10:13am EDT

FARNBOROUGH England (Reuters) - Smartphones could become the next weapon in the United States' battlefield arsenal, as defense companies seek to cash in on the rapidly growing use of sophisticated mobile applications.

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

The software could potentially be powerful enough to pick up aerial images from an unmanned aircraft or satellite and then focus in on details such as license plates on cars or a person's facial features.

"We're trying to take advantage of smartphone technology to tailor for what soldiers may need in the field," Mark Bigham, vice president for defense and civil mission solutions at Raytheon, told Reuters.

So far Raytheon have added their software to handsets made by Motorola and HTC Corp. Google has been instrumental in helping the company access and understand its Android platform, which is in aggressive competition with Apple's iOS platform for the iPhone.

"Google has helped us push the limits of the phone," Bigham said, adding that the U.S. internet giant would stand to financially benefit once the Raytheon Android Tactical System (RATS) is rolled out to the defense market.

The U.S. Army is a potential customer for the software and some members of U.S. Special Forces teams have tested the product and advised Raytheon, Bigham said, adding that the Indian military was also a possible huge market for Raytheon.

Each handset, which has a color touchscreen, would cost about $500, in line with prices for unlocked consumer smartphones, but Raytheon would be responsible for providing the encryption software and communications system necessary for the application to work in remote areas where signals do not exist.

"What you have to do is provide your own communications networks ... communication coverage is absolutely an issue but there are very cost effective solutions that you can use which give you a pretty big foot print," Bigham said.

The software would also allow soldiers to interact as 'buddies' and enable them to track each others' movements on the battlefield, as well as help them identify potential enemies in a way similar to social networking sites such as Facebook.

If the phones do take off, then potentially thousands of handsets could be in circulation on the battlefield, and the risk that they would get into the wrong hands would be high.

But Bigham said identity recognition software would be installed on the phones, allowing only select users to unlock them. GPS would also allow forces to track the phone.

(Reporting by Golnar Motevalli; Editing by Ben Berkowitz)

[buglerbilly]

Rugged Phones Ready For War

By Matthew Cox Friday, July 30th, 2010 5:04 pm

Just as smartphones have become an icon of the civilian world, they may soon find their way into every soldier’s kit.

Take a look at General Dynamics’ version of the battlefield smartphone.

The GD300 features a highly-sensitive GPS, 3.5 inch touch screen and the ability to connect door-kickers to the tactical network.


“It’s a commercial GPS as a stand-alone unit, but the beauty of it is with a click of a cable you can connect it to” secure communications gear such as the Joint Tactical Radio System, said Jason Jacob, product manager for General Dynamics Itronix, a commercial arm of GD C4 Systems.

“We are looking to supply these to every dismounted soldier,” Jacob said.

GD is one of several companies developing military-style smartphones in response to the Army’s acknowledgement that the technology could prove useful on the digital battlefield. The Army has been testing a mix of 200 iPhones and other smartphones at Fort Bliss for several months, trying to figure out their best uses and to see how they hold up.

The Android-based GD300 can be mounted on the forearm or chest. At 8 ounces, it’s a “lightweight, fully rugged device” that measures 5.8 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and .7 inches thick, Jacob said. It has a 600MHz processor and a Lithium-ion battery good for 8 hours of use.

A simple cable will connect the GD300 to tactical radios that use software such as the Enhanced Position Locating Reporting System. Once connected, the GD300 can send and receive text messages and graphics and use situational-awareness tools such as Blue Force Tracker.

GD wants the Army, and other services to buy it, but the company also plans to sell the GD300 commercially.

“In the future, I do expect that any soldier could order it,” Jacobs said.

It won’t be cheap though. Right now it costs about $1,200, Jacob said, but the price could drop below $1,000 on bulk orders.

[buglerbilly]

Is GD’s New TacSmartPhone Grunt Proof?

by christian on August 2, 2010



Our good friend Matt Cox, who recently pulled up stakes at Army Times to launch into a full-on freelance career, posted an interesting piece over at our sister site DoD Buzz on the development of a battlefield smartphone.

As we reported a month ago, our boy Colin Clark talked to the folks at Boeing who are honchoing the whole Brigade Combat Team modernization (the remnants of the FCS program) and developing a tactical App Store with programs for in-processing detainees and calling in 9-lines.

One of the problems is architecture — Droid, iOS4, Microsoft — and Clark reported that the folks at Apple might be a bit on the anti-military side, charging $200 setup for mil-related apps.

Well, Cox reports GD has stepped into the breach by developing a combo-pocket computer/smartphone that puts in its lot with the open-source Droid OS. The GD3000 is a downright brianiac of a smart phone, allowing troops to plug in their secure comm devices and flow whatever info back and forth through it.


The Android-based GD300 can be mounted on the forearm or chest. At 8 ounces, it’s a “lightweight, fully rugged device” that measures 5.8 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and .7 inches thick, Jacob said. It has a 600MHz processor and a Lithium-ion battery good for 8 hours of use.

A simple cable will connect the GD300 to tactical radios that use software such as the Enhanced Position Locating Reporting System. Once connected, the GD300 can send and receive text messages and graphics and use situational-awareness tools such as Blue Force Tracker.

There were some interesting comments on the Buzz story, including questions of the phone’s ability to hold up to abuse and whether it will have the battery life it needs for data-intensive battlefield tasks. But the biggest worry is in its security architecture…as the Army has seen from its Aircraft Wireless Intercom System, if the NSA doesn’t sign off, forget it.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz0vSMhG9Ln

[buglerbilly]

More on this...........

General Dynamics Itronix's New GD300 Rugged Wearable Computer Enables Unprecedented GPS and Situational Awareness for Warfighters

(Source: General Dynamics; issued August 3, 2010)

SUNRISE, Fla. --- Combining commercial global positioning and communications technology with battlefield-rugged computing, General Dynamics Itronix is introducing the GD300 fully rugged arm- or chest-worn computer.

Weighing less than 8 ounces, the Android-based GD300 operates like an ultra-sensitive commercial GPS unit or, with the click of a cable, interfaces with tactical radios like the Rifleman Radio (AN/PRC-154) for secure access to the tactical network. The GD300 uses a quadra-helix antenna for real-time global positioning that defies interference even when the user is positioned in mountainous regions or urban environments.

"The GD300 is a game-changing computer that will save lives," said Mike DiBiase, vice president of Computing Technologies for General Dynamics C4 Systems. "We expect the GD300 will become the most important 8 ounces of tactical communications and situational awareness equipment that a warfighter can carry."

The GD300 hosts the open architecture, Android-based operating system to easily accommodate current and emerging applications for warfighters at all command levels. Operating in two distinct modes, the GD300 serves as a stand-alone GPS device or, when connected to a tactical radio, performs as a tactical mission computer. The GD300 supports commercially available standalone applications or military "apps" like the Tactical Ground Reporting (TIGR) System which is currently in use by the military.

When connected to a tactical radio, the lightweight GD300 enables warfighters to securely communicate, share information and collaborate while on the move. Delivering up to eight hours of continuous operation, the lightweight GD300 is powered by standard lithium-ion batteries.

Reginald Daniels, an engineer for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory responsible for testing military wearable computers, said, "Given that the dismounted warfighter's job is not a computer operator, it is imperative that wearable computers be unobtrusive, intuitive to operate and provide compute-on-the-go functions."

The GD300's sleek ergonomic design was the result of input and feedback from wearable-computer users from the military, government and emergency first responders. The GD300 includes a sunlight readable display and functional control buttons typically found on any Android-based device. The 3.5-inch touch-screen display lets warfighters move information around, zoom in or out or place digital 'markers' on tactical maps with the touch of a gloved finger. Comfortably fitting in an adult's hand, the computer fully meets MIL-STD 810G specifications for ruggedness.

General Dynamics Itronix is a leading developer of wireless, rugged computing solutions for mobile workers, offering a full range of field computing systems including laptops, ultra mobile notebook PCs and tablet PCs. The company is part of General Dynamics C4 Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics.

General Dynamics, headquartered in Falls Church, Va., employs approximately 91,200 people worldwide. The company is a market leader in business aviation; land and expeditionary combat systems, armaments and munitions; shipbuilding and marine systems; and information systems and technologies.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

iPhone Could be Cracked by Terrorists and Cops

by christian on September 7, 2010



You all know how much I love my iPhone…I mean, I consider it the greatest invention since the wheel and if I could have it implanted in my skull, I would. I call it my “Brain Pal.”

Well, one thing I hadn’t really considered is the way in which the little life keeper could be exploited as an intelligence source — both for ill or good.

A Kit Up! tipster forwarded an interesting piece on how police officers are being trained to pull information on perps from smartphones – particularly the iPhone.


Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you’ve been, what you were doing there and whether you’ve got something to hide.

“Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone,” said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.

“It may look like everything’s gone,” he said. “But for anybody who’s got a clue, retrieving that information is easy.”

There’s even a cottage industry for law enforcement to understand cracking Apple’s wonder device and a book on how to do it.

While the article focuses on how police and investigators can crack the phone for gouge on crooks, Kit Up! readers will probably be interested in flipping the concept on its head by considering how a bad guy might be able to find out a wealth of information about a military unit from the little bits of info contained on a trooper’s misplaced iPhone.

We wrote about how more and more troops in The Zone arejailbreaking their iPhones and using them on local networks — and with the explosion of apps that can be used for military ops, the iPhone will surely become a much more ubiquitous device on the battlefield. So it’s important to consider security of your iPhone while deployed.

One thing you can do to better secure your iPhone is to enable the password lock feature and couple it with a data erase modeafter some failed attempts at breaking in. While the passcode is only four digits long (which should be easy enough to crack for hardcore sleuths) it’s better than nothing.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz0yqxXys1T

[buglerbilly]

The linked article to the above...........

iPhone makes great snitch for savvy cops

September 1, 2010 By Amber Hunt



Got an iPhone in your pocket? Then you might be storing even more personal information than you realize. And some of it could be used against you if you're ever charged with a crime.

A burgeoning field of forensic study deals with iPhones specifically because of their popularity, the demographics of those who own them and what the phone's technology records during its use.

Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

"Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.

"It may look like everything's gone," he said. "But for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."

Two years ago, as iPhone sales skyrocketed, former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski decided law-enforcement agencies might need help retrieving data from the devices.

So he set out to write a 15-page, how-to manual that turned into a 144-page book ("iPhone Forensics," O'Reilly Media). That, in turn, led to Zdziarski being tapped by law-enforcement agencies nationwide to teach them just how much information is stored in iPhones -- and how that data can be gathered for evidence in criminal cases.

"These devices are people's companions today," said Zdziarski, 34, who lives in Maine. "They're not mobile phones anymore. They organize people's lives. And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone."

It's an area of forensic science that's just beginning to explode, law-enforcement and cell phone experts said. Zdziarski said the focus of forensics recovery has been on the iPhone over other smartphones in large part because of its popularity.

An estimated 1.7 million people rushed to buy the latest iPhone version released in June. Before that, Apple had sold more than 50 million iPhones, according to company figures.

Although some high-stakes criminal cases have used cell phone towers to estimate a suspect or victim's whereabouts, few have laid out the information that iPhones have to offer. For example:

• Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants could use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.

• iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.

• Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said that some of it could prove useful to police.

Clearing out user histories isn't enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a communications expert and member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners who has written articles for law enforcement about iPhone evidence.

"With the iPhone, even if it's in the deleted bin, it may still be in the database," Minor said. "Much is contained deep within the phone."

Some of that usable data is in screenshots.

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.

"Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory, or exculpatory," Minor said.

Most iPhone users agree to let the device locate them so they can use fully the phone's mapping functions, as well as various global positioning system applications.

The free application Urbanspoon is primarily designed to help users locate nearby restaurants. Yet the data stored there might not only help police pinpoint where a victim was shortly before dying, but it also might lead to the restaurant that served the victim's last meal.

"Most people enable the location services because they want the benefits of the applications," Minor said. "What they don't know is that it's recording your GPS coordinates."

Bill Cataldo, an assistant Macomb County, Mich., prosecutor who heads the office's homicide unit, said iPhones are treated more like small computers than mobile phones.

"People are keeping a tremendous amount of information on there," he said.

Cataldo said he has found phone call histories and text messages most useful in homicide cases. But Zdziarski, who has helped federal and state law-enforcement agencies gather evidence, said those elements are just scratching the surface when it comes to the information police and prosecutors soon will start pulling from iPhones.

"There are some terrorists out there who obtained some information about a network from an iPhone," he said.

Sam Brothers, who works for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and helps train law-enforcement agencies about cell phone forensics, said he also has testified in state and federal cases about data he has retrieved from iPhones.

Although he can't comment about specific cases, he provided a hypothetical case:

"Let's say you have a gang and somebody's killed a gang member on the street," he said. "The killer takes a picture on his iPhone. ... We as law enforcement may retrieve that image and might have proof not only of the death, but the time of death."

Even people who don't take pictures or leave GPS coordinates behind often unwittingly leave other trails, Zdziarski said.

"Like the keyboard cache," he said. "The iPhone logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect" so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes.

Apple doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted.

Apple did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

Adam Gershowitz, who teaches criminal procedure at the University of Houston Law Center, said the new technology brings with it concerns about privacy -- especially when it comes to whether investigators have the right to search someone's iPhone after an arrest.

So far, the courts have treated mobile phones like a within-reach container that police can search the same way they can check items in a glove box or cigarette pack, Gershowitz said, though the Ohio Supreme Court in 2009 ruled to bar warrantless searches of cell phone data.

That case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Phones are regular tools of the drug trade," Gershowitz said. As police become more familiar with iPhones, they become more adept at flipping through photos, map searches and text messages as they look for evidence.

Zdziarski said some examiners are afraid to touch iPhones because of privacy concerns.

"I personally will never work on civil cases," he said, adding that when he advises law-enforcement agencies about obtaining search warrants for iPhones, he instructs them to add iPhone-specific language to the warrant.

But, he said, as iPhones appear to keep selling in record numbers, law enforcement appears poised to keep up.

"It's no longer about a list of phone numbers and maybe a couple of pictures," Zdziarski said. "You're talking about data that can travel back a year or longer. That's useful to law enforcement."

(c) 2010, USA Today.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

[buglerbilly]

iPhone is a huge security risk, warns crime expert

By Amy Coopes 7:51 AM

Friday Oct 22, 2010

John Lawler, head of the Australian Crime Commission, said the virtual world had brought 'boundless opportunities' for crime gangs. Photo / SuppliedSYDNEY - A senior Australian crime official has raised serious security concerns over popular smartphones such as Apple's iPhone, which he warned was particularly vulnerable to hacking and information theft.

John Lawler, head of the Australian Crime Commission, said the virtual world had brought "boundless opportunities" for crime gangs and mobile technologies were giving criminals "previously unimaginable" reach.

He singled out the iPhone as especially at-risk, explaining that it was the "third most used system in the world" for businesses and "deployed or piloted by more than 70 per cent of Fortune 100 companies".

"Yet IT managers are swimming against the phone's tide of popularity because they can't centralise installation and security updates as with other software," Lawler told a criminology conference on Tuesday.

"This overwhelming desire for instant services (comes) at the expense of security safeguards."

Lawler said criminals could breach unprotected devices or fool users into giving access to malicious programs which planted viruses or could harvest lucrative information for fraud.

The "explosive" advent of mobile technology had also triggered a shift in information storage from hard-drives to online "cloud" sites like Hotmail and Gmail, posing complex problems for crime-fighting agencies, he added.

"People are embracing this because they can access applications or data from anywhere in the world via any number of devices other than a computer," said Lawler.

"With cloud computing, where is the computer system? Where is the data? How do we gain access? How do we deal with cross-jurisdictional issues? Where is the victim and where were they when the crime occurred?"

An entire criminal enterprise had sprung up around Apple's smartphone, he said, with an imitation iPhone racket in Italy and sophisticated siphoning scam worth 4.5 million pounds (NZ$9.47) linked to devices in London.

The comments come after the German government banned ministers and senior civil servants from using iPhones and BlackBerrys to guard against cyber-attacks.

In Australia, a student breached iPhone security last November with a worm which spread from phone to phone along wireless networks, and could have been used to read text messages, emails and other information stored on the device.

Lawler said fraudsters were increasingly targeting social networking sites for identity theft, seeing the internet as "technological pipelines flooding with rich data that can be turned to profit".

Cyber security was an issue likely only to intensify as technology advanced, he said, which would "undoubtedly bring even more opportunities" for criminals.

"Strategists predict that so much of our information, entertainment and even our body data, our emotions and senses could be streamed through one, individual and embedded device," said Lawler.

"What will organised crime make of that?"

Apple's spokeswoman in Australia was not immediately available for comment.

- AFP

[ADMk2]

iPhone Could be Cracked by Terrorists and Cops

One thing you can do to better secure your iPhone is to enable the password lock feature and couple it with a data erase modeafter some failed attempts at breaking in. While the passcode is only four digits long (which should be easy enough to crack for hardcore sleuths) it’s better than nothing.

That's only the simple password. You can turn the simple password feature off and put in a new password up to about 16 characters long. Oh, and if anyone doesn't have the erase all data function enabled and they use there Iphone for anything important, then they are a fool and might as well not even lock their phone in the first place...

[Weasel]

That's only the simple password. You can turn the simple password feature off and put in a new password up to about 16 characters long. Oh, and if anyone doesn't have the erase all data function enabled and they use there Iphone for anything important, then they are a fool and might as well not even lock their phone in the first place...

...and Sam Brothers needs to put a sock in it. CBP drip.

cheers

w

[buglerbilly]

Real Men Use Android: Special Forces Favor Google Phone

By Spencer Ackerman October 29, 2010 | 9:48 am



The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They’re planning to use Android phones.

Last week, the SOCOM asked coders to create a suite of applications for keeping commandos linked up while they’re out on missions. The software should include chat functions, file transfers, video display and “multi-touch whiteboarding aka John Madden tool.”

SOCOM calls it the Tactical Situational Awareness Application Suite, or TactSA, and it has to work in low-connectivity areas — the middle-of-nowhere places you’d expect to send the military’s most elite troops. It’s got to be peer-to-peer, encrypted “at the application level” and able to recover from “network outages and substantial packet loss.”

But rather than go the Army route and custom-build hardware, SOCOM is happy to use off-the-shelf gadgetry. It’s the software that interests them more. “Due to the shift in commercial hardware to mobile, battery powered systems,” the solicitation reads, TactSA has to work on “lighter devices that utilize the Android operating system.” Special Operations Forces currently have video, mapping and other data tools that run on Windows platforms, but the command is guessing that’s not where the mobile market is going.

A different option for TactSA would be to wait until the military works out the hardware and picks out an operating system. As Danger Room reported yesterday, the Army will award a contract next spring for Nett Warrior, a seven-pound bundle of wearable computers and radios. But even if the prototypes designed by competing defense contractors Raytheon, General Dynamics and Rockwell Collins work as planned, it’ll be years until Nett Warrior is out in the field.

Similarly, the Army hopes to trickle out a handful of soldier-developed apps for smartphones over a year or so. But with special forces operating at an intense pace in places like Afghanistan, that’s not time the elite troops have.

One benefit of using Android-run devices is that Android keeps its source code open. If special operators find that the TactSA functions don’t quite meet their needs, they could conceivably design their own.

James Patrick, a young special-ops veteran, learned in Afghanistan that it can be hard for analysts to sift through a sea of incident reports to find precisely the data they need to plan a mission. So, he and some of his special-operations friends started the Texas firm Aptus Technologies to develop the Threat Action Program, a data-mining app that displays search terms in a word cloud for analysts to parse.

“You can target anti-social acts, like ‘kidnap’ or ‘ambush’,” he says, showing off his cloud for Danger Room at the Association of the U.S. Army conference, and see what associated terms in select areas or involving select people pop out. “It focuses an analyst’s attention.”

Vendors have until December 15 to bid on TactSA. It might not hurt to ask special operators themselves what they most need the development to accomplish.

Photo: U.S. Army Special Operations Command

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/special-forces-want-android-apps-for-warzone-john-maddens/#more-34300#ixzz13oE0xyRO

[buglerbilly]

Smart Phones Get Field Test

December 16, 2010

Army News Service|by Lt. Col. Deanna Bague

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- Phase II of "Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications" (CSDA) kicked off Dec. 8, with a field exercise in which Soldiers from the Army Evaluation Task Force (AETF) tested smart-phone technology.

During a limited user test in July, the Soldiers received phones with either the Android, Windows Mobile, or Apple operating system. This was the first phase of CSDA for AETF Soldiers from 1st Combined Arms Battalion (CAB), 5th Brigade, 1st Armored Division.

Capt. Andrew Hitchings, the commander for C Company, 1st CAB, said the phones were equipped with a few applications to see how the Soldiers would interact with their chain of command via text messaging and voice communications.

Phase two expanded the use of smartphones to an operational environment, said Hitchings.

"We're testing a mobile network," he said. "The phones we're using are equipped with more applications that provide direct voice communications and Soldier situational awareness, as well as additional reporting tools; so both the network and the cell phones are brand new and much more elaborate for tactical use."

In addition to familiarizing themselves with the phones and applications they used for the exercise, Soldiers said they developed their own standard operating procedures, ensuring that as a unit they were competent enough to conduct the missions and provide feedback.

"They did some additional training with each of the applications," said Hitchings. "They tested different types of headsets for voice communications and did a few rehearsals as far as learning how they would apply these new applications and these cell phones in a tactical environment."

The exercise simulated events that may occur in the theaters of operation. Soldiers were tasked to search for a mock opposing force that was responsible for the fabrication of improvised explosive devices and was hiding at a small ranch house not far from the unit's command post.

The scenario developed into a raid that called for the capture of the pursued mock insurgents. Soldiers faced insurgent activity in the mock ranch complex. The "insurgents" in the scenario were also equipped with Android-equipped phones which they actively used for communication and situational awareness purposes, said Hitchings.

"A lot of insurgencies do use what is already in place as the pre-established cell phone network in any country that we visit," he said.

Soldiers said they feel a desire to have a smart phone in hand that can aid them during combat operations.

Pvt. Harrison Henson of 1st CAB, a 2009 high school graduate, said Soldiers possess skills the Army can tap into to help develop its vision of integrating smart-phone technology in today's battlefield.

"I think we're just right off the bat - for the most part - more familiar with the concept and how to work the technology," said Henson. "What person my age doesn't text, call - whatever -- use all the smart phones. We're already pretty familiar with it. They just enhance it and create their apps to adapt to the Army's needs."

Unit officials said the training scenario lays a foundation in which Soldiers can begin to use the phones. The exercise allows Soldiers the opportunity to provide feedback to the analysts and the contractors on how to improve the phones to make them a better product for use in a tactical environment, said Hitchings.

"We're not looking for an end product today. We're not looking to completely rely upon these phones," said Hitchings "We just want to develop a scenario in which the Soldiers can try to use them, provide feedback and then refine it for future use and possible fielding."

© Copyright 2010 Army News Service. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Army Tests SmartPhones for Battlefield

December 31, 2010

El Paso Times

FORT BLISS -- Soldiers soon may be able to get cell-phone service on the battlefield.

Earlier this month, Soldiers from the Army Evaluation Task Force based at Fort Bliss took smartphones into the field and tested them in a variety of simulated missions at White Sands Missile Range. The exercise was the first time the task force conducted field evaluations for the phones, which included both iPhones and other models running on the Android operating system.

"Not every Soldier is given a radio, not every Soldier has a computer, not every Soldier has situational awareness or operational environment understanding, and they need that before they go in and engage either lethally or non-lethally," said Col. Marisa Tanner, a Future Force Integration Directorate division chief. "The enemy has some of this stuff already, and they're doing pretty well with it."

In addition to phones and their applications, a mobile cellular network was evaluated.

One of the primary advantages the phones and cellular network provide is situational awareness, officials said. Using software loaded on the phones, Soldiers were able to know the location of other team members and friendly forces. They also had access to a wealth of data, such as where improvised explosive devices had been found or detonated.

"I'd say we always made sure to have [the situational awareness] up so you could track where everybody was at," Spc. Michael Torrez said. "That's probably the biggest plus that's actually in development now. It will hopefully decrease [friendly fire] by a lot."

During the exercise, Soldiers conducted a variety of simulated missions, including setting up checkpoints for roads, conducting raids and providing security for a designated area.

Torrez said an application that gathered biometric information was useful when operating a checkpoint because it allowed Soldiers to take photos with their phones of people and send them back to the command post.

Not only did Soldiers on the ground benefit from enhanced situational awareness and quick access to critical information, but also observers found that Soldiers sent more information up the chain of command using the phones and a dedicated reporting application that gave unit leaders a clearer picture of what was happening.

"We saw a huge jump in the engagement Soldiers had in their reporting because they now had a very handy tool," Tanner said. "Right out of their hip pocket, they could quickly text, quickly phone or quickly get situational awareness on their immediate area where they never had that before."

The main weakness found during the testing was the network itself. Cellular service was provided for the U.S. forces by a mobile cellular antenna with two servers handling data traffic. In many cases, signal reception was limited to line of sight with the antenna. Data transmission also was sluggish, rendering the voice-over-Internet protocol application unusable.

"The network needs a lot of work," Capt. Andrew Hitchings said. "It's a very difficult task to create a mobile network that is secure and can support multiple users at once, so that's definitely still in the development phase."

The Army has embraced consumer cell phone technology and is poised to begin equipping Soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan with phones loaded with military applications, some of which the AETF is evaluating and helping to refine as early as mid-2011.

"It would not be unrealistic to see us start deploying phones in theater sometime in the spring and early summer of next year," said Mike McCarthy, director of operations for the Future Force Integration Directorate.

© Copyright 2010 El Paso Times. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Pentagon Looks to Militarize the Cloud

By Spencer Ackerman February 22, 2011 | 7:00 am



Store tactical military data on distributed servers, accessible through networked computers or mobile devices? Ask most officers about cloud computing and they’ll look at you patronizingly and say: Yes, Google Docs is nice, but it’s not secure enough for our secrets. (I write from experience.) But Darpa’s new budget shows that it wants the military all the way up into the cloud, and plans to set up mobile wireless hotspots so troops can reach the cloud from the most connectivity-forsaken places.

Appropriately, the goal of getting big data files to troops on the move in the middle of nowhere is, well, distributed between two new programs from the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers. Cloud to the Edge looks to essentially ape Google’s tools (other than search) to create a military cloud. And Mobile Hot Spots wants to carry connectivity anywhere troops need to share those big data files.

Wherever the military goes, it brings bandwidth with it. But it’s easier to set up networks around big bases than it is to have them follow troops in the field, especially if those troops have to send or receive large data packets, like video from drones overhead. Some companies are combating the problem by mounting cell towers under the bellies of drones, beaming connectivity below.

Mobile Hot Spots is Darpa’s way to even out what it calls the “100-1000x mismatch of data needs and available network capacity.” Starting out with a $10 million request to Congress, it looks to “create high-capacity and secure wireless technologies by exploiting advances in high-frequency and new security paradigms using RF, millimeter wave (MMW) and/or optical transmission.” If approved, it’ll spend its first year of life developing hardware and network architecture for the mission. And it’s considering going the under-drone route, proposing to “explore hardware, software, and waveform options to include unmanned aerial systems, soldiers, and mobile platforms connected into network topologies.”

Then there’s the place where the data carried over those networks will reside. Cloud to the Edge has no problem distributing that around through the ether. Unlike Mobile Hot Spots, it’s not even asking for money yet — perhaps because what it’s proposing is so ambitious it first needs to see about feasibility. Not only will it store data in “distributed servers and advanced networking and information database technologies,” it seeks to minimize human interaction in retrieving the data, “autonomously seek out relevant information and mov[ing] it to where it is needed in a timely and assured manner.”

The budget proposal doesn’t give any hint about how it’ll do that yet, proposing for now just to study “information flow patterns through the regional and localized network” and write software for “distributed data dissemination.”

Neither does Darpa explain how to keep its Cloud secure. Instead, it flips the security question back around, asserting that the “current centralized or regional storage and dissemination of information presents security, reliability, and capacity challenges in identifying and getting relevant information to users at the edge.”

At a time when Special Operations Forces are turning to Android-powered tablets to read their data in the middle of nowhere, Darpa looks to be focused on setting up the supporting infrastructure that lets U.S. troops access more information in more remote areas. It might not be Google Docs. But it’s something.

[I]Photo: U.S. Air Force

[buglerbilly]

Army Wants Low-Level Soldiers Linked Into Its Data Nets

By Spencer Ackerman February 22, 2011 | 3:57 pm



The Army’s on a crash course to get its futuristic information network available down to the lowest possible levels, says its deputy leader, a move that will provide soldiers with a “tremendous advantage that we’ve never had before.”

Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., Gen. Peter Chiarelli hailed the initial development of the Army’s Common Operating Environment as a potential gamechanger for the nation’s ground forces. Its proliferation will pave the way for soldiers to one day get equipped with smartphones, each linked in to access information from across a warzone or back home. It may take years to get networked phones to soldiers, but the Army’s trying to push its networks out to the “squad and team level.”

“It’s taken us way too long to get the network out to the soldiers,” Chiarelli said, lamenting the relative ease with which insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have been able to communicate and push out their message.

Enter the Common Operating Environment. Unveiled in October, it’s a series of standards by which software developers can design applications that tap into the Army’s data systems, known collectively as its Enterprise Network. Whether that developer is a soldier or works for a defense company, the Common Operating Environment is supposed to guide development of different communications tools, whether they’re radios or smartphones or applications for the phones.


That builds on last year’s big “Apps for the Army” contest — a proving ground to determine whether the Army community has enough developers who can design applications, says Lt. Col. Gregory Motes, head of a new group called the Mobile Applications Branch at Fort Gordon. Nearly 150 participated in the months-long challenge to build apps relevant to the Army; Motes and Capt. Chris Braunstein designed one that digitizes the Army’s physical-training standards.

As the Common Operating Environment matures, more sophisticated applications can be written and more equipment can be linked in to the Enterprise Network. Chiarelli said testing is still ongoing: in “June and July” he’ll observe a test of Rifleman Radio, a network-compliant radio system built by General Dynamics that allows squad and team leaders to get GPS coordinates on exactly where their soldiers are.

The Common Operating Environment is designed to be agnostic to any particular platform, instead elaborating the technical requirements that apps have to meet. Its goal is interoperability, in its founding document’s words, so data is “available anywhere on the network to authorized users from any suitable Army-managed device.”

“I’m not into any particular smartphone,” Chiarelli tells Danger Room,”I just happen to carry an iPhone for my own personal use…. We can already see the benefit for the squad and team leader.” That is, the rapid availability of data from across the Army, all over the world, into a soldier’s mobile device — from intelligence reports to drone video to local-language phrasebooks — if the bandwidth is available.

Those are questions that Motes’ team at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) are still studying. Is there enough bandwidth when soldiers are out in the middle of nowhere for accessing the networks? (Darpa’s trying to solve that problem.) What’s the best operating system for soldier smartphones and app generation? Should there be a particular phone issued, or is it better to issue requirements for operating across the Common Operating Environment and leave it for the market to sort out and update for soldiers to buy?

Troops at Fort Bliss have been experimenting with smartphones in a simulated war environment for the past year. Mike McCarthy, a civilian out at Bliss with the Brigade Modernization Command and one of the officials in charge of exploring smartphone use, tells Danger Room that a consensus exists within his TRADOC group that the time has come to equip soldiers with the phones, and expects the Army to make a top level decision on issuance this year. If the Army decides to go the smartphone route, it’ll still take years to get Common Operating Environment-compliant phones, hooked into to the Army Enterprise Network, out to soldiers.

But it’s the environment that standardizes app development and paves the way. Asked by Danger Room if troops could have their phones before the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, Chiarelli says, “I see that happening very, very soon.”

Photo: Flickr/U.S. Army

[buglerbilly]

Smartphones: The Next Security Gap

By Colin Clark Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 7:00 pm



The next major security gaps in the military’s computer networks are likely to be found in the smartphones on which soldiers, sailors and airmen increasingly rely in theater.

The Army may equip every soldier with a smartphone and it has experimented for more than a year with phones and how they might be used at the brigade and below level. The service is seeking NSA certification for iPhones and looking at other ways for them and Android phones to be made secure. But a security briefing today by top research experts at Symantec made clear that both for the military and the general public, security may become a major preoccupation of cell phone users.

Smartphones “are a really rich target,” Joe Pasqua, VP for research at Symantec, said in a briefing for reporters today. For example, Android phone applications receive no security screening before they are released, and iPhone apps receive a cursory scrub. Those apps could be loaded with malware “that can take down a cell tower,” he said. Currently, Android phone face four known malware threats, he said.

In addition to the possible threat from apps, cell phones can be formed into botnets, remotely controlled computer devices turned into a malicious network that hackers have used to great effect in attacking computer networks. Pasqua was careful to note that no one has yet created a botnet with cell phones, but he says it can be done.

The military has ways to make phones more secure, including encryption. Turning off the voice portion of the phone and only allowing it to use the data network would help, Pasqua said. That way all data transmissions can be encrypted, including voice communications using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Also, locking the phone and only allowing the use of approved apps would help, the Symantec security expert said. The same thing is often done with company-issued laptops.

The military has struggled for the last few years to plug the many online and physical holes in its networks. Buzz readers will remember the now famous episode of the thumb drives strewn in the Pentagon parking lot which, when attached to a computer, introduced pernicious software that appeared to be a cross between a worm and a virus.

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/02/23/smartphones-the-next-security-gap/#ixzz1EptgMSwo

[buglerbilly]

Mobile Tech Activists Wary of State Department Cash

By Spencer Ackerman February 23, 2011 | 7:00 am



If technology advisers to online activists have their way, the mobile phones in the pockets of the democracy protesters reshaping the Middle East will have circumvention and anonymity tools built in to them, and they’ll be able to go blank if pro-regime goons confiscate them. The State Department wants to fund the development of precisely such activist tools. Only the activists aren’t exactly jumping to take the government’s cash.

In a speech last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she’d make available $25 million for a “venture capital approach” to underwriting new tools to keep the Internet open in repressive nations. She singled out mobile technologies as increasingly important. But some observers and developers, while lauding the move, aren’t so sure the rigid bureaucracy of the State Department can accommodate the approach.

Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project, which designs Android-based tools for mobile anonymity, says he’s not going to apply for any of State’s money. “Accounting complexity of process means we’d have to spend 25 percent of it” on an accountant, he says, while praising the idea in theory.

Same goes for Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, which advises activists and non-governmental organizations on how to minimize security risks on their mobile devices. Verclas likes where State is coming from, as she thinks it’ll expand the pool of government funding recipients beyond the typical Beltway aid groups who “know how to navigate the system.” But she’s not seeking the aid herself until she has a “really great project” ready to pitch.

Which might be surprising, because both of them have lots of ideas for how activists need to protect themselves when using their mobile devices. The basic problem is that mobiles are “highly traceable, trackable and centralized,” as Verclas puts it, with carriers possessing a lot of information on their users and without many circumvention tools developed for mobile phones. One of Freitas’ efforts is Orbot, a proxy tool for Android phones that uses Tor to block mobile carriers from accessing their data usage.

And the phones are potential security risks even when they’re switched off. Verclas sees a big need for a remotely activated “kill switch” that can cleanse a phone of its stored contacts or its recent Twitter or SMS activity when an activist gets arrested, so as not to alert authorities to the names of other dissidents. Activists tell her they’d like to have some kind of phone wiping occur “with a simple command while an arrest is taking place, or for an ally to do that remotely via SMS or something.”

Freitas worries about the proliferation of camera phones — a somewhat counterintuitive concern, given the power of viral videos to inspire a protest movement or galvanize outside support. But impromptu video can reveal sensitive information like people’s faces. He sees a need to “tap on these faces and blur them out” before an innocent upload accidentally gives away someone’s identity and puts them in the crosshairs of a regime.

These are the kinds of ideas that the State Department says it wants to fund. But it’s just not clear how nimble the department can really be in dishing out money responsibly — a good-government encumbrance, remember — or even what it really means by a “venture capital approach,” says Sheldon Himmelfarb, a technology expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

When venture capital firms find a promising technology, they’re “able to turn lots of focus, attention, people, brainpower and resources to taking that to market, and the State Department doesn’t work that way,” Himmelfarb says. “It’s really interesting to hear them talk about a venture capital-style approach, but try to unpack that. Apparently, they’re going to give money to lots of organizations in the hope of bringing about breakthrough technologies, but how are they going to bring them to market?”

Indeed, just last week, Sen. Richard Lugar identified at least $8 million in money the department hadn’t spent that Congress provided to help Chinese Internet users evade restrictions.

That’s not to say State’s approach doesn’t have its virtues. “Venture capital firms own half your company, while [here] the U.S. government owns nothing,” Freitas says, “so there is that benefit if you figure out how to make it work.”

And Himmelfarb notes that the $25 million pot of cash is a “significant amount of money for this effort.” According to his research, the Tor Project’s 2009 budget was $1.25 million, so it’s not as if these tools are particularly expensive to develop. Rather, he says, “we have to make sure the approach is one we’re in position to take advantage of.” After the success of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, there’s not going to be any shortage of demand for tools that can keep activists off the radar of the tyrants they’re trying to overthrow.

Photo: Flickr/AlJazeeraEnglish

[buglerbilly]

Will Army Smartphones Kill Nett Warrior?

by christian on February 24, 2011



Kit Up! participated in a round table interview this morning with Lt. Gen. Mike Vane, the head of the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center. What he basically does is come up with technologies that will help the Soldier of 2020.

Interestingly, the interview revolved mostly around the Army’s move to integrate smartphones into the force. Sure there’s all kinds of network issues (Vane said most conflicts of the future will be in areas where GSM cell coverage is available, but admitted that the service is testing options for a portable network that could make up for a lack of one, or as in Afghanistan’s case after about 1900 each day, denial of one); security issues; hardware issues; Army App Store issues, etc.

Still, there’s little doubt the Army is moving more solidly toward either giving each Soldier a smartphone or letting him use his own to do Army things. Thing is — as many of you have mentioned here — why pay millions for Nett Warrior when much of what Nett Warrior can do can be done on a smartphone?

Vane admitted the Army smartphone could be a Nett Warrior killer.

Connecting Soldiers to the digital applications of smartphones challenges a lot of traditional radio programs (including WIN-T, Nett Warrior and the rifleman’s radio). … Smartphones could be the answer to the Nett Warrior requirement. Smartphones could be the answer to the rifleman’s radio requirement.

Look, everyone understands — including the Army — the security implications and network pitfalls of smartphones and their application in a military environment. But Vane was realistic in his assessments of how difficult these challenges are and made clear the Army is working on ways to confront them.

He did mention that a “portable network” solution was being experimented with in Afghanistan and Fort Bliss. Anyone have any gouge on that?

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz1EvuRAH6V

[buglerbilly]

Death by BlackBerry crisis averted

Asher Moses

March 1, 2011 - 2:02PM


BlackBerry devices are a godsend to politicians but some worry it could cause car accidents. Photo: Reuters

With threats of cyber war on the horizon, one would think the Department of Defence has more pressing security concerns than whether politicians keep the flashing blue light on the top of their BlackBerry handsets on or off.

But the secretive Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) was so concerned that it instituted a recommendation requiring politicians to enable the flashing light on their taxpayer-funded mobiles.

It has now backflipped on the rule after senators rebelled, arguing it could cause serious accidents.

The seemingly innocuous BlackBerry light, which flashes blue when paired with a Bluetooth device such as a car hands-free kit, caused such consternation that Senator Stephen Parry used a Senate estimates hearing to rail against the Defence order to leave the light on and warned it was "exceptionally dangerous at night".

"The strobe effect of this light impairs driving, especially out of city environs. I do a number of kilometres after hours in the dark and it has a terrible effect," Senator Parry said.

"It impairs driving, especially now - and I know Senator [Scott] Ryan has had an experience - when the phones are mounted higher up on cradles in motor vehicles."

Senator Parry urged David Kenny, deputy secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services, to look at repealing the rule "as a matter of urgency, because we do not want to come back to the next estimates and find that a senator or member has had an accident because of a stupid little requirement".

Another senator, who did not wish to be named, confirmed that several colleagues had expressed concern about the rule and their inability to switch the light off. Normal users can turn it off in the settings menu but not politicians, whose devices are tightly controlled.

Defence acted quickly, telling this website yesterday that "this recommendation [to leave the light on] has now been withdrawn".

It would not say why this rule was in place to begin with other than that "the light can be used to make users aware that their Bluetooth connection is active".

The former team leader of investigations at the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, Nigel Phair, who is now working as a private consultant, said "there is good reason to have this light on so the owner is aware their device is 'discoverable'". He referred to "Bluetooth sniffing" devices that seek out phones with vulnerabilities.

"But this counts for nothing if the handset user [the senator/s] have never been given any advice on device security, including the dangers of Bluetooth, wireless, email scams, etc," Mr Phair said.

However, security consultant Chris Gatford, of Hacklabs, said the rule was most likely a hangover from when Bluetooth-based attacks were a major threat to mobile devices. Defence's rule meant politicians would know when their Bluetooth was switched on and sowhen they may be vulnerable to attack.

"Bluetooth attacks have historically been used for initiating calls, listening to conversations and stealing data from phones," Mr Gatford said.

But while the rule may have been relevant for high profile executives and politicians four or five years ago, Mr Gatford said Bluetooth had since been tightened up and he would be surprised if there were any phones still around that were vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

During a visit to China in 2008, former prime minister Kevin Rudd and his staff were reportedly subjected to several hack attempts on their mobiles and laptop computers.

Politicians and prominent business people, including mining industry executives, now undertake immense security measures when travelling overseas, such as fitting out their devices with special security devices designed to encrypt data and safeguard them against intrusions.

[buglerbilly]

The Best Tactical iPhone Case

by christian on March 1, 2011



Kit Up! received a brand new (and much saught after) piece of gear that has made a huge difference in our staff’s (my) life.

It may be small, it may be plastic, it may be black. But it does have a minuscule label that says huge things.

My iPhone 4 is one of the best pieces of gear ever invented my man. Its destruction would throw me into terrible depression and borderline psychosis. How to best protect it?

Why Magpul, of course.

Who better than the masters of AR accessories to construct the worlds greatest iPhone 4 protector. Strange, I know, but I must say, the Magpul Executive Field Case for the iPhone 4 is by far the best case I’ve ever had for either my iPhone 3 or 4. It’s low enough profile not to be obnoxious (Otter Box) but still has enough bulk to take most impacts.

It grips well, keeps the screen usable and, most important, doesn’t inhibit after-market chargers and cables (a major gripe with early non-Apple iPhone accessories).

And there’s that subtle element of Tacti-Cool in the whole thing. Only your bros who know the deal will know it. But I can see sniper A pulling out his iPhone to deploy the Knights Armament range app or door kicker B launching his shot timer app at the range and sprinkling in that extra ounce of image sporting a Magpul iPhone accessory that can result in a pound of performance.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz1FOT3Kj4N

[buglerbilly]

Smartphones Combine with Tactical Radios to Boost Ground Troops

(Source: U.S Army; issued March 9, 2011)

FORT BRAGG, N.C. --- A cutting-edge combination of smartphones plugged into tactical radios empowered small Army units during a recent field exercise observed by Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff.

Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division communicated via voice, data and images as they swarmed a mock village to capture a high-value target. Information traveled rapidly up and down the chain of command - and horizontally between team and squad leaders.

"What I watched with interest today was the ability to take pictures of high-value targets, immediately provide them to the company or to the battalion command post," Chiarelli said afterward. "I saw the ability when a Soldier is wounded to take a picture of the wound and to pass that to the doctors, so that medics can make sure that they are treating the Soldier in the appropriate way, given the wound that he has received. So there are many, many applications of this."

In an expeditionary force like the 82nd Airborne Division, which prepares for full-spectrum operations around the globe, Soldiers need a communications solution they can carry with them on the fly.

"Where we go, there's not going to be a vehicle for us," said Maj. Nicole Vinson, communications officer for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, who initially identified the gaps the new equipment aims to solve.

"What we were really focusing on was just the voice capability down to the team level, but in addition to that they took it to the next level (with) the data capability," Vinson said. "For the company and below, it's very effective."

It was Vinson's request that led officials from the Joint Program Executive Office for the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JPEO JTRS, and Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications - Tactical, known as PEO C3T, to join forces and develop a solution. For the exercise, JTRS HMS Rifleman and Manpack radios were married with PEO C3T prototype handhelds, demonstrating interoperability between programs of record in the "transport layer" and the "application layer."

The ruggedized, Android-based smartphones ran two apps: Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, and Tactical Ground Reporting, known as TIGR Mobile. JBC-P is the follow-on program for Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below, or FBCB2.

JBC-P displayed blue icons indicating the real-time GPS locations of friendly forces across a map of the battlefield, where users could also plot enemies or landscape hazards to alert their teammates. TIGR enabled users to exchange photos, and to enter and retrieve historical information relevant to the operation.

When the paratroopers needed to change direction halfway through their simulated mission, they did so quickly and seamlessly. Without the radios and handhelds, they would have relied on much more primitive methods.

"It would just be shouting through the woods. That's all it would be," said Sgt. Kyle Hayden, one of the squad leaders. "It makes it much smoother and faster. You can be a little sneakier, too, because now I'm not yelling (instructions)."

Spc. Randy Fite, who served in Iraq in 2008-09, said the system "would have been great to have" for urban combat.

"We tend to get split up, separated," Fite said. With the handhelds tracking blue forces, "I don't have to radio back to the truck to see where another squad is at and where they're moving to. I can just pull out my phone and look at it."

"Usually I'm running to my guys, running back to the squad leader, running back to my guys, relaying information," he added. "This way, it's just right there on me and I can just go to town."

Soldiers said they could use the gear with little training.

"We got a five- or ten-minute class," said Spc. Hao Bui. "If you know how to use a phone, it's pretty simple."

At the dismounted Soldier level, the information was conveyed over the secure terrestrial network provided by HMS Manpack and Rifleman Radios. The radios were integrated with Warfighter Information Network - Tactical, or WIN-T Increment One to carry the information between the ground troops and the battalion tactical operations center.

A WIN-T satellite terminal known as SNAP (Secure Internet Protocol Router/Non-secure Internet Protocol Router, or SIPR/NIPR, Access Point) extended the network's range beyond line of sight and back up to higher headquarters.

"It's across all of the echelons, from the Soldier to the (Tactical Operations Center)," said Col. Michael Williamson, the Army's deputy program executive officer for Integration Networks. He praised the cooperation across different organizations and integration of system components to "optimize" performance.

"Instead of developing a bunch of individual systems that work their best, what we're really trying to do is figure out how do we tie these all together so they provide the best capabilities for the Soldier," Williamson said. "What I think you saw here is where these PEOs got together and actually made that happen. Our challenge coming out of this is, now that they've seen it, held it, touched it, used it - now we have a responsibility to put it in their hands."

Feedback from the 82nd Airborne Division will be used to reduce risk for upcoming tests of the equipment, including the Integrated Network Baseline Exercise, or INBE, in June and the Brigade Combat Team Integration Exercise in October, program officials said.

"That's what you value most when you give (new equipment) to an operational unit that's going through the training that they would normally do," said Lt. Col. Mark Daniels, product manager for JBC-P. "You get some very frank feedback. We value it and we're going to benefit from it."

In the case of JBC-P handhelds, PEO C3T will continue to partner with providers of different transport methods, including Netted Iridium and several radio models selected by the Marine Corps, Daniels said. For each instance, the mobile applications will be interoperable with existing battle command systems because they are built from a government-owned framework known as the Battle Command Product Line Mobile.

"It's important to add a disciplined approach to the development of the software - a common framework that's going to put everybody on the same sheet of music in terms of what messages we're sending, how we utilize the computing resources that are on that smartphone, and the security that's involved in protecting this data," Daniels said.

While challenges remain, the Fort Bragg exercise was a step toward leveraging smartphones for tactical use, said Col. Buddy Carman, Training and Doctrine Command Capability Manager for Brigade Combat Team Mission Command.

"We're trying to find a way that we can stay in stride with commercial technology as much as possible, because it's changed the way people look at the Internet (and) how they interface with a computer," Carman said. For example, units could potentially receive new, upgraded devices every two years as part of the Army's capability set equipping process, he said.

What is clear is that providing communications capabilities to dismounted Soldiers increases their survivability, lethality and effectiveness, said Col. John Zavarelli, program manager for HMS (Handheld, Manpack and Small-Form-Fit).

"It's the guys that don't get information - giving them the power of sharing information," Zavarelli said. "We're trying to give capability to the Soldier so that they can be dominant. We want to make our contribution to the dominant squad."

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

U.S. Army to Test, Evaluate SoldierEyes, FASTCOM Systems

Overwatch Delivers Smartphone-Enabled Battlefield Solutions

15:44 GMT, March 30, 2011 AUSTIN, Texas | Overwatch, an operating unit of Textron Systems, a Textron Inc. company, announced today that its SoldierEyes smartphone-enabled analysis and battle tracking system will be a part of various upcoming U.S. Army field tests of smartphones, network equipment and applications. These tests are in support of the Army's Brigade Modernization initiatives, following Overwatch's more than eighteen months of support of the U.S. Army's 2nd Brigade, 1st Armor Division of the Brigade Modernization Command (BMC). A goal of the BCM is to evolve the SoldierEyes system to address the situational awareness needs of soldiers in full-spectrum operations.

"SoldierEyes is an outstanding example of the next generation of tools available to the individual warfighter," said Mike McCarthy, director of Operations, Brigade Modernization Command, TRADOC, U.S. Army. "The SoldierEyes technology has produced very relevant and open, smartphone-enabled services and applications that may be easily tailored to meet the needs of the Army."

SoldierEyes is fully operable within government fielded communications environments such as 3G/4G cellular and WiFi. In remote areas of the globe, where reliable connections are non-existent, SoldierEyes devices and systems are able to connect via the new FASTCOM technology co-developed by Overwatch and Textron Systems' AAI Unmanned Aircraft Systems division in partnership with ViaSat Inc. FASTCOM is a mobile, secure battlefield cellular network that can be hosted on manned and unmanned aircraft, aerostats, masts or ground vehicles. Leveraging FASTCOM, SoldierEyes users are enabled with secure, mobile network connectivity even in the most austere tactical environments.

"The next generation of tools that SoldierEyes provides will serve to heighten warfighters' ability to gain and maintain situational awareness throughout all phases of a combat mission. It is a system that tracks across all six warfighting functions: movement and maneuver, fires, intelligence, sustainment, command and control, and protection," added Col. Marisa Tanner, division chief, Future Force Integration Directorate, TRADOC, U.S. Army.

The benefits of SoldierEyes are two-fold. First, the system provides soldiers with fused information that is populated to form a critical and more relevant common operation picture. This provides the soldier at the tactical edge greatly enhanced situational awareness and situational understanding whenever needed and wherever they are located. Through the integration of mobile technology and application services, SoldierEyes delivers real-time mission centric situational awareness to the warfighter. Viewing each warfighter as a sensor, SoldierEyes provides handheld capabilities for collecting, reporting and communicating mission critical geo-referenced information (video, reports, photos and more) between the soldier and existing command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems.

Secondly, the SoldierEyes system provides an open architecture environment that may be rapidly and continuously updated and improved through third party application development and deployment. The advantage of this system is that it will enable the Army to maximize the reuse of basic services and programs of record while leveraging the power of a large, certified third party development community to rapidly and efficiently address evolving mission needs. This approach provides existing government systems the benefit of fielding new operational applications, access to richer information, and a pathway to a relevant and timely common operating picture from the soldier to every echelon above.

SoldierEyes uses cloud architecture which is designed to operate on existing Government servers and to support any Internet Protocol (IP) enabled client, such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers. This design flexibility allows SoldierEyes to provide utility irrespective of the communications architecture, security protocols, client platforms, as well as various tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) employed by the U.S. Army.

"The SoldierEyes Application Cloud manages the movement of information between the soldier, analysis applications and large Army databases. It fully supports a collaborative approach with its open Application Protocol Interface, or API, and available services, such as map servers, standard symbology database and more," said Overwatch Senior Program Manager Evan Corwin. "To demonstrate the open architecture, the SoldierEyes API has been shared with various third party developers who have easily merged new and existing data sources, sensors, applications, services and cell phone applications with the system. This unique approach highlights the flexibility and growth potential of the system among third party developers."

Later this year Overwatch will deploy the SoldierEyes system as a member of the FASTCOM team and participant in Empire Challenge 2011, as well as participate in large scale exercises with the U.S. Army's full-up Armor Brigade at the White Sands Missile Range. Numerous lab and field capability demonstrations and evaluations of the system are also planned throughout the year.

[buglerbilly]

Sectra Panthon approved by Dutch security authority on security level Restricted

Sectra Panthon approved by Dutch security authority on security level Restricted

Linköping, April 11, 2011

[ASDWire]-- Sectra Panthon, Sectra’s new communication solution for customers that wish to utilize a smartphone to make secure telephone calls, has been approved by the Dutch security authorities on security level (*1) Restricted. Government agencies that subject products to security requirements can thus allow officials who handle sensitive information to use Sectra Panthon to protect their phone calls from eavesdropping.

The development of cellular phones of increasing similarity to computers means requirements for new types of security solutions. For this reason, Sectra has developed Panthon, a voice encryption solution that enables civil servants and decision makers who are subject to stringent security requirements to make telephone calls with a smartphone without the risk of information leaks. Making a secure call with Sectra Panthon, which also supports mobile IP telephony, is as simple as making a normal telephone call.

“The security authority’s approval of the Sectra Panthon for secure voice traffic constitutes a crucial first step for customers that wish to communicate securely with a smartphone,” says Michael Bertilsson, President of Sectra Communications.

“Our existing customers, who currently use products for security level Secret, regard Panthon as an excellent complement for employees that handle information classified on security level Restricted,” continues Michael Bertilsson.

Sectra’s close collaboration with customers and national security authorities has led to the company’s products for secure telephony currently being utilized by government authorities and defense customers in 17 European countries, within EU and NATO.

[buglerbilly]

Soldiers’ Wearable Computers May Get an iPhone Brain

By Spencer Ackerman April 14, 2011 | 2:35 pm



Smartphones are all the rage in Army circles, as top generals talk up the prospect that only a few technical fixes stand in the way of a soldier having an iPhone or an Android phone as part of his basic kit. But don’t expect the Army to scrap the suite of wearable computers, cameras, radios, GPS and digitized maps it’s spent years developing just because a phone you can buy at Best Buy makes its functions redundant.

Like a superhero designed by Rob Liefeld, that system, called Nett Warrior, snakes cables around a soldier’s body armor to network him with his unit or headquarters through an array of computers and peripherals. It adds between 12 to 15 pounds to his load. But the biggest challenge to Nett Warrior comes from the phones soldiers carry in their pockets — when they’re in civilian gear, that is.

“Every kid’s going down to whatever local store they want and they’re buying some smart device and saying, ‘Well, this is modern, and it lets me know where I am, where my friends are … it gives me all that capability, how come I can’t get that?’” acknowledges Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, the officer in charge of outfitting soldiers with all their standard gear, who oversees Nett Warrior. “We’re trying to figure out: How do we move Nett Warrior from its current configuration?”

Fuller’s shop, PEO Soldier, will send Nett Warrior — the son of an earlier, failed program called Land Warrior – into “full-rate production” around June. But to some in the Army, it already smacks of outdated technology. An Apps for the Army contest last year proved there are amateur developers in the service, ready to design Army-relevant functions for the Apple Store or the Android Market.

Accordingly, defense companies are creating apps of their own for tracking or mapping. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff and an iPhone enthusiast, told Danger Room in February, “we can already see the benefit for the squad and team leader” of smartphones.

A program within the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications, is running parallel to Nett Warrior in thinking through how iPhones and Droids can be most useful to the Army. The officer overseeing it, Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, told Military.com’s Christian Lowe point blank that “smartphones could be the answer to the Nett Warrior requirement.”

During a roundtable on Thursday with reporters at his Pentagon office, Fuller is sympathetic to a lot of that. Yes, smartphones are cool; yes, they’re a lot lighter than Nett Warrior; and no, they don’t have a ton of cables sticking out to entangle a soldier on dismounted patrol.

His solution: Marry the two together. Maybe take out the computer that serves as Nett Warrior’s brain “and give you a smart device” instead, he says when Danger Room asks him about smartphones and Nett Warrior’s future.

“We need a program to work from,” Fuller says, “and we’re saying Nett Warrior is that program. So get it through the milestone, and then you can make all the adjustments.”

The Army still has a way to go with smartphones, as TRADOC officers involved in the smartphone push have acknowledged to Danger Room. It has not decided whether it prefers the iPhone, Android phones or Windows phones. (The open architecture of the Droids might have an edge, though.)

It’s not sure how configure them for a low-bandwidth environment like, say, Afghanistan. And it has not yet figured out how to secure them, so an Android phone doesn’t “tell Google where we are all the time, because we’re tied to GoogleMaps,” as Fuller puts it. Darpa, it’s worth noting, is working on that last part.

Another unresolved question: Should the Army actually issue phones to soldiers, or give them requirements and an allowance, so they can buy their own phones and upgrade as necessary?

Until the Army resolves all that, it’s going to be some time before smartphones are as much a part of the Army as the M4 rifle. The drawback is that it might spend millions on Nett Warrior as a stopgap measure that practically has to be replaced as soon as it’s complete.

Fuller, who’s leaving PEO soldier for a tour in Afghanistan, argues that the best way to getting smartphones into soldiers’ pockets is to incorporate them into Nett Warrior. But he’s up front about the frustrations of the program. “I tell people, we are at the one-yard line, in our red zone,” he says. “And everyone’s looking at the cheerleaders and going, ‘Hey, I like what they got over on the sidelines.’”

Photo: Spencer Ackerman

[buglerbilly]

Can the Army’s smartphone dreams endure?

By Philip Ewing Friday, April 15th, 2011 3:25 pm



The Army’s new chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, gave every indication this week that he’s on board with the service’s plans to possibly equip every soldier with a smartphone, or at very least continue looking into how the service can use off-the-shelf gear to help with networking the force. More basically, Dempsey said, he gets it: These young people today are all about their mobile devices. “Dempsey knows, based on his own children’s lives, that the new generation wants to sit in the middle of an open field with a smartphone, be by themselves, but be connected to the world,” as this Army story put it.

The Army has been struggling for years to get better at networking its soldiers, vehicles and commanders, and the brass is also interested in using mobile devices to help with navigation, sending back intel reports, and training in the field. As you read here on Buzz back in December, it’s easy to picture the telecom industry’s reaction to all this: Imagine Daffy Duck’s eyes turning into dollar signs and bulging out of his head, along with a big cash register sound effect. A smartphone for every soldier — or even just for units that are training or deploying — could mean billions of dollars in iPhones or Android devices, and billions more dollars in network usage. And it could bring new companies, including Verizon, Apple or HTC, say, into business as direct-line defense contractors.

That’s all several steps down the road. First the Army has to figure out how it’ll use smartphones in its network strategy and then determine which ones it could buy — and as all that is taking place, service officials will be going to Congress to justify their plans to spend all this money. The telecom industry has lots of friends on the Hill, but it’s also easy to imagine that lawmakers could balk at major new costs that go on forever, especially if soldiers are permitted to use the phones for personal use as well as when they’re on duty.

And you know how the services are: If every soldier has a sleek new iPhone, pretty soon the Air Force might go to Congress and say, “Y’know senator, I really think equipping every airman with a mobile device will facilitate key communications capabilities across the broad spectrum of operations, and that is absolutely critical to our warfighters.”

So in today’s political environment, when President Obama has said he wants DoD to cut $400 billion over the next ten years, can the Army’s smartphone plans survive?

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/04/15/can-the-armys-smartphone-dreams-endure/#ixzz1Jdl6vxK8

[buglerbilly]

Army Develops Smartphone Framework, Applications for the Front Lines

(Source: U.S Army; issued April 18, 2011)

FORT BRAGG, N.C. --- Leading his team of paratroopers en route to capturing a high-value target, Spc. Hao Bui encountered obstacles - enemies, streets, roadside bombs.

He pulled a smartphone from his uniform and entered the information into an app, immediately transmitting warning graphics to his buddies and higher headquarters.

"If we see an enemy up front, we could put it in the GPS system," said Bui, a member of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division. "Even though they (fellow Soldiers) can't see it, you can mark it for them."

The device, known as a Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, is the first developed under an Army effort to devise an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. The government-owned framework, known as Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, or CE, ensures that regardless of who develops them, applications will be secure and interoperable with existing mission command systems so information flows seamlessly across all echelons of the force.

This framework, originally prototyped by MITRE, is now being developed at the Software Engineering Directorate in Huntsville, Ala., with the JBC-P family of systems and is aligned with the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Common Operating Environment, or COE strategy.

"Using the Mobile /Handheld CE Product Developers Kit, we're going to allow the third-party developers to actually develop capabilities that aren't stovepiped," said Lt. Col. Mark Daniels, product manager for JBC-P. JBC-P, which will be fielded to both the Army and the Marine Corps beginning in fiscal year 2013, is the follow-on program of record for Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below/Blue Force Tracking, or FBCB2/BFT.

"That's going to allow us to be interoperable across the entire family of systems of JBC-P, which would include the platforms, the aviation, the logistics community, the tanks, the Bradleys, the handhelds," Daniels said.

The Mobile /Handheld CE development kit will be released to industry in July, he said. In the interim the Army is refining the Mission Command Apps, which will include mapping, blue force tracking, Tactical Ground Reporting, or TIGR tactical graphics and critical messaging (such as SPOT reports, Medevac and Mayday) between all mission command systems. The baseline suite of applications will also include supporting apps like an address book and Open Office for document viewing.

"It's like when you get an iPhone and you have the Apple-made apps: the contacts, the e-mail," said J. Tyler Barton, an engineer with one of the Army organizations designing apps, the Research, Development and Engineering Command's communications-electronics center Command and Control Directorate. "Then other applications are free to use those apps, or to go above and beyond that."

Allowing industry to freely develop apps within a government-led software environment means the Army can leverage fresh ideas and technology while still maintaining "disciplined" governance, Daniels said.

"All of the research dollars are out there in the commercial market. All of the best minds are at work in these companies to produce these smartphones and this software," Daniels said. "We don't want to rehash that, we want to leverage it. We want to take advantage of it and get it out to the Soldier in a structured fashion, so it can be implemented in a way that is secure and useful at the same time."

For the JBC-P Handheld smartphones themselves, the Army is currently evaluating prototypes to determine whether to use a government-off-the-shelf model or a commercial-off-the-shelf model in a ruggedized tactical sleeve or case. However, the software is being designed so it can run on a variety of different Android platforms.

"We're trying to set this program up so that it can rapidly adapt and maintain relevance to the current warfighting generation," Daniels said.

That flexibility also extends to communications. The JBC-P Handhelds will work over different types of radio networks, including the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JTRS Soldier Radio Waveform, Netted Iridium, and Marine Corps radios such as the PRC 117G and PRC 152A. Even when connected to a radio, the lightweight system weighs approximately two pounds.

Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 1St Armored Division will try out the handhelds and JBC-P software during the Network Integration Rehearsal at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in October. The Network Integration Rehearsal is part of a series of four events leading to executing a fully integrated Brigade Combat Team Network Evaluation at the end of 2012.

For dismounted Soldiers like Bui, the software approach consistent with modern day commercial technology will also provide a consistent, easy-to-use experience. They will be able to choose different Mission Command applications for their specific mission needs without intensive training.

"I was just shown a quick, little, five-minute brief on it - that's all it took and we were ready to use them," said Spc. Randy Fite, who like Bui experimented with the JBC-P Handheld prototype during a recent training exercise at Fort Bragg, N.C. He said the app's blue icons indicating the GPS locations of his fellow Soldiers helped them navigate and coordinate actions during the capture.

"We can know where each unit is in our platoon, and how they're moving," Fite said. "It makes the job a lot easier."

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Army Picks Android to Power Its First Smartphone

By Spencer Ackerman April 21, 2011 | 7:00 am



The Army wants every soldier to carry a smartphone to keep them networked. It doesn’t yet have a program to do that, having spent the last year working through the implications of what that might mean — like, for instance, what operating system would power it. An initial answer: Google’s Android.

A prototype device running Android called the Joint Battle Command-Platform, developed by tech nonprofit MITRE, is undergoing tests. The development kit behind it, called the Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, will be released to app creators in July, the Army says.

But until then, the envisioned apps for the Joint Battle Command-Platform will run a gambit of Army tasks. There’ll be a mapping function, like the kinds the defense industry is developing for soldier smartphones and tablets. A Blue Force Tracker program, to keep tabs on where friendly forces are. “Critical messaging” to exchange crucial data like medevac requests, and on the ground reporting.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about the Army’s smartphone effort, like how to keep data secure and how to use them effectively in combat environments with low connectivity. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the iPhone lover who moonlights as the Army’s vice chief of staff, has boasted that the devices being tested can withstand the physical wear-and-tear of soldiering, but it remains to be seen just how rugged the smartphone is.

Even when connected to a radio, the Army says its Joint Battle Command-Platform weighs about two pounds. That’s way lighter than the Nett Warrior suite of sensors, computers, radios and mapping functions — the Army’s program of record for doing much of what a smartphone already does.

But that’s not to say the current phone prototype will be what the Army ends up issuing soldiers. And it’s also not to say that whatever makes it through testing will definitely rely on Android as its operating system. That’s all a ways away. But the point of building the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment is to have a common framework for designing apps that can run on any manner of devices — and that’s an early indication that the Army’s leaning toward Android devices, especially in this age of budget efficiencies, rather than iOS, which is tied to one specific (i)Phone. Score one for open architecture.

Photo: U.S. Army

[buglerbilly]

First Look: Inside the Army’s App Store for War

By Spencer Ackerman April 27, 2011 | 7:00 am



If all of the bureaucratic and security hurdles can be overcome, the Army will soon launch its version of an app store, where soldiers can download Army-relevant software to their work computers and — with a little luck — mobile phones. This is what its homepage will look like.

Called Army Marketplace, it’ll start off featuring the few dozen applications that soldiers created last year during the Apps for the Army contest. Those early efforts ran the gamut from workout guides to digitized manuals for standard Army tasks. So far, there are 17 apps for Android phones and another 16 for iPhones.

But the Army Marketplace will do more than sell existing apps. It’ll help generate ideas for new ones, says Lt. Col. Gregory Motes, chief of the Army’s new Mobile Applications Branch. Imagine that a soldier wants an app instructing how to call for artillery fire, and the app doesn’t exist yet. The soldier would post a description of what she needs on a Marketplace forum, attracting discussion from fellow soldiers and potential designers.

If other troops can’t home-brew a solution, the Army would open a bidding or contracting process from would-be vendors who’ve expressed interest on the thread. Ideally, the app would be available on Marketplace not long thereafter, with a nominal purchase price, a la the App Store or Android Market.

“It’d use an agile software-development process, to close with the vendor and try to quickly turn these apps around,” Motes tells Danger Room. “The current process of software creation [in the Army] is a very long and arduous process. That’s how we do things. But app development needs to be done quickly.”

You’ll have to be a member of the Department of Defense community to see the store and access its wares. It’ll be hosted on a secure DOD server and require a username and password from intranets like Army Knowledge Online. Eventually, Marketplace will become an app of its own, loadable onto the forthcoming Army-issued smartphone so users aren’t tied to a website. Marketplace isn’t meant for the general public — which creates problems for how it interacts with smartphones. (More on that in a moment.)



Army Marketplace’s designers are also working on personalized user pages to facilitate the app exchange. On them, customers announce their needed apps, propose new ones, and exchange criticism. On the right hand side of that inside page are auto-generated lists of “Top Ideas” and “Top Projects” that others have generated. (That’s a screenshot of a personalized page, above.)

Army brass like Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff often seen thumbing like mad on his iPhone 4, view apps as a game-changing approach to pushing information down to the lowest ranks and exponentially increasing the Army’s ability to learn and adapt. So the service has set up new shops — like Motes’ parent organization, called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications — inside the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, to help generate an ecosystem of military-friendly applications.

Eventually, the Army will host apps that track the location of friendly forces or map out wartime terrain or translate foreign languages. Software writers and defense companies have already created all of those. On top of that, the Army will launch its second Apps for the Army contest later this year as a way to generate both more apps and a constituency for them inside the service.

There’s just one small problem. The government hasn’t certified any single mobile device as secure enough to receive data from its networks. If all goes according to plan, the Army will unveil Marketplace in August, at the LandWarNet convention. That’ll mean whatever applications are currently available could be easily sent to a soldier’s work computer — which doesn’t really help, given the whole idea is to allow mobile access to the corpus of Army information.

The Army’s now testing Google’s Android OS to power its first smartphone prototype. That’s made by MITRE, the federally funded defense consultancy. Other defense companies use Android’s open architecture as the backbone of their own mobile devices that they’d like to sell the Army, such as Raytheon’s RATS and General Dynamics’ GD300. But the Army isn’t near close to settling on an operating system or a mobile device for its ultimate goal of requiring soldiers to carry a smartphone just as they carry a rifle.

And no Android phone has so much as started going through the process of having the National Institute of Standards and Technology certify it as secure-enough to host government data. The iPhone has started the process, Motes says, but is still months away from finishing it.

That’s why government BlackBerries can process someone’s official mail and do practically nothing else a civilian smartphone does. As of now, “we don’t have a solution for authenticating applications or secure websites,” Motes says.

How long until a phone receives certification? “An optimist might say 12 months,” Motes assesses, but being pragmatic, it’s further down the road.”

Until then, Marketplace will be a good place to download web apps and dream up apps of the future. It won’t be useful for loading up your phone with Army apps.

But it’s possible, Motes says, that “commanders can take risks” if they can convince the Army there’s a pressing need in a “tactical environment” for skipping certification. Welcome to the laborious process of getting the Army prepared for the day when every soldier is required to carry a secured smartphone.

That’s not the only challenge. Congress’ inability to pass a budget for months set back the apps program. A LandWarNet debut for Marketplace remains the goal, Motes says, and “if they don’t announce at LandWarNet, then it’s just a big sigh.” Another headache is securing the apps themselves, a process of going through code “line by line” looking for potential security flaws, which “is gonna drive us crazy.”

But at least Motes is convinced that at the end of this process is an agile website and mobile portal that will connect soldiers to apps that will let them do their jobs better. It’s a lot more functional and intuitive than the laughable attempt at a placeholder homepage for the Apps for the Army results, called Storefront, currently hosted at storefront.mil/army:



Motes sums up Storefront in one word: “Busted.” Now to see if Marketplace will fix it.

[buglerbilly]

Army Accelerates App Innovation, Delivery

(Source: U.S Army; issued May 3, 2011)

WASHINGTON --- The Army is now developing another "Apps for the Army" challenge which will be the next increment of the Army Marketplace.

The challenge is expected to launch in 2012 with expanded participation, to include both public and industry developers.

"In 2010, the Apps for the Army challenge provided a venue for internal Army early adopters and innovators," said Gary Blohm, lead for software transformation within the Army Chief Information Office/G-6. "This time the Army wants to tap into industry, and not just for its well-known application development capabilities, but to help them look at new ways to broaden third party participation in the marketplace."

In preparation for the next Apps for the Army, or A4A, the CIO/G-6 is designing prototype monetization business models and addressing intellectual property rights, said Blohm.

Army CIO/G-6 efforts to accelerate innovation and speed delivery of applications include conducting a number of events that engage industry in changing the business models, practices and processes currently used to respond to warfighter needs.

The events will help refine the existing prototype Army Application Marketplace and its capabilities and provide the foundation for next year's A4A challenge.

"Our ability to adopt more agile practices and processes is based on the ongoing collapse and standardization of computing environments," said Blohm. "This means we are looking to establish an online capability that can support applications that are accessed by a variety of devices across diverse mission areas."

While many think of apps and app marketplaces being only for smart phones, the Army wants to use the marketplace for all types of applications.

In 2010, the Army kicked off its application innovation initiative by launching "Apps for the Army," a challenge directed at unleashing the creativity of Soldiers and Army civilians to develop solutions to enhance operational effectiveness and increase business productivity.

Parallel efforts were conducted to establish a supporting proof of concept application marketplace with streamlined processes and nascent capabilities provided by Department of Defense, such as the DoD Storefront, forge.mil and RACE. Its initial set of capabilities supported the distribution of the A4A winning apps.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

'PaperPhone' -- Combat Apps for Combat Ops?

May 11, 2011

Military.com|by Bryant Jordan



Soon, Soldiers may be downloading combat apps along with loading ammo before a mission.

An Army-funded program at Arizona State University and Queensland University in Ontario, Canada, has produced a so-called "PaperPhone" -- a bendable computer that is smaller than a postcard and not much thicker. The PaperPhone is a "wearable computer" that links troops to each other and other sources of data.

"We have certainly shown prototypes where we have an ACU with one of these built right into the sleeve," said Nick Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Centers at Arizona State. Raytheon -- one of 30 industry partners in the project -- has a version that a Soldier would wear around his wrist, he said.

The latest advance toward the flexible computer, dubbed the "PaperPhone" because it will make and receive phone calls, was developed by ASU's Canadian partner, Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University.

Vertegaal said the thin, film-like material is as flexible as plastic nametag holders. Its flexibility is directly linked to its functionality as phone or computer. When bent one way, the device functions as a phone; another way, it becomes a computer.

Researchers also are looking at the bendable computer technology with other functions in mind, including camouflage. Colaneri said flexible display screens could alter their appearance like the high-tech camouflage used by the alien in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Predator."

"Everybody thinks about that one," Colaneri said. "We're not actively working in that space, but I'm sure that a lot of people thinking about the materials we're making could want them for those kinds of applications."

© Copyright 2011 Military.com. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Special Forces Want an App Store

Posted by Paul McLeary at 5/20/2011 10:47 AM CDT

At the SOFIC Special Forces conference in Tampa this week, it was all iPhone/Android all the time, from the show floor to the briefing rooms to the panel discussions. Everyone wants to push smart phones into the hands of operators out at the “last tactical foot” as the catchphrase goes, and do it as soon as possible. The problem is, no one seems totally sure just how.

John Wilcox, Director, J6 at USSOCOM told one panel that he not only wants his guys to have commercial off the shelf smart phones, but he also wants to provide his operators to have access to a fully stocked SOF-centric app store so they “can tailor their [smart phone] experiences as they see fit,” just like the average college student does.

“We're looking for off the shelf technology,” he said, “protected by a body glove-like case—and not a $10,000 hardening process—so when my operator breaks it I can give them a $200 phone, and not another $10,000 computer.” Wilcox is serious about the idea, saying that operators should be able to “build an app that only does what they need, not what they need plus 100 other things that costs more.”

CDR Ken Elkern of the Naval Special Warfare Command sees other issues with smart phones: namely, “we're still looking for that phone than can blend in to whatever country our operators are jumping in to.” Even if they're inserted into a country quietly, at some point many operators will most likely still need to clear international customs, and doing so with obviously military phones has caused some of them to be stolen by customs officials in foreign countries. So part of the fight is an aesthetic one—the phones have to be as vanilla-looking as possible.

Wilcox admitted that the use of smart phones on the battlefield comes with risks, since encryption remains a problem and there is always the risk of the phones being hacked, lost, or stolen. But with the tempo of SOF deployments showing no signs of lessening any time soon, and with the force having doubled since 9/11 with more growth to come, “We have to be willing to accept some level of risk” with new communications technologies he says. “Accept it and then be able to fight through it.” Not only are the benefits in increased communications and information sharing, but smart phone-like devices can replace bulky communications gear, reducing the overall weight an operator needs to carry. And not insignificantly, several SOF officers said, younger operators who have grown up with these technologies are simply demanding them on the battlefield.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Army Testing Battlephones This Summer

Posted by Paul McLeary at 5/23/2011 8:53 AM CDT



It’s not only Special Operations forces that are looking to put smart phones in the field. Big Army has also shown interest in experimenting with the devices, so much so that earlier this year, it announced that it was testing a prototype operating system called the Joint Battle Command-Platform that runs on the Android operating system.

One big test of the platform comes next month when the Army’s Army Evaluation Task Force (2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division) pitches its tents at the White Sands Missile Range for the Network Integration Evaluation, a six-week stint of intensive testing of the network concept that is supposed to link all nodes on the battlefield together. The Army has planned a complicated series of tests this year, putting an entire brigade in the field to run drills including counterinsurgency scenarios, near-peer fights, and everything in between.

The Task Force received their smart phones and base stations last month from a company called xG Technology Inc., and the company says that the system is capable of searching for up to six frequencies with which to transmit information, and if signal strength is lost, they’re capable of switching without interruption to stronger frequencies.

"The other advantage is that they won't have to have any specific phone; they'll be able to use any phone they want to," the El Paso Times quoted Paul Medina, director of government operations for xG Technology as saying. “The network that xG will be testing uses Voice over Internet Protocol (or VoIP)” the story continues, “when the system is expanded beyond just voice and text-messaging capability, all data will be handled in Internet protocol, which Medina said will give the Army an ability to better secure its communications.”

The Army’s vice chief Gen. Peter Chiarelli and other officers involved in this summer’s network tests are giving a briefing at the Pentagon this afternoon, so more on this soon.

[buglerbilly]

The ultimate Android phone?

Invisible Phone: Answer Calls with Your Hand

Analysis by Nic Halverson

Tue May 24, 2011 10:24 AM ET



We recently told you about a paper-thin electronic film that could stream-line your smartphone into something as thin and flexible as an index card, but some German researchers are now working on a system to complete the ultimate vanishing act.

Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and his team of students are developing a device that turns the palm of your hand into an interface capable of performing the same actions as your smart phone. Instead of swiping and tapping your finger across your phone, you simply do so across your palm.

Their Imaginary Phone relies on a depth-sensitive camera, similar to ones used in Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox, that would detect the swiping and tapping motions on your hand. The concept also contains software to analyze the video and a wireless radio to send instructions back to your phone.

Baudisch and his colleagues believe the imaginary phone prototype could liberate users from actually having to physically retrieve a device when answering a call. Imagine answering your "hand" while stir-frying vegetables for dinner, planting tulip bulbs in the garden or scrubbing greasy plates in the sink without even needing to reach for a towel first.

In test runs of the device, the depth camera was affixed to a head-mounted rack that is anything but inconspicuous. However, the team envisions future models being fitted with a camera so small that it could easily integrate into clothing, for example, as the button of a shirt.

Grand marshaling the project is a study the team submitted to the User Inerface Software and Technology conference, held in Santa Barbara, Calif., this October. The study shows that participants could accurately recall the position of two-thirds of their smartphone apps on a blank phone and with similar accuracy on their palm. Apps used more frequently were able to be recalled with up to 80 percent accuracy.

Though we don't advocate blindfolding yourself and testing your Jedi smart phone skills, may the force be with you.

[via Technology Review]

Photo: Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Sean Gustafson, Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch

[buglerbilly]

SOCOM Looking for Smart Phone Radios

by Brandon Webb on May 25, 2011



In my opinion we need to start utilizing more commercial off the shelf (COTS) solutions for today’s war fighter. This is especially true when dealing with IT solutions. Gone are the days when a large system integrator (Lockheed, L3, SAIC…take your pick) puts out a meaningful technology solution that is relevant at the end of a multi-year deliverable. I saw this first hand when Naval Special Warfare paid L3 to develop a recon lap top system that was irrelevant and outdated when delivered.

And at 25k a piece we ended up with an expensive and bulky system that could be easily replaced at Radio Shack or the Apple store with off the shelf technology that was better and only a fraction of the cost.

I’m glad to see the direction SOCOM is heading with this May RFI outlined below. -Brandon

From FedBizOpps


“USSOCOM is requesting industry comment on its ability to provide a non-developmental, personal role radio-like capability with as many of the attributes identified in the RFI Attachment. The requirement is for such device to be available in 4th Qtr FY 11. Consequently, the technological maturity of this radio cannot be waived.”…..

From a source at INPUT:


“According to a Nextgov article, SOCOM said it is looking to acquire a nondevelopmental radio for team members with a range of just over a mile. Requirements include the capacity to plug-and-play with Android devices through a USB or serial port and also to run on either a Windows or Android operating system.”

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz1NO4Axsg7
Kit Up!

[buglerbilly]

Via Soldier Systems blog..............

Tac Apps – Tactical NAV ver 2.0

June 6th, 2011

A couple of months ago we told you about Tactical NAV, an iOS app developed by Army Artillery CPT Jonathan Springer while he was in Afghanistan. He has just released an update to the app. It offers an improved graphical interface as well as editable waypoints and the ability to navigate to waypoints. All points are available in MGRS format and bearings in degrees or mils.

Updates are free and we expect him to continue to refine his app. To get yours, visit iTunes.

[buglerbilly]

Army begins mobile phone experiments

By Philip Ewing Monday, June 6th, 2011 11:22 am



Funny coincidence: The same day Steve Jobs and his top Apple lieutenants are set to announce their latest batch of wonder-products, the Army is beginning its latest experiment with smartphones on the battlefield. As the WSJ’s Nathan Hodge reports, the Army has dialed back its ambitions a bit — its leaders are emphasizing this is a test, and they don’t necessarily want to buy a phone for every soldier. Still, the Army would love to network up all its soldiers and vehicles with relatively cheap devices and software, and the wireless industry, no doubt, would love to sell it all that stuff.

Wrote Hodge:


The Army doesn’t have a plan to give every soldier a smartphone. But Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, recently said that if the devices proved themselves in testing, the service would “buy what we need for who needs it now.”

Many of the applications the Army wants to develop—for instance, the ability to watch full-motion video shot from a drone—can already be done with equipment now in the field. The potential advantage of smartphones and tablets is their lighter weight and ease of use.

The tests will take place at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and at neighboring Fort Bliss, Texas, as part of a wider Army evaluation of a range of communications gear. During the six-week event, soldiers of the Second Brigade Combat Team, First Armored Division, will see if the equipment holds up in rugged desert conditions.

Michael McCarthy, one of the Army’s project leaders, said the point of smartphone testing is to see what works and what doesn’t. “We want to give people the right phones for the right reasons, not just give them another shiny thing to hang on their equipment carriers,” he said.

Army officials say the devices need to be relatively affordable, perhaps costing a few hundred dollars each, depending on the model. The service doesn’t want to “spend $2,500 to ruggedize a $200 phone,” Mr. McCarthy said.

In theory, smartphones could eventually become common tools for troops, with software customized for each unit or mission. The Army, for instance, is testing apps that could expedite the treatment of soldiers wounded in combat. In the coming exercise, the service will evaluate several apps that help speed requests for medical evacuation by relaying the exact location of an injured soldier, with touch-screen menus to fill in crucial information such as the patient’s name, health status and type of injury.

Another app, called “SoldierEyes,” turns a smartphone into a sort of battlefield navigation device. In addition to displaying a digital map, it features an “augmented reality” mode that enables the user to flip on the camera and scan the horizon. Digital markers pop up on the screen, displaying the direction and distance to objectives on the battlefield.

Here’s where Steve’s ears perk up:


The Army is experimenting with Apple Inc. devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but is also trying devices built around Google Inc.‘s Android operating system. All told, the Army has identified around 85 digital apps for testing, some created by commercial software designers, and some developed in-house by soldiers. The service is also developing downloadable apps to substitute for bulky instruction manuals that need constant updating, often at considerable cost.

But the Army could have some big challenges when — or if — it decides to try to field all this stuff in an actual shooting war. It could be in a position where it has to deploy with its own cellular network infrastructure, meaning towers, cables and computers, which sounds potentially complicated and expensive.

And it will need to figure out some way to protect all this data zipping back and forth, especially if troops are using their devices full time. The Army battle network might be encrypted, but if Sgt. Hardtack uses his iPhone in Afghanistan to upload sensitive intel, then brings it home, what happens if it gets lost or stolen? Or, in this post-Wikileaks era, what if Sarge might want to deliberately share what he has on it?

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/06/06/army-begins-mobile-phone-experiments/#ixzz1OYAylhVs
DoDBuzz.com

[buglerbilly]

The comments from one of the guys is relevant to this post as well...............

amtho93944@yahoo.com · 7 hours ago

Use Linksys routers which the android system hooks up to just find. The super encryption (freeware) is already available and will easily stand up to military specs. Put a Linksys router in a bird or even a balloon will a 1 meter antenna and you will have a signal for miles. Your soldiers will have android phones w/ a mapping program that will show where everyone else who is on the network is (there is already an app for that). Also give them the ability to designate points on their mapping program that will feed targets back to arty and HQ. Each phone can also be turned into its own router so that if a soldier is outside of the signal from the main router, but within range of a nearby soldier, it will route the info to HQ via the other soldier and to another until it is within range of the main router (up to 3 times in theory).

amtho93944@yahoo.com · 7 hours ago

This is all off the shelf and could equip a company in under $10,000. It could be set up in a weekend with a trip to radio shack, assuming you already have the weather balloon. P.S. - the router can be 'militarized' by taking the mother board out of its original shell and put in a $15 phone box that is found outside every house with a land line. If the balloon goes down, the router can bounce off the ground and still probably be good. If not, you grab the backup since these routers and boxes go for about $80 a piece.

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/06/06/army-begins-mobile-phone-experiments/#ixzz1OYBylJSF
DoDBuzz.com

[buglerbilly]

Cellcrypt launches Android encrypted voice calling

June 15, 2011

Cellcrypt, the leading provider of encrypted voice calling on mobile phones, today announced that it has launched Cellcrypt Mobile for Android, a version of its encrypted voice calling application that runs on Android devices operating over Wi-Fi, GSM and CDMA wireless networks.

Cellcrypt Mobile provides encrypted voice calling for off-the-shelf cell phones using government-certified security in an easy-to-use downloadable application that makes highly secure calling as easy as making or placing a normal phone call. It is a software-only solution that uses the IP data channel of cellular (2G, 3G, 4G), Wi-Fi and satellite networks and can be deployed to personnel anywhere in the world in as little as 10 minutes.

Cellcrypt Mobile is in use by governments and corporations globally, uses cryptography certified to US government National Institute of Standards and Technology FIPS 140-2 security standards and has been awarded the CESG Claims Tested Mark (CCTM) from the U.K. government's information assurance authority.

The interception threat level increased during 2010 as hackers developed, demonstrated and published details of low-cost air-interface interception equipment that uses open source software freely downloadable from the internet and a generic off-the-shelf radio transceiver costing less than $2,000. Another group of hackers demonstrated interception in December 2010 using four modified cell phones as transceivers each costing $15 (interception was filmed in London by the BBC in April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13013577). At least one top-tier European University has added practical lessons in GSM interception to its curriculum.

"Cellular voice interception is different from other types of data breach," said Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader, Security at Bloor Research, "if you lose a laptop, USB stick or disk drive it can be fairly obvious that the data has gone missing. But with voice, a successful interception can leave no physical trace so there is little chance of realizing your data has actually been intercepted resulting in disastrous consequences. If you can compromise a cell phone then you are more or less assured that you can collect the most relevant, current and damaging data possible about a user, their business or their private life. By supporting Android devices, Cellcrypt is providing enhanced security for one of the world's most popular mobile platforms."

At the same time as the threat level is increasing, the use of cell phones for discussing sensitive and confidential information has also increased, even among government employees, due to the ease of use, ubiquity and interoperability of mobile phones. This leads to an increased need for government-grade end-to-end protection that provides assurance that call security is controlled along all points of the call path between caller and recipient and risks are adequately mitigated in compliance with internal security policies.

"We are seeing a growing tension between organizational security requirements and personal convenience requirements with people often discussing sensitive issues on mobile phones to get their jobs done faster or because they have no other practical choice." said Richard Greco, CEO

of Cellcrypt, continuing, "With Cellcrypt's support of Android we are meeting the usability demands of a fast-growing user base whilst continuing to help organizations meet their operational security requirements."
Cellcrypt Mobile for Android is available immediately on devices supporting Android 2.3 and is interoperable with Cellcrypt running on other devices such as Nokia and BlackBerry® smartphones.

Source: Cellcrypt

[buglerbilly]

USAF receives 300 General Dynamics Sectera Edge Smartphones

June 17, 2011

General Dynamics C4 Systems is delivering300 rugged Sectera Edge Smartphones to the US Air Force. For use by senior leadership at the air staff and major command levels, the Smartphones are part of a broader Air Force plan to integrate Secure Mobile Environment - Portable Electronic Devices (SME-PED) like the Sectera Edge into its consolidated enterprise network. General Dynamics C4 Systems is a business unit of General Dynamics.

"The Sectera Edge provides cyber security at the hip," said Mike Guzelian, vice president of Secure Voice and Data Products for General Dynamics C4 Systems. "Air Force and civilian personnel will have cost-effective, secure access to classified and unclassified networks, even the Internet, from virtually anywhere in the world."

The Sectera Edge is the first SME-PED certified by the National Security Agency for classified voice and data, using wireless access to commercial WiFi and cellular networks that provide access to classified and unclassified government networks.

Since 2007, General Dynamics C4 Systems has delivered thousands of Sectera Edge Smartphones to US government customers, including users at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense. Similar to a commercial cell phone/personal digital assistant (PDA), the Sectera Edge is capable of synchronizing information with a user's computer, enabling access to calendar, address book, calculator, notepad and other PDA capabilities.

Capable of operating on existing Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) commercial cellular networks, the Sectera Edge is WiFi compatible as well. Interoperable with over 350,000 fielded Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol (SCIP) devices, the Sectera Edge provides secure data communications classified Secret and below and secure wireless voice communications classified Top Secret and below.

Utilizing the Suite B encryption algorithm, the Sectera Edge interfaces with the US Department of Defense Public Key Infrastructure using the government's standard Common Access Card. Information stored in the Sectera Edge is also protected using data-at-rest encryption.

The Sectera Edge Smartphone was developed under the NSA Secure Mobile Environment/Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program and is compliant with the Secure Communication Interoperability Protocol (SCIP); it provides secure interoperability with other SCIP devices, including the Secure Telephone Equipment (STE), Omni, QSec and existing Sectera phones and terminals. The Smartphone is also compliant with the High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor Interoperability Specification (HAIPE® IS) for interoperability with in-line encryption devices that secure information on the US Government's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), including the widely deployed TACLANE® family of network encryptors.

Source: General Dynamics

[buglerbilly]

Cellcrypt Launches Encrypted Voice Calling for the iPhone

June 28, 2011

Cellcrypt, the leading provider of encrypted voice calling on mobile phones, today announced that it has launched Cellcrypt Mobile for iPhone, a version of its encrypted voice calling application that runs on Apple devices running iOS and operates over Wi-Fi, GSM, CDMA and satellite networks.

Cellcrypt Mobile provides voice call encryption for commercially available off-the-shelf cell phones using government-certified security through an easy-to-use downloadable application that makes highly secure calling as easy as making a normal phone call. Cellcrypt's software-only solution uses the IP data channel of cellular (2G, 3G, and 4G), Wi-Fi and satellite networks and can be deployed to personnel anywhere in the world in less than 10 minutes.

Cellcrypt Mobile is in use by governments and corporations globally. It uses cryptography certified to US government National Institute of Standards and Technology FIPS 140-2 security standard and has been awarded the CESG Claims Tested Mark (CCTM) from the UK government's information assurance authority.

Cyber-attacks on government agencies and global corporations are happening more and more frequently and these attacks may include interception of voice calls, which is often undetectable as it typically leaves no trace. Interception equipment is becoming more accessible and affordable. During 2010, hackers published a how-to guide for building an air-interface interception device with open source software freely downloadable from the internet, along with a generic off-the-shelf radio transceiver, for a total cost of under $2,000. Another group of hackers demonstrated interception in December 2010 using four modified cell phones as transceivers, each costing $15, for a total cost of $60. (The BBC filmed this interception in London in April 20111).

Cellcrypt delivers an easy to use countermeasure against cyber crime by preventing voice interception on cell phones used by government and corporate personnel. With no specialist equipment, Cellcrypt Mobile for iPhone delivers high strength security at the same time as a voice call experience comparable to a normal mobile phone.

"The introduction of Cellcrypt Mobile for iPhone further strengthens Cellcrypt's market leadership position," said Richard Greco, CEO of Cellcrypt. "The performance of Cellcrypt's application for iPhone is very impressive. In trials, customers are reporting international calling with near-perfect voice quality and latency better than landline calling."
"Recently, an elite military communications unit made a call over a portable satellite terminal using Cellcrypt Mobile for iPhone and were so impressed that they immediately ordered a full-scale operational evaluation."

Cellcrypt Mobile for iPhone is available immediately from the App Store and requires Cellcrypt's Encrypted Voice Service from Cellcrypt. It supports iOS 4 on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 and is interoperable with Cellcrypt running on other devices such as Nokia, Android and BlackBerry smartphones.

Source: Cellcrypt

[buglerbilly]

Via Soldier Systems blog............

Tac Apps – Spyglass

June 29th, 2011

Billed as “AR compass, rangefinder, GPS tracker, stars, maps”, Spyglass is an iPhone/iPad app. It features Augmented Reality to overlay navigation data on to the phone’s viewfinder or on a map.



According to the iTunes description, it features, “Spyglass features a hi-tech viewfinder, milspec compass, gyrocompass, maps, GPS tracker, speedometer, optical rangefinder, visual sextant, gyro horizon, inclinometer, angular calculator, 5x zoom sniper scope and camera.” Lots of features here.



Uploaded by Happybytez on May 18, 2011
=== http://happymagenta.com/ ===
With the Spyglass 3D augmented reality navigation and advanced mil spec compass you may tag, find and track in real-time multiple locations, bearings, Sun, Moon, stars and use it as a hi-tech viewfinder, a gyrocompass, an optical rangefinder, a visual sextant, maps, GPS, angular calculator, inclinometer and zoom camera.

I really dig the fancy pointers.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spyglass-ar-compass-rangefinder/id332639548?mt=8&ls=1

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Army Putting Smart Phones, Tablets, to the Test

Posted by Paul McLeary at 7/5/2011 7:30 AM CDT



WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M.—The takeaway from the Army’s now-biannual Network Integration Exercise this time around isn’t, surprisingly, all about the network. Well, it is, but it’s also focused on lots of different technologies that will possibly one day connect to that network , and how they might co-exist on the battlefield. In short, it’s about integration, and experimentation with new technologies not yet in the Army budget cycle, and the acquisition process itself. The tests aren’t only “all about hardware,” the Army’s Paul Mehney says. “It’s also about changing the culture” of how and what the Army buys.

Vice chief of the Army Peter Chiarelli has said that given how quickly technology changes these days, he wants to service to “buy less, more often,” so that instead of buying 80,000 radios that will be outdated in a few years, the service will instead only buy as many as it needs, and then upgrade when technology advances.

Which brings us to Ft. Bliss, where the 3,800 soldiers of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, along with several hundred civilian contractors and industry reps, (one figure in the brigade operations center put 4,400 people in the field), are camped out in the desert for six weeks in order to test six programs of record, along with 29 other technologies that the Army describes as “under evaluation.”

Very much “under evaluation” here was the Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications (CSDA) program, which is putting smart phones and tablets into the hands of infantrymen.

Lt. Col. Mark Stiner, program manager for the JTRS Handheld, Manpack and Small Form Fit radios is pushing the concept at NIE by installing tablets in vehicles and handing out phones and various-sized tablets to soldiers. One jerry-rigged system featured a smart phone plugged into a GPS-enabled Rifleman’s Radio that gives the dismounted soldier visual confirmation of where friendly units are moving on the phone’s screen. Stiner has also placed Motorola Xoom tablets connected to Manpack radios in vehicles, and has distributed a variety of smaller phones and tablets to soldiers in the field. While fully supporting the use of smart phones in the exercise, 2nd Brigade commander Col. Daniel Pinnell admitted that at the start of operations, so many soldiers were sending information back and forth on their phones that the network was bottlenecked, which slowed down both comms as well as operations. His fix was to limit the use of smart phones to certain soldiers, and only in certain situations. Another issue that arose was keeping the phones powered up in such an austere environment. Soldiers were forced to figure out ways to get 120-volt power off of their vehicles to keep the phones charged. All of this is probably to be expected, however, since this is the Army’s first large test of smart phones in an operational environment, and while the service is cranking out the apps for the smart phones of its future, a ruggedized, encrypted smart phone in the pocket of every soldier is probably still some ways off.

[buglerbilly]

A Translator in Your iPhone

by christian on July 5, 2011



Anyone who’s been deployed at one time or another over the last decade knows that language in a COIN fight is key. You can’t get that ‘Hearts and Minds’ approach done without being able to communicate with some precision to the folks you’re trying to win over.

There’s been a constant struggle between the technology and teaching solutions to language — gadgets can provide a short cut to communications, but are often clunky and expensive; classes are the best way to learn a language but take a lot of time, are tough to master and are also pretty expensive.

But sometimes all you need is something to get you by…it’s not like you’re going to be able to interrogate Zawahiri or Mullah Omar, but if you’re a Joe at a TCP, it’ll do in a pinch.

That’s where something like the new iPhone application SpeechTrans comes in. It’s a pretty nifty app that has a full list of languages that can be translated, including Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Korean.

Kit Up! took the app for a test drive for about a month and while it’s darn good for short phrases, we had some questions about its military application potential. Instead of rehashing the back and forth, I’ll just provide a blow-by-blow from the company:

Do you have to have a wifi or 3G connection for Speechtrans to run, or does the entire library reside on your iphone?

SpeechTrans does require a wifi or 3G connection for translation to function. All translations are saved into the history log with offline playback.

I noticed the volume is pretty low and the speed of the actual voice translation is pretty fast. Is there a way to slow the translation down and boost the volume? Do you have any suggestions/accessories that could help with the volume issue so it could be used in the field?

SpeechTrans in its next update plans to provide user controls to adjust volume and speed of translation. Accessories that we have tested for military field use are an external IPhone Speaker. (as shown in the attached video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdR8y7ig3Lc A Sound Clip which redirects and amplifies the audio by as much as 10 dB may also be a more cost effective solution for field applications.

Are there ways to add mission-specific vocabulary words? I’m thinking of military-specific words like “detonator” or “blasting caps” or “commander” or “ammunition” etc.

Since we are using Nuance Communications Inc’s (Maker of Dragon Dictation) Automatic Speech Recognition as the backbone, the above should be recognized by SpeechTrans as well as most military jargon. If there are mission-specific vocabulary words which SpeechTrans currently does not recognize, a request can be submitted thru our website and we will ensure the words are added to the vocabulary list.

Are there any military-specific features that you are developing or have available for certain customers?

We attended the Language Convention at the Pentagon in December of 2010 and have integrated several suggested features, including access to offline translations, Chat integration which enables real time translation across the globe and have a prototype OCR capture (Optical Character Recognition) which would enable photo capture and translation of documents, signs, etc .

SpeechTrans is currently being pilot tested in Germany’s Army Medical Command (AMEDD) and we have submitted proposal to DARPA BAA-11-40 BOLT (Boundless Operational Language Translation) for further consideration.

So it’s with question #1 where I see the greatest weakness of the product: you have to have a WiFi connection to make it work (the data doesn’t reside on your phone — and that’s a good thing since it would take up way too much storage). But I can see how SpeechTrans would help a trooper prep for a mission. He could take a few minutes to learn and practice some phrases that he’d expect to use and even write them down phonetically for later reference.

Look, we all know that actually learning a language is the way to go. But we also recognize that most servicemembers (and OGA types) don’t have the time, or even aptitude to learn a language to anywhere near fluency in time for a mission. So something like SpeechTrans can help bridge the gap — it’s a good attempt at least. And at less than $20 for all its capability, you can’t go wrong.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/2011/07/a-translator-in-your-iphone.html#ixzz1RHNLsFga
Kit Up!

[buglerbilly]

Not really an Android phone per se but similar technology and interesting for all that...............

World's First Global 2-Way Text Messager Unveiled

Analysis by Scott Tharler

Wed Jul 6, 2011 03:14 PM ET


DeLorme inReach: $249.95 plus service (starting at $9.95 per month)

Until now, worldly professionals, first responders, outdoor adventurers, government operatives, remote area workers and other safety-minded travelers have been lacking.

They haven't had an affordable, reliable two-way messaging solution when venturing into the estimated 90 percent of the planet not covered by terrestrial wireless networks.

To fill that need, DeLorme's recently announced inReach offers bidirectional texting from virtually anywhere on the planet, with messaging and tracking subscription plans starting at just ten bucks a month. The Iridium 9602 short-burst data (SBD) transceiver is the core communications component that connects this compact, buoyant and durable device to Iridium's global satellite network.

The inReach is a natural for remote tracking and rescue situations, given its ability to quickly transmit an SOS with embedded location info and then confirm delivery of that message with a flashing LED. Even better, the GPS communicator can be paired via Bluetooth to an Android smart phone.

That not only allows for more descriptive text dialogues with cell phones, social networks and email, but is also a great everyday way to improve the smart phone's positional accuracy and battery life.

Credit: DeLorme

[buglerbilly]

Army Hits Pause on ‘Wearable Computer’ Program

By Spencer Ackerman July 28, 2011 | 4:12 pm



A classic case of where COTS technology is better and is updated FAR more frequently than Military-specific............

The Army’s long-awaited program to outfit soldiers with wearable computers isn’t exactly dead. But it’s in a state of suspended animation while Pentagon officials figure out if it needs a brain transplant.

Debi Dawson, a spokeswoman for the Army office overseeing the Nett Warrior program, confirms that the Army has put the multi-million effort on pause. “It has not been cancelled,” Dawson emphasizes.

But it smells like the Pentagon is reconsidering the purpose of Nett Warrior in a fundamental way. The idea behind it is to give soldiers a suite of digitized maps, cameras, computers and communication tools that they can strap to their kit and to stay connected during the fog of war.

The Army has worked on various incarnations of Nett Warrior for almost two decades, without success, while the gear weighs down soldiers with about eight extra pounds of equipment. If that wasn’t enough, commercially smartphones now do everything the Army wants Nett Warrior to do, and more.

Now, a Pentagon acquisition group called the Configuration Steering Board has paused Nett Warrior for a possible brain transplant. The board is looking “for opportunities to infuse existing government devices” into the program, Dawson tells Danger Room, like commercially available smartphones and tablets, or the military’s voice-n-data Joint Tactical Radio System. It’s possible the board could recommend that the Army tear up the designs for Nett Warrior and reconfigure it around, essentially, an iPhone.

Army officials in the Nett Warrior program are touchy about smartphones — all while Big Army goes app-crazy and inches closer to requiring all soldiers to carry an iPhone or Android device. The former director of Program Executive Officer Soldier, which is in charge of Nett Warrior, was uncomfortable during an April briefing with questions about Nett Warrior’s apparent technological obsolescence. His answer: maybe rejigger Nett Warrior so that its central computer is a smartphone.

That seems to be precisely what the Configuration Steering Board is considering. It’ll deliver its recommendations for Nett Warrior to a larger acquisition oversight body, the Defense Acquisition Board. Dawson says there’s no time frame for any conclusions about Nett Warrior.

She did, however, push back hard against a recent report in the plugged-in blog Soldier Systems that Nett Warrior is done, dead, finito. Nett Warrior’s just on hold, Dawson says; the board is not considering the broader question of killing the program. And Nett Warrior is famously hard to kill: it was originally something called Land Warrior, another system providing wearable connectivity for soldiers that was first conceived in the mid-90s, back when a phone was just for making phone calls.

But Soldier Systems might just be prematurely correct. If the board is considering incorporating smartphones or tablets into Nett Warrior, it might consider cutting out the middleman and recommending the Army use those devices for connectivity. The Army recently tested a variety of smartphones at the White Sands Missile Range running on the Army’s private data network, and its vice chief, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told a House panel on Tuesday the devices and the network all performed swimmingly. If Nett Warrior is effectively in suspended animation, it might not be long before the Army pulls the plug.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman

[buglerbilly]

Charge! Darpa Wants Wireless Power-Up for Troops’ Gadgets

By Adam Rawnsley July 28, 2011 | 1:47 pm



Phone batteries dying, spider webs of power cords — powering mobile technology can be pretty annoying for the average iPhone or iPad user. But it’s even more annoying — not to mention potentially dangerous — if you’re a soldier on patrol in Afghanistan losing juice on a critical gadget. Yes, troops in the field use their fair share of handheld gear, too. Now, the Pentagon is hoping to give them a power-up with a wireless charging system.

Darpa, the Defense Department’s advanced research shop, announced Wednesday that it’s looking to build a short-range wireless power transmission system for troops in the field. The transmitter would allow troops to charge up things like GPS without having to stop and plug in. If the system works, a single GI could strap on a battery pack and allow other troops to draw power from it wirelessly at a distance of up to two meters.

I'd have thought this a too-small range?

The push for wireless power is a problem born of an increasingly technology-equipped military. GIs in the field lug a lot of handheld electronic gadgetry — about five to ten pounds of just battery weight, according to Darpa. On top of that, the Defense Department keeps coming up with ideas for yet more portable electronic gear, from Android-based smart phones to universal translators. All that gear needs juice to keep going on long missions. If troops are out on patrol, they can’t just find a convenient socket to stop and plug in. Darpa’s hoping its wireless power system can prove a solution to energy needs in the field without adding a tangled mess of charger cords.

Wireless power transmission may sound like Tesla-inspired science fiction, but the technology behind it isn’t that exotic. In fact, you may have brushed your teeth with it this morning. Electric toothbrushes use a form of wireless power transmission called inductive coupling. A coil in the plugged-in charging station creates a magnetic field that allows current to transfer when a coil in the toothbrush enters the field. Microwave power transmission, another method of wireless power transfer, uses microwave-beaming antennas to power devices across distances.

There’s already quite a few wireless systems available. Powercast (.pdf) makes a transmitter that uses radio waves to transmit both data and power. For naval super users, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doctoral student Tristan Lawry has built a system that can shoot power through ship and submarine hulls with ultrasound.

Darpa, however, is looking for a wireless power transmitter that’s customized to the needs of troops in the field. If you plan on pitching the agency, your system needs to have an efficient distribution of power from end-to-end and work with a range of different portable electronic devices. Safety is key, too. Make sure your power transmitter doesn’t easily give up users’ position or have any lingering health effects from radiation.

Photo: U.S. Army/Flickr

[buglerbilly]

Nett Warrior not ‘Cancelled’ Just — hmmmm?

by Christian on August 2, 2011



After reading the post over at Soldier Systems that the Nett Warrior program had been cancelled by PEO Soldier, I figured I’d head straight up the middle and see what the command would say on the record about its potential demise.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been having some fun with the Nett Warrior program since I ran around with the boys from the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment back in 2008 in Iraq during its first real-world deployment test. Back then they called it the 12-pound GPS unit (and only the battalion commander would wield the ‘around-the-corner-shooting’ M4 sighting system) and the criticisms really didn’t end there.

Sure the Army kept touting some successes with the system in Afghanistan, but I felt for PM Col. Will Riggins who had to put lipstick on that pig — especially since the Army had launched a parallel effort to use smartphones to do much of what the Land Warrior (now Nett Warrior) system could do — and more.

Well, despite what our friends at Soldier Systems wrote, the top PEO Soldier spokeswoman told Kit Up! that the program “had NOT been terminated.” She went on to say that the Army had set up a so-called “configuration steering board” which is “looking for opportunities to infuse commercial devices and existing government devices into the program.”

According to the PEO shop, the Defense Acquisition Board decision on the program is pending the CSB’s findings.

Which we all know what it will be: Android phones.

We’re still trying to find out more details, but if you read the writing on the wall, Nett Warrior as we know (and knew) it will likely be no more.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/2011/08/nett-warrior-not-cancelled-just-hmmmm.html#ixzz1TuyuYHpk
Kit Up!

[buglerbilly]

Army melds tactical, commercial comms networks

By Philip Ewing Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 2:22 pm



Maybe it’ll be a commander’s dream come true, or maybe it’ll be a soldier’s nightmare, but here it is: The Army is making strikes in melding its military networks with commercial communications equipment, the service said this week — it has “linked tactical radios and military chat systems with cell phones, instant messaging and other commercial communications technologies as part of a wide-ranging effort to streamline collaboration across the force.”

Service officials dream of a future in which General Halftrack can be sitting at his desktop computer back at headquarters and, if he wants, reach all the way down to Pvt. Smitty out at FOB Jackhammer. The general could theoretically see whether Smitty is up on chat and ping him directly to tell him about his commitment to warfighting excellence. And that’s not all.

Here’s how the Army’s official story put it:


The integration of emerging commercial software with the existing tactical communications infrastructure has far-reaching potential as the Army expands communications for soldiers at the tactical edge, shares more battlefield data with NATO allies and equips users with tools to help minimize information overload, service officials said.

“Whether you’re at the command post or on patrol, you know when someone is online and what the best way to reach that person is,” said Osie David, Fire Support Command and Control system engineer and former solutions architect for the Army’s Project Manager Mission Command. “Things are still in the early prototyping stage, but there’s certainly potential to share information more quickly and easily among NATO partners and U.S. forces.”

Spearheading the effort is the Command and Control Directorate for the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s communications-electronics center, or RDECOM CERDEC C2D. Engineers there have integrated Lync and its predecessor, Office Communications Server 2007, with a widely used military situational awareness application called Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below/Blue Force Tracking, or FBCB2/BFT.

A Microsoft Office user can then trade chat messages with an operator of FBCB2, which enables warfighters in vehicles and aircraft to exchange messages, such as the location of an enemy or an improvised explosive device, and share a common operating picture of the battlefield.

“The potential for lower echelon forces to have a richer communications capability between stationary command posts and mobile FBCB2-equipped platforms by leveraging this new technology is huge,” said retired Lt. Col Jeffrey From, science and technology specialist at the Mission Command Battle Lab at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “I was impressed with the work CERDEC C2D has done integrating Lync with our existing Army mission command systems, and I see great potential in a system that can operate at the tactical edge, in the lowest bandwidth environment,” From said.

The story goes on:


Beyond text chat, CERDEC also used Lync to enable voice communication between Microsoft Office users and Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System radios, cell phones and Voice over Internet Protocol phones. With a mouse click, an individual could place a call to another user and reach him or her on whatever communication medium was available. There was no need to remember phone numbers or take extra steps to call a radio.

“If a general is on a phone or a (computer) and needs to communicate, you could actually bridge that with a mobile radio unit and have that connection be seamless,” said Phil West, a principal technologist with Microsoft. “If an officer is speaking with an individual, it can traverse a number of types of systems.”

The users’ “presence” was also integrated into several applications, letting others know whether someone was available to collaborate.

The full story is full of details about what else could be possible if the Army can put a fully cross-pollinated net into action. But could it be potentially worrisome to establish an “always available” communications environment on the battlefield? We all know what instant messaging can do to one’s productivity in an office environment … what do you think?

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/08/10/army-melds-tactical-commercial-comms-networks/#ixzz1UgCPezKa
DoDBuzz.com

[buglerbilly]

Via Soldier Systems blog..............

Magpul Releases iPhone 4 Fieldcase

August 18th, 2011

If you an iPhone 4 user and a reader of SSD, then you are most likely aware that Magpul had previously released an Executive Field Case for the phone. As stylish as it might be, this case lacked the grip enhancing PMAG-style ribs found on the Field Case for the iPhone 3. This new version has rectified this and has incorporated them into the design.



Available in Black, Flat Dark Earth, Foliage, OD Green, and Orange from www.magpul.com

[buglerbilly]

Special Operations Apps to launch SF App Store

August 22, 2011

Special Operations Apps, the smart-device CamoScience innovator, has announced the plans to launch the SF App Store, which will put advanced technologies directly into the hands of US warfighters.

Special Operations Apps (SOA), which developed the CamoScience App for MW Research & Development, Inc., uses the "technology push and market pull" of the most popular smart devices like the iPhone, Android, and iPad, to develop customized Special Operations applications on common platforms already familiar to SF operators.

"It is a certainty that mobile smart devices will be adopted military-wide, with Special Operations Forces deserving of the quickest approval based on their needs and responsibilities," said K. Dominic Cincotti, president of Special Operations Apps and the inventor of CamoScience.

"It's clear that SOF needs a Central Marketplace for custom apps, and certain elements of the commercial sector are the most nimble in providing this," said David Mullins, team leader of SOA's subject matter experts. "We and our partners are stepping up to the challenge."

The SF App Store will include new applications made within SOA development protocols, according to Cathlena Spencer, SOA's chief technology officer, "which means taking full advantage of what these new smart devices can really do: geo-locating, augmented reality, hi-def video, even 3D.

"The SF App Store will also serve as the commercial gatekeeper for useful apps created by other developers to meet specific operator requests and as an incubator responding directly to need statements and wish lists from operators," she said.

SOA is in talks with app developers, operators with specialized needs, and defense companies looking to utilize mobile smart devices and special operations apps to remain current in the latest wave of technology revolutions.

Unmanned vehicle assets are getting special attention from SOA, said Mark Tocci, SOA vice president for business development.

"Special Operations Apps are the new means that SOF can access and control unmanned vehicle systems as needed down range with ground-truth precision," Tocci said. "The unmanned systems are the eyes and ears of the SOF, and the operators can now be in control of that through mobile smart devices. The operator can have better, quicker striking capability through these apps.

"These Special Operations Apps place the SOF warfighter back in the forefront of the cyberspace battlescape by enabling the operator of the UAV, UGV or Robo-boat to be pilot/controller and at the spear tip of battle."

C4IT -- command, control, computers, communications, information technology -- is often outside of the SOF warrior's direct control, Mullins said, "so shortening the information pipeline is the best advance."

The first slate of application developments -- the 15 Must-Have SF Apps -- were created to:

-- Enhance Combat Performance
-- Sharpen Situational Awareness
-- Increase Survivability
-- Improve Mobility
-- Reduce "The Load"

"The current App Store/App Market Model won't work for military or SF Apps, because of the intrinsic differences between civilian and SOF App needs," Spencer said. "The Commercial App Stores can rely on millions of people to download and subsidize apps. SOA doesn't expect an 'Angry Birds' level of downloads for our Apps.

"SOA doesn't build Apps for the mass market, we build for a select group," she said, "and we know our end users understand and appreciate that we build with only their needs in mind."

SOA's CamoScience was featured in CNN and NBC news programs last month, in stories that focused on the next-generation camouflage capabilities it affords to military and hunting/outdoor markets as well as flexing the power of these lightweight smart devices with feature-rich app attributes, including geo-positioning, augmented reality overlays and Area of Operation imagery.

CamoScience was developed from two of MW R&D's patent-pending technologies, Photo-Real and Photo-Stealth, new camouflage processes introduced by Cincotti in 2007 and designed initially for the unique Special Forces requirements. To develop CamoScience, the MW R&D Apps Team paired with NASA veteran Dr. Craig Hunter, who, with his brother Todd founded Hunter Research & Technology. The Hunter brothers are renowned as the minds behind The Theodolite App for the iPhone 4, the best-selling navigation application.

Special Operations Apps was launched in May, with the release of the CamoScience app by MW Research and Development, Inc. CamoScience is a photo application native to the Apple iPad 2/iPhone 4, with its Android counterpart soon to be released.

Source: Special Operations Apps

http://www.specialoperationsapps.com/

[buglerbilly]

Army Taps Android Phones for ‘Wearable Computers’

By Spencer Ackerman September 6, 2011 | 6:30 am



Officials running the Army’s long-awaited program to equip soldiers with a wearable computer system are sick of hearing about smartphones.

Smartphones embarrass them: The Nett Warrior program and its predecessors have spent two decades trying to give soldiers tools for communications and mapping that smartphones currently offer. The results? Mixed, at best.

Back in April, the officer then overseeing Nett Warrior, Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, sounded irritated when Danger Room brought up the subject of smartphones. “Every kid’s going down to whatever local store they want, and they’re buying some smart device and saying, ‘Well, this is modern, and it lets me know where I am, where my friends are … it gives me all that capability, how come I can’t get that?’”

Of course, it’s not as simple as that: Civilian smartphones rely on billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure to work, and they don’t have to be built to survive Afghanistan. But now, with little choice, Nett Warrior is taking the plunge and embracing the smartphones it once tried to avoid.

In late July, the Pentagon’s acquisitions overseers put Nett Warrior on ice while they reviewed whether it made any sense to make soldiers wear eight pounds of gear to do less than what a phone weighing a few ounces (plus a tactical, encrypted radio) can offer. Evidently, the answer is no. A new solicitation from Nett Warrior is basically preparing to go shopping for smartphones.

It’s a spree that’ll make Google happy: The Army is insisting that the phones be powered by Android.

The solicitation tries not to use the S-word, preferring the comical acronym NW EUD, for “Nett Warrior End-User Device.” But there’s no mistaking it. The Army envisions a “smartphone or smartphone-like device (repackaged smartphone technology)” that can provide “commercial-based, integrated computer, display and data-entry capability for dismounted use in either standalone or networked configuration.”

Purpose? To “provide the Soldier with enhanced mission planning, monitoring, communication and situational awareness.”

That sounds a whole lot like Nett Warrior’s main device has now been reconceived as a phone. Just last fall, three different defense companies — Raytheon, Rockwell Collins and General Dynamics — were putting together Nett Warrior designs that relied on portable computers with peripherals like eye displays, radios and mapping tools snaking out through cumbersome cables.

See that picture above? That’s Rockwell Collins’ Nett Warrior design. Check out the banana-shaped keyboard dangling from the body armor.

The new “End User Device” won’t totally be a standalone system. An Army smartphone has to go places where there are no cell towers. It needs a way to tap into the Army’s wireless battlefield network. That’s why the device has to be able to “tether to a tactical radio via USB,” which shouldn’t be that big of a deal for a motivated handset-maker. But the other functionality the system needs to provide is mostly standard on any phone these days:

• “Integrated camera, GPS, compass, accelerometers”
• “Sunlight-readable”
• “Ability to dim the screen for night operations.”

A touchscreen “suitable for use with fire retardant gloves, in wet or dusty conditions” might require some reworking. But not a ton.

Fuller’s suggestion: Don’t kill Nett Warrior outright, which would be a bureaucratic hassle. (Not to mention an embarrassing concession that the Army’s acquisition system is so cumbersome that it missed the entire smartphone revolution.) Reconfigure Nett Warrior to maybe phase in smartphones. Fuller’s gone now — he’s helping train the Afghan security forces — but that appears to be exactly what’s going on.

It’s a concession to an emerging internal trend. The Army is crazy for apps and plans to launch its own app store very soon. Its vice chief, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, gushes about the Army’s new data network and raves about how well generic, commercial smartphones handled network usage during a recent test at the White Sands Missile Range this summer.

Incoming Chief of Staff Ray Odierno may soon decide whether to require soldiers to carry smartphones as a standard piece of gear — and if he’s got the money to pay for it. Seen in that context, it doesn’t make sense to have Nett Warrior as a separate communications tool.

Army representatives didn’t return repeated requests for comment by press time. That meant we couldn’t answer one of the biggest questions the solicitation poses: whether Nett Warrior’s acquiescence to the smartphone is the program’s redemption or, ultimately, its death knell.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman/Wired.com

[ADMk2]

God I hope that Android phone doesn't tell that soldier to jump over a cliff...

:rofl

[buglerbilly]

BAD person you!

[buglerbilly]

Satellite Phone Provides Global Wi-Fi Hotspots

Analysis by Scott Tharler

Wed Sep 21, 2011 09:24 AM ET



Iridium Extreme handset: Price varies by carrier; Iridium AxcessPoint: Under $200

The world's greatest hotspot isn't necessarily in New York, Ibiza or Las Vegas. That's because it's not about partying all night, but rather getting online wherever and whenever you need to. Global communications provider Iridium recently announced a two-part solution to enable Internet access anywhere on the planet with a clear view of the open sky.

First, enter their newest satellite phone, the relatively compact Iridium Extreme. It may seem like a basic handset, with just a 200-character grayscale display, 100-entry phonebook, 30 hours of standby and four hours of max talk time. But its resistance to dust, shock and jet-water make it the first satellite phone rated with U.S. Department of Defense Military Standard 810F durability. And it's also the first satellite phone with GPS-enabled SOS (activated with a dedicated button) and real-time tracking.

Where the Extreme becomes invaluable is in its ability to connect you through the Iridium global network to the Internet. One way is via your computer, after downloading their Direct Internet 3 software. Or for those who don't want to lug around a laptop, before the end of the year Iridium plans to release a little index card-sized AxcessPoint device for less than $200. Either way, you'll be able to create a hotspot capable of serving up to five devices. Just keep in mind, the fewer the simultaneous users, the faster the data speeds each will have. Of course, those speeds may be down in the dial-up range, but being able to send and receive messages in your email client and browse in Firefox or Internet Explorer virtually wherever you want...priceless.

Credit: Iridium Communications

[buglerbilly]

First French Secure Mobile Phones Delivered

BY PIERRE TRAN

Published: 23 Sep 2011 11:30

PARIS - The Direction Générale de l'Armement (DGA) has delivered a first batch of 1,000 secure mobile phones, able to handle secret classified information, the procurement office said in a Sept. 22 statement.

The mobile phones, dubbed Teorem, are intended to equip senior government officials, the armed forces and ministries handling classified defense information, the DGA said.

The delivery was made Sept. 7, the statement said. The phones allow users to speak and send, via modem, information classified "secret defense," the French equivalent of NATO secret classification, a DGA spokesman said.

A total of 14,000 units were ordered, with 7,000 for the armed services, from Thales, which developed and built the phones using algorithms and cryptographic components developed by the DGA.

DGA managed the phone contract for the secretary general for defense and national security, and the chief of staff.

No financial details were available.

[buglerbilly]

The iPhone 4S’ Talking Assistant Is a Military Veteran

By Spencer Ackerman October 5, 2011 | 11:18 am


Uploaded by brianboyko on Aug 30, 2010
Video produced by DARPA. I believe this upload to be kosher with DARPA's use policy. http://www.darpa.mil/usage.html

Siri, before you became the premiere feature of the new iPhone 4S, where did you come from?

Spencer, I started out as a gleam in the eye of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, as your Wired colleague Steven Levy tweeted. Darpa thought my artificial-intelligence algorithms for data collection and organization could help the military plan better. Would you like me to find you some references for that?

I would, Siri, thank you.

As it turns out, Siri — the voice-activated data assistant available on Apple’s iPhone upgrade — is a veteran. Nearly 10 years ago, Darpa funded a project known as PAL, for Personalized Assistant that Learns. It was an adaptive AI program for both data retrieval and data synthesis. (So not entirely like search, but not dissimilar, either.) If you told PAL what information you needed, and it observed what you did with that information, it would figure out a more efficient path to acquiring and sorting relevant information the next time around.

The project started out with a California company called SRI International. With a five-year, multimillion dollar grant from Darpa under the PAL program, SRI developed a system called CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. (Check out this handy chart of its architecture.) ”The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems,” it explained, “that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”

Put more simply, “The idea is to develop a system that will adapt to the user, instead of the other way around,” a PAL project partner told a fresh-faced Noah Shachtman way back in 2003. Technophobic New York Times columnist William Safire sputtered that Darpa was ushering in “a world light-years beyond the Matrix,” with dire implications for the person “that PAL’s user is looking at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world?”

As Darpa tried to show in the corny instructional video above, PAL didn’t work the way Safire thought it did. In the video’s hypothetical scenario, the military is in the middle of a humanitarian aid mission when a terrorist group fires a rocket-propelled grenade at a cargo plane. PAL — then quaintly hosted on a desktop — anticipates an officer’s question. “These-are-the-additional-security-forces-in-theater-that-are-available,” a Vocodered voice from a computer tells the officer, like it was the Enterprise answering Captain Kirk, as icons pop up on a screen to illustrate the point.

An Air Force major, new to the fictional task force, gets up to speed on the aid mission by asking PAL for displays of the command plan. “These are my priorities,” he tells it, tapping the screen with his finger. (Darpa seems to have anticipated that by the time PAL was ready, everyone would have a touchscreen desktop monitor.) And just like that, the major has planned his day, telling PAL what briefings he plans to attend. “Here-are-the-materials-you-need-for-the-meeting,” PAL replied, as it collated them into a folder.

Perhaps PAL was geared to be more like a PDA than the Enterprise’s computer. (No bureaucratic headquarters task is too complicated for a super-algorithm!) Then again, once PAL is networked with other officers’ PALs, it becomes easy to spot the erratic behavior of a fictional ship, alerting the task force to a potential terrorist threat.

By 2008 — with the PAL project not bearing fruit — SRI didn’t want to miss out on the commercial opportunities of iPhone apps. So it spun off a company called Siri Incorporated to develop what became the first iteration of the Siri app — a so-called “do engine” that weaved user preferences with existing web functions to, say, let you know what time the nearest Iron Man showing started. (It wasn’t voice-activated.) Apple thought the Siri’s tech showed promise, so it paid a rumored $150 to $200 million for the company. On Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook finally explained what Apple had in mind.

In other words, you probably won’t be using Siri to track any terrorists on your iPhone 4S. Chances are you’ll ask Siri to find you a nearby restaurant with an available table; a phone number from the depths of your email inbox; or tell you how long it’ll take you to get from the office to the airport in traffic. In fact, according to an SRI veteran, Siri is way more powerful than what Darpa and SRI had in mind. “It’s not just connected to various Web services, but also to your calendar and contacts and music and everything on the phone,” Norman Minarsky of SRI told Technology Review on Tuesday.

But what if you’re in the military, and you want to take Siri back to its PAL roots? Best of luck to you. Obviously, there’s no PAL in usage. Five years after the iPhone launched the smartphone revolution, the military is barely catching up. Only the Army is seriously considering requiring its soldiers to carry smartphones loaded with militarily relevant apps. (The Marines, to a lesser degree, are starting to as well.)

But it still doesn’t know how to secure the classified data that the phones will need to host. The Army is also schizophrenic about scotching its now-obsolete plans for networking soldiers together through wearable computers or incorporating smartphones into them. And budget crunches threaten to smother the Army’s entire smartphone experiment in the cradle. (Check Danger Room on Thursday for an update on Army smartphones in the age of defense austerity.)

So Siri, what should a soldier who wants to take advantage of you do?

She should probably consider getting an iPhone 4S. Would you like Metro directions to the Apple Store in the Pentagon City Mall?

No, I think I’m good. But how exactly could your functionality, hosted on a commercial iPhone 4S, be used to help the military directly?

Despite the early funding from Darpa to develop me, I’m not sure the Army has figured that question out.

Thank you, Siri, I suspected that was the answer.

[buglerbilly]

SteelCloud Announces Support for DoD Android Mobile Devices

MobileWorks DE Delivers Secure Platform for Good and Android

09:22 GMT, October 6, 2011 ASHBURN, Va. | SteelCloud, Inc., a leading developer of mobility appliance and VMware solutions today announced that MobileWorks DoD Edition for Good is immediately available to support Google Android deployments within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). This new release of the MobileWorks DE compliance platform for the Good for Government mobile security suite adds secure protection for Android to existing support for Apple iOS mobile devices.

As announced in July, SteelCloud has partnered with Good Technology to deliver new mobile security management solutions to the DoD and Federal Government. MobileWorks DE for Good helps military commands minimize technology learning curves and complex security challenges associated with deployment and management of DoD-approved mobility solutions including Android and iOS.

"The approval to deploy Android again demonstrates the rapid expansion of innovative mobility options that are being made available to the DoD," said Brian Hajost, President, and CEO of SteelCloud. "We are pleased to build on our track record of delivering securely configured and compliant 'out of the box' platforms to now include both iOS and Android. Our timely MobileWorks DE release continues SteelCloud's commitment to help our military take mobility to the next level."

Available as a specialized hardware appliance or as VMware software, MobileWorks DE deploys a hardened Windows environment, Good for Government enterprise-class mobile mail and personal information management system, and support for iOS and Android in under 60 minutes. SteelCloud also offers STIG360, a compliancy support service that ensures deployed systems are kept up to date with appropriate STIGs and security guidance, significantly reducing the burden on budgets and staff. As a result, military commands are able to re-allocate IT resources to other mission-critical tasks rather than committing weeks or months to manual system deployment, hardening, and maintenance.

SteelCloud has created several special implementation bundles that include everything needed for any size command to quickly deploy their STIG and security configuration guidance compliant mobile device infrastructure. MobileWorks for Good/Android joins SteelCloud's existing MobileWorks for Good/iOS solution and STIG-compliant SteelWorks for BlackBerry solution.

[buglerbilly]

Army Shows Off Soldier Smartphone Beta

By Spencer Ackerman October 6, 2011 | 1:06 pm



It wasn’t one of those epic Steve Jobs product roll-outs. Not even close. But in an obscure warren of the Pentagon, the Army took a major step toward embracing the smartphone revolution that Jobs did so much to promote. Only the mobile device it unveiled is best described smartphone-esque — and it might cause bureaucratic and financial problems if the Army actually does decide soldiers need to carry real smartphones.

The phone-like thing you see above is what the Army is calling its End User Device. It’s the next design for the Army’s Nett Warrior system — an expensive program that’s tried, and failed, for 20 years to connect soldiers to one another through a suite of wearable computers, radios and keyboards. Now, it’s a device that weighs under a pound and connects to a radio. And it will very, very likely run on Google’s Android operating system.

That’s right. No more eight- to 15-pound pieces of kit to slap onto a soldier already humping a ton of body armor. No more banana-shaped keyboards hanging down from a load clip. No more cables connecting the whole thing that tangle a soldier up. And no more funky monocle attached to a helmet for a heads-up display. Nett Warrior, the descendant of another failed program called Land Warrior, has finally joined the 21st century.

With one very important distinction. “This is not a phone,” clarifies Brig. Gen. Camille Nichols, the leader of the Army office, called Program Executive Officer Soldier, in charge of the Nett Warrior program. And that could be a problem.


A Nett Warrior mock-up looked like this in 2010.

For the last few months at Danger Room, we’ve been reading the Army’s smoke signals about junking Nett Warrior’s cumbersome design — which did less for soldier data networking than the phone in your pocket did in 2008 — and starting from scratch. In July, the Pentagon’s acquisitions folks put Nett Warrior on pause for a re-think. Last month, the Army quietly solicited the mobile-phone industry about giving Nett Warrior a brain transplant — with its new smartphone-like brain powered by Android.

On Thursday morning, to a small group of reporters, the Army made it official. The End User Device is the new brain, heart and soul of Nett Warrior. It’s an Android device. Nett Warrior’s ears and mouth will remain a radio — specifically, the Army’s Joint Tactical Radio System. Taken together, the system will weigh less than three pounds, with more than two of those pounds coming from the Rifleman Radio.

The End User Device won’t be Wi-Fi enabled. In fact, if the Army has its way, it won’t ever connect to a civilian network. It’ll hook into the Army’s brand-new data nets, as well as other classified military networks. The devices themselves will encrypt data that they store; and there will be another level of encryption when transmitting or receiving data. No one wanted to say the word “WikiLeaks,” but it’s obvious that data security is a big, big concern for the Army.

Soldiers who are used to the smartphones they carry in civilian life will find the End User Device pretty familiar — up to a point. Apps? It’s got them, though the kinks are being worked out. Nichols said that she anticipates the devices will connect to the Army’s forthcoming App Store, Marketplace — which Danger Room exclusively reported on in April.

There — or, perhaps, loaded onto the Device from jump — soldiers will find a variety of useful apps. A civilian directly overseeing Nett Warrior, Bill Brower, said the Device will run a mapping-and-tracking function similar to Blue Force Tracker, a program that lets soldiers keep track of where their colleagues are on the battlefield to avoid friendly-fire incidents and know how far away help is. There will be a “mission planning tool” that lets commanders design and then send out their plans for a given task.

Nichols’ shop doesn’t know whose hardware will actually become the End User Device. Later this month, the Army will take about 60 phones that Nichols literally purchased from Best Buy off the shelf and test them in rugged conditions during a scheduled “Network Integrated Evaluation” exercise. There are a lot of questions — like which devices can stand up to the harsh, dirty, un-delicate conditions of a warzone; and which touchscreen is rugged and responsive enough to a soldier jabbing at it with a finger wrapped in a flame-retardant glove.

Oh, and it won’t just be phones tested out at the exercise. Tablets will be tested, too. In order to ensure that Nett Warrior doesn’t fall back behind contemporary tech, every year devices will be put to the test to figure out what the next-gen End User Device should be. Someday, Brower says, it could be a tablet.

But however the devices perform, the winner is Google. iPhones will not be part of the October test, Brower confirms to Danger Room. Neither will any Windows phones. This is an Android party.

“No disrespect,” Brower says.

But even with Nett Warrior’s massive upgrade, there’s still one big problem looming over it. It’s not a phone.

And the Army brass loves smartphones. For the past year-plus, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, its deputy chief of staff, has been flirting with the idea of requiring soldiers to carry smartphones for all their communications and data needs. Supporting smartphones is one of the main rationales for the Army’s new data network. The Army’s Training and Doctrine command (TRADOC) created a Mobile Applications Branch and a program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications to think through the specifics of an Army smartphone program, from data security to configurations to the kinds of apps worth having. This program is active and ongoing.

You can see the redundancy coming down the pike. It doesn’t make any sense for Nett Warrior to equip soldiers with an End User Device while the Army also requires soldiers to carry a smartphone — which will probably do everything Nett Warrior does; run on the same secure network; host the same Marketplace app store; host email; and also — oh yeah — be a phone. And this is an era where defense budgets are declining drastically, with the Army likely to face major funding cuts.

Nichols concedes the possible redundancy between the End User Device and potential Army smartphones is a problem. “We’ll have to work through TRADOC,” she says, to figure out what device or system wins out “if they merge, or don’t merge.”

But for now, the new Nett Warrior is moving full speed ahead. By mid-2012, Brower says, the Army will figure out what manufacturer will make the Nett Warrior End User Device, a crucial step for getting them into the hands of soldiers.

“We’re coming truly into the 21st century,” a proud Nichols beamed. It took long enough.

Photos: Spencer Ackerman

[buglerbilly]

Nett Warrior Kicks Clunk to the Curb

by Christian on October 6, 2011



The resounding grumbling from Soldiers was finally heard loud and clear by officials at PEO Soldier who saw the budget writing on the wall and decided on a radical redesign of what was once Land Warrior.

In a story to run tomorrow morning on Military.com we report:


The Army has abandoned its decades-long effort to pack nearly 20 pounds of batteries, computer processors and displays on future Soldiers in favor of a simpler solution that uses technology already in many Joes’ pockets.

Officials with the Fort Belvoir, Va.-based PEO Soldier told reporters Oct. 6 that they had decided to configure the so-called “Nett Warrior” system to use a commercially-available smart phone plugged into a secure tactical radio.

“There’s significant cost and weight savings in this approach,” said Nett Warrior deputy program manager Bill Brower. “We took out about 70 percent of the weight” from the original system.

Don’t say we didn’t tell you so…

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz1a3QHdvqE
Kit Up!

[buglerbilly]

Via Soldier Systems blog...........

The End User Device

October 7th, 2011

Already the techno websites are making much hay of the Army’s move to a new End User Device that will, most assuredly, wipe the notion of what was Land Warrior/Nett Warrior from our collective bad memories. By removing 70% of the weight from the Soldier, the End User Device is simultaneously enhancing the capability of the system as a whole.

What has tongues wagging is that, thankfully, the Android-based systems currently being evaluated are not phones. That’s right. As PEO Soldier, BG Camille Nichols stated at yesterday’s media roundtable, they are NOT 3G devices. Instead, the Army will connect these End User Devices to the Rifleman’s Radio variant of the Joint Tactical Radio System or JTRS. It is pronounced “jitters” as in, that radio system that is still in development hell after 15 years gives me the JTRS. At any rate, the Rifleman’s Radio segment of JTRS actually works and much better than its predecessors the PRC 126, 127 or God forbid 68 (if you are old enough). Plus, it handles data pretty well which is critical for a system like this.

Why no 3G you might ask? Simple, it’s all about the infrastructure, or lack thereof. Oddly enough, we rarely fight in places with a nice, new 3G (or better) network in place. And even if it is there, the bad guys are using it so we have to knock it out in order to disrupt their Command & Control. Sure, there are new portable mobile networks being developed, but they are still just phone networks that rely on switches. A radio on the other hand does not. Radios can talk to other radios without a switch and if a redundant mobile network goes down, radios continue to Soldier on. Yes, we know that a cellphone uses a radio. Unfortunately, it requires a complex infrastructure to work. Like it or not, the Rifleman’s Radio is the key here.

This strategy can also be cheaper. If a newer End User Device is approved you aren’t stuck with that pesky contract. Instead, you just go out and buy the new one. Likewise, if we upgrade radios there’s no need to replace everything.

And then, there’s that whole accreditation issue. How do you keep the data and access to the network safe safe from the enemy? That’s the current long pole in the tent, working out the security for the device. But, we are very pleased to hear, that the Army gets it. Unfortunately, those writing about it don’t seem to.

Most of the comments flying around the interwebs about this issue are confounded about why we can’t just go buy the latest ‘Droid, let the troops upload some apps, and go kick ass. That’s because those commenting know two things about warfighting. That’s “Jack”, and you can guess the other one. What’s worse, they don’t seem to have much of a grasp on telecommunications either.

So, big points here:

Army looking at Android based tablet or handheld devices.
Army is not going 3G with the End User Device.
Mobile Devices require a network, networks don’t exist in places we tend to fight.
Consequently, radios are not going away.

Discuss amongst yourselves…

[buglerbilly]

Going To War? The Army's Got An App For That

By Carlo Munoz

Published: October 6, 2011



Washington: Going to war? The Army may soon have an app for that.

Today the Army rolled out the newest version of their NetWarrior program, a system designed to let individual soldiers tie into the massive command and control networks used by the Army to coordinate its operations.

This version of the system is centered around what the service is calling an "end user device," which is essentially an Android or iPhone-like smartphone that runs off the military's Joint Tactical Radio System, Bill Brower, deputy project manager for the Army's soldier warrior directorate, said today.

The setup, which weighs a total of five pounds, dwarfs previous iterations of the NetWarrior system, according to Brower.

The Army has 60 working prototypes of the new system now. Half are based on the smartphone platform, the other half are based on an iPad-like tablet, he added.

While these prototypes were built using commercially-available products, hardened to withstand the rigors of combat, Brower said the final versions of each system will be built up to military specifications and run off of secure DoD networks.

Once fielded, soldiers will be able to access an "app store" that will let them securely download a wide swath of programs into either the smartphone or tablet version of the system.

Those apps, Brower added, will let U.S. troops call in fire support missions, plan and coordinate operations and track friendly forces - all with the swipe of a finger.

While the parallels are unmistakable, Brig. Gen. Camille Nichols, head of PEO-Solider was quick to point out that NetWarrior "was not a phone" and the features that come on the system would be limited to military use.

But Brower acknowledged the use of the Android operating system as the basis for the new NetWarrior program is causing concern.

In a report released in August, software security firm McAffee ranked the Android as being the smartphone most suceptible to malware, beating out the iPhone and other similar models.

When asked why the Army chose the Android OS for NetWarrior, and not something more secure, like the OS that runs the iPhone, Brower said the service was still "evaluating products" and no decision has been made about using the Android.

But reiterating the point made by Nichols, the final version of NetWarrior will meet all the service's security and encryption requirements, regardless of which operating system the service ends up using.

[buglerbilly]

Begun, These Army Phone Wars Have

By Spencer Ackerman October 10, 2011 | 4:30 pm



After 20 years, the Army has finally figured out how it wants to network soldiers together in a warzone: through something like a smartphone. It’s called Nett Warrior, and it’s got the Army very excited. There’s only one problem: Defense companies already want to render it obsolete.

Defense giant ITT picked just the right time to roll out its new secure smartphone. It debuted what it’s calling the GhostRider, pictured above, at the Army’s annual Washington, D.C. gala, known as the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) convention. The GhostRider isn’t really a phone — it’s just hosted on a commercial Android smartphone, in this case a Motorola Atrix — it’s a small encryption device, called a crypto, installed on a phone near the battery. Put it together with the smartphone of your choice and it’s a secure phone — exactly what the Army wants to one day issue its soldiers, and is still figuring out how to do.

“It’s called the GhostRider because the crypto is a ghost riding on the phone,” explains ITT vice president Richard Takahashi. “Oh, we’re fans of the comic books, too.”

The idea is that the GhostRider’s crypto can allow secure phone calls and text messages, transmitted over the Army’s data networks, anywhere out in a warzone. A tap-and-hold of the smartphone’s touchscreen turns the phone display red, to signal that the security features are engaged. Send another GhostRider user a secure text, and she’ll be asked to enter a passcode before her phone can receive and decipher it. Its security standards have been certified by the crypto experts at the National Security Agency, ITT tells any visitor to its AUSA pavilion who’ll listen.

That’s for good reason. Figuring out how to secure data is a problem the Army is still grappling with as it figures out whether and how to equip its soldiers with smartphones.
But look at the display on the GhostRider in the photo above. Notice it’s a map, complete with icons that indicate a user’s position, along with those of others on the network. That’s very, very similar to the functionality offered by the Army’s revamped Nett Warrior platform. ITT is offering the GhostRider crypto and software for a maximum of $1,500 per phone. And it’s not shy about where it goes next.

“We think Nett Warrior should be something like this,” Takahashi says. “This can be the smart device.”

Just a few yards away from ITT on the top floor of the Washington Convention Center, the Army is showing off the latest version of Nett Warrior, which it announced to reporters only on Thursday. Nett Warrior depends on a smartphone without a phone called an End User Device, which right now relies on an Android operating system to power a host of apps — especially the mapping functions that the GhostRider also runs. Here’s what Nett Warrior’s display looks like, projected onto a flatscreen TV, when the mapping app is engaged.



The icons tell positioning of the user — that’ll be the blue chevron — allied and subordinate units, and significant places for an operation, like buildings to clear or placements of enemy fighters. (Pinch in to focus, and swipe to move elsewhere on the map.) But Nett Warrior also tells a lot more. Tap the icon of the six blue boxes, and standard-issue apps pop up. One is a feature to call for medevac. Another is a planning feature, so a company commander can send changes to a plan to his platoon and squad leaders. Yet another is a secure messaging system. The one thing Nett Warrior can’t do is make a phone call.

That took a long, long time to develop. As recently as last year, Nett Warrior relied on a cumbersome eight-pound series of wearable computers, peripherals and mapping tools — all of which provided less data to soldiers than the smartphones they already carried around in civilian life. Quietly, over the last few months, the Army gave Nett Warrior a brain transplant in order to salvage the 20-year-old program. They’re happy with it now.

Nett Warrior’s architects have yet to decide what kind of commercial phone will be used to host the End User Device. Last week, the one-star general in charge of the program, Brig. Gen. Camille Nichols, said that she bought 60 Android phones from Best Buy to take to a networking test that begins next week. ITT wants in on that test. And while no one puts it in these terms, it’s possible that the GhostRider — or the next special-brewed phone by the next defense company — could be a Nett Warrior killer.

That’s because the Army is out of money.

Defense budgets are in for a steep, steep decline, all because of the government’s overarching fixation on reducing the budget deficit. That puts the Army’s acquisition programs under heavy scrutiny. Especially future acquisitions — like, oh, say, End User Devices and smartphones. An Army spokesman — a specialist who only gives his name as Johnson — says he’s “supremely, honestly” confident that the Army can afford to issue its soldiers’ smartphones. And that raises the prospect of expensive redundancy between a smartphone and Nett Warrior’s End User Device.

It doesn’t have to be that way. For one thing, not everyone will get Nett Warrior: It’s designed for use only in warzones. Smartphones could be used back at the safety of a base, to host training manuals as well as other, more mundane Army apps. For another, the Army definitely wants a commercially available smartphone, in order to control costs — and it might balk at ITT’s $1,500 price point. Paul Mehney, another Army spokesman, says the Army is testing and testing and testing some more to ensure it thinks through “who needs this capacity” for smartphones and End User Devices precisely so some soldiers don’t end up carrying two devices that largely perform similar functions.

But the Army, frankly, isn’t a very good steward of its own money. A recent internal review found that it had wasted $3 billion-with-a-B annually between 2004 and 2009.

Mehney says that a final decision about issuing smartphones to soldiers will come “in the next couple of years.” ITT is clearly hoping to be in the running. No matter what, Nett Warrior has a leg up: It’s way further along in the development process. But that’s not a guarantee that the program will survive, or avoid yet another major revamping. Nett Warrior may have finally incorporated smartphones into its design. But the Army might still decide it likes smartphones better — and can’t afford both.

Photos: Spencer Ackerman

[buglerbilly]

Raytheon Shows the Army a Universal Translator App

By Spencer Ackerman October 10, 2011 | 12:32 pm



It’s been a white whale for the Army during a decade at war: building a translator that can let English-only troops communicate with Arabic, Dari and Pashto speakers in war zones. Now a huge defense contractor think it’s speared the elusive quarry — in app form.

Martha Lillie, a business manager at defense giant Raytheon, picks up a no-frills Motorola Atrix from a table at Raytheon’s booth at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. She loads an application, presses her thumb on the Atrix’s touchscreen and moves the phone close to her mouth. “Where are you going?” she asks.

Lillie passes the phone to her Pashto-speaking colleague, Ubaidullah Tokhi. The phone barks back a phrase in Pashto. Tokhi grips the phone and speaks something into it in his native language. A calm electronic voice soon follows: “I am going into the city.”

That’s TransTalk, a Raytheon translation app. It’s got a vocabulary of up to 30,000 words in Afghanistan’s major languages, and another 80,000 in Iraqi Arabic, all geared toward translating phrases and questions that soldiers on patrol and stationed at checkpoints use every day. Raytheon hopes that the Army will include it in the ground service’s forthcoming App Marketplace.

It’s a project that’s been a long time in coming — even though rudimentary speech-and-text translators are already available in the App Store and the Android Market. The Pentagon’s far-out research agency, Darpa, has funded overlapping programs for text and speech translation over the last 10 years, from semantic models so sophisticated they’ll (allegedly) be able to understand foreign slang to translators that can filter out background noise to foreign document readers. TransTalk is the child of one of those programs, known as Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, or TRANSTAC.

The fact that TransTalk is an app — built for an Android device — reflects a gamble by Raytheon. The Army is crazy about smartphones, hoping to one day issue each soldier a secure phone like it does a rifle, and has recently revamped a long-standing program for networking dismounted soldiers to run on a smartphone-like device. (It’s smart, loaded with data, just not a phone.) The smartest way to convince the Army that it should buy your translation tool is to forget about building a new piece of hardware to host it on.

That is, if the Army doesn’t run out of money before it can get its smartphone plans off the ground. The Army hasn’t yet figured out how to secure its data; what sort of phone it should require soldiers to get; or whether it should just give soldiers a stipend to buy their (Army-approved) device of choice. So far, the Army is inclining toward the Android operating system, rather than iOS or Windows, but you never know.

Raytheon figures an Android app is the way to go for TransTalk — a bulkier version of which Raytheon showed off last year. (There’s no iOS equivalent.) But anyone even remotely familiar with online or mobile communications will understand TransTalk pretty quickly. The interface is just two buttons with flags denoting the language lined up to be translated. A conversation isn’t just spoken aloud, it’s stored and is displayed like an Instant Message convo, complete with time of communication, red and blue fonts to denote the different speakers and an option for photos to be incorporated.

Lillie says TransTalk will be taken to Fort Bliss later this month for inclusion in the next round of the Army’s trial runs for its new data network. It won’t ever show up in a civilian Android Market, but because of its utility for “force protection, basic First Aid, basic interrogations and checkpoint” operations, Raytheon has other customers.

“It’s been funded by another government agency to improve the Dari model,” Lillie says. Spies need a translator, too, after all.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman

[buglerbilly]

First Look: Strike Industries Tactical iPhone Case

by Christian on October 11, 2011

With more smartphones and iPhones hitting the battlefield these days, it makes sense that some of the tactical accessory makers might want to dip into the personal communication device protection market.

We’ve looked at Magpul iPhone case Mod. 1 and after a few months of using it, we ditched it in favor of one that didn’t turn the phone on mute every time you put it in your pocket. We hear their newest version is better, but they’re not showing us the love, so we haven’t done a review.

Strike Industries is sort of Magpul-esque — making smart accessories for your AR and 1911 (think grips and swivels). But they’ve just developed a cool iPhone case dubbed “The Battle Case” that takes another approach to smartphone management.



Uploaded by StrikeIndustries on Sep 2, 2011
The SI battle case for the Apple iPhone 4. Our case was designed to eliminate the slow "reload" times of pulling your phone out of your pocket. Any cell phone user has experienced this, phone rings and you go to pull your phone only to find it hard to find and grip inside of a pocket. Our patent pending quick pull loop cuts your phone "reload" times further making you a much more efficient phone user. Loop also doubles as an extra point of contact to keep your phone secure in hand. Makes it easier for phone manipulation.
An idea born out of the battlefield, Kevlar. We are offering optional Kevlar inserts and lens protectors for our cases. There have been many survival stories of soldiers on the battlefield being saved by their mobile devices. We are adding an extra layer of protection by offering a Kevlar insert for the case. Inside our case is a slot specifically designed and sized for our Kevlar inserts. Add an extra layer of protection with Kevlar. We are also offering an optional lens protector. Keep your camera and lens protected. Combine them both for even more protection.
Our battle comes in a nice smooth streamline matte black honeycomb finish. It's also a premium slim case. We too dislike having a slim phone only to have to add a bulky case. Retain the sleek style of your iPhone while still adding a level of protection.
SI Battle case: "Battle Ready, Mission Capable"
Patent pending quick pull loop, pull fast, everytime
Matte black finish
Honeycomb texture
For Apple iPhone 4
Kevlar insert capable (optional equipment)
Lens protector capable (optional equipment)

*Note that our case with Kevlar insert is not bulletproof!


We got our hands on a couple of these bad boys and so far we’re diggin’ ‘em. The loop at the end takes some getting used to — the ergonomics of the phone change with the extended grip — but the design saved us when the phone dropped into the “death slot” of the Kit Up! Suburbanator and we executed a tactical retrieval while still rolling at 60.

Strike did not have Kevlar inserts to demo with our review model, but for EOD bubbas or Joes prone to getting blown up, it could mean the difference between making that Angry Birds record and bricking the thing. Strike says they’re also working on a camera protector for the Battle Case.

We’re sending a couple of these things down range for a combat eval and will get back with a more detailed review later. But for less than $12 bucks, this thing is more than just tacticool.

Read more: http://kitup.military.com/#ixzz1aWEbzbGt
Kit Up!

[buglerbilly]

New App Guides Commandos Parachuting Into Danger

By Spencer Ackerman October 17, 2011 | 9:15 am



Jumping out of an airplane wasn’t exactly a precision mission. Until now.

Sure, executing a jump takes precision: troops need to descend 25,000 feet onto a very specific spot, sometimes in hostile territory. But jumpers didn’t exactly have a guidance system to make sure they get to where they’re going.

A team comprising the Texas-based defense firm Nanohmics and Florida’s Complete Parachute Solutions is trying to change that. They’ve designed what may be a first — an avionics system for parachutists. Loaded onto a phone running either Android, Windows or Linux or a five-pound ruggedized laptop, the software, known as Glideline, calculates the variables of a pre-jump mission and even helps the parachutist stay on target as he descends.

The app’s display shows a series of concentric circles representing something parachutists call a wind cone. It’s a basically a vector or an air current you need to catch if you’re looking to land in a precise area. Veer outside of the cone, and you’re not making your drop zone. Problem is, when you’re parachuting, you don’t have a good way of knowing when you’re in the wind cone.

Glideline lets you know. Reading a signal from a GPS device worn by the parachutist and relying on latitude/longitude coordinates of the desired landing spot, the program shows a visual display of the cone and the parachutist’s relationship to it. Better yet, it shows you where the cone will be as you descend, so you can figure out how to stay in position.

Glideline’s functionality extends before the actual jump. A sub-program called Mission Planner allows the jumpmaster to enter the coordinates of a landing spot and tinker with the specifics of how the jump should go down. Real-time weather information cross references wind forecasts and calculates the optimum spot from which a jump should originate, and the optimal time to begin the jump. Terrain data from a GoogleEarth-like imager adds a sense of what troops should expect when they’re on the ground.

That’s not to say Glideline makes parachuting an automated process. It can’t remedy a malfunctioning chute. Nor can it find enemies below who might be expecting paratroopers.

Right now, Glideline isn’t totally an app. It also runs on a small laptop made by General Dynamics, the MR-1, that some airmen have taken to strapping onto their kit. James Hart, a retired Army master sergeant and 23-year Special Forces veteran who works for Complete Parachute Solutions, tells Danger Room that both his company and Nanohmics are looking toward revamping Glideline so it’s exclusively a mobile app.

It’s quite a step for an avionics system, which typically focus on incorporating the various control systems on an aircraft. But there’s an irony to Glideline. The real purpose of guiding a jump is to make the jump less important to operational planning.

“We want to concentrate on the actual mission at hand, which is not the jump,” says Hart. If you can automate as many of the variables on a complex process like falling out of a plane at 25,000 or so feet and landing in a precise target, then “you can concentrate on the end state” — that is, what you’ve just risked death to accomplish down on the ground.

Photos: Flickr/Oceanaris

[buglerbilly]

Special Operations Apps Integrates CamoScience for iPhone 4S — 96 Hours After Release

Integration of HD demonstrates GEOINT Camouflage for immediate SOF needs

07:39 GMT, October 18, 2011 SAN ANTONIO | GEOINT 2011 Symposium, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center — Special Operations Apps (SOA) has announced the release of CamoScience HD, the retooled application that now integrates the high-definition video of the Apple iPhone 4S for camouflage on demand, executed direct to garment and for next-generation adaptive camouflage, GEOINT Camouflage.

The integration of CamoScience HD comes 96 hours after the first iPhone 4S devices were made available to the public.

Special Operations Apps — a company affiliated with, but independent of MW Research and Development, Inc., both of which were founded by SOA president K. Dominic Cincotti — designs and fields applications specifically for warfighter mobile devices, touchscreens, laptops, and smartphones.

CamoScience HD was created as the result of a cluster of successive patent-pending technologies, including Photo-Real, Photo-Stealth, and simultaneous multi-spectral adaptive camouflage processes, introduced by Cincotti in 2007, 2009, and earlier this year. This camouflage was designed initially for unique Special Forces requirements. To develop CamoScience, Cincotti and his team partnered with Dr. Craig Hunter, who, with his brother Todd, founded Hunter Research & Technology. The Hunter brothers are renowned as the minds behind the iPhone 4's Theodolite App, the best-selling, award-winning navigation application.

"The SOA team delivers solutions from a unique perspective," said Todd Hunter. "They have one foot in the SOF world and one foot in the Apps world. What is so unique about SOA is that they seamlessly integrate perspectives of both worlds. They really live their motto, 'Warrior Legacy, Killer Apps.'"

"The SOA team is also fast and easy to work with," Hunter said. "And did I say fast?"

SOA apps are integrating technologies as disparate as Pedestrian Dead Reckoning, Human Geography, and Crowd Sourcing into what Cincotti calls U2-DOP2 — Unit/User Defined Operational Pictures and Perspectives.

"This is, essentially, a hierarchy of veracity based on point-of-the-spear and 'on point' philosophies," Cincotti said, "which means, for example, the aviator who sees the larger picture of a firefight doesn't have data-veracity precedence over the Operator actually engaged in the firefight. Yet intel from each is important."

"Through more robust geo-tagging and navigational tools, 'eyes on' has precedence that needs to be expressed in algorithms and developed into mobile Apps," said David Mullins, team leader of SOA's subject matter experts and a veteran Operator on four continents.

"This is what we preach and what we do and what we are developing — with U2-DOP2," said Cathlena Spencer, SOA's chief technology officer.

"Obviously there is an interest in turning COTS — commercially available off-the-shelf products into GOTS, government off-the-shelf products, for ease in training and dissemination," Spencer said. "We seek to bridge that gap with technologies available in 18-month increments."

"We customize, design, and retool with the Operator in mind," said Mark Tocci, SOA's vice president of business development, a patent-pending inventor and a former Ranger. "After all, as the saying goes: 'Humans are more important than hardware.'"

CamoScience and CamoScience HD are great examples of making relevant Commercially available Off-the-Shelf (COTS) technology customized for immediate military use, Cincotti said. "That's why we're working with Hunter Research & Technology and will continue to work with them," he said. "They are truly ahead of their time."

U2-DOP2 and Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) will create new systems for integrating and fusing useful data and feeding this mission-critical data directly to Operators, Cincotti said.

"We already know that in today's networked battlescape, every soldier is a sensor," he said, "but what has been created with all this data is a giant haystack. SOA is focused on finding that needle in the haystack — and that needle is going to look more like a Google-Maps push-pin perspective, like street-view.

"That needle now carries all attached metadata sources," Cincotti said.

Popular Science magazine interviewed Cincotti last month for a forthcoming article. SOA's CamoScience was featured on CNN and NBC news programs in July, in stories that focused on the next-generation camouflage capabilities it affords to military and hunting/outdoor markets and flexing the power of these lightweight smart devices with feature-rich app attributes, including geo-positioning, augmented reality overlays, and Area of Operation imagery.

Special Operations Apps launched in May, with the release of the CamoScience app by MW Research and Development, Inc. CamoScience is a photo application native to the Apple iPad 2/iPhone 4, with its Android counterpart soon to be released.

Cincotti, who also founded MW R&D, has created more than a dozen interlocking patent-pending adaptive camouflage and immersive-training technologies. As MW R&D president, Cincotti is credited with creating Photographic Camouflage, camera-derived camo design that is an orders-of-magnitude advance over paint-and-pattern concealment. Using site-specific, digitally enhanced GEOINT imaging, Cincotti has developed a cluster of intellectual properties, including Photo-Stealth, Photo-Real, T.R.I.G.G.E.R., RO.U.T.E.S., MW Gripz, Photo Veil, 3D Hot Targets, P.I.R.A.T.E., and P.I.R.A.T.E. 3D.

At Special Operations Apps, Cathlena Spencer, who the led the commercial-application team for CamoScience, serves as chief technology officer. Mark Tocci, a former Ranger and also a patent-pending inventor, is vice president of business development. David Mullins, a former Special Forces Operator with counter-terrorism and HALO experience, leads in-house subject matter experts. Cincotti, in addition to his duties at Special Operations Apps, continues as president of MW R&D.

Special Operations Apps (SOA) made the announcement of the new CamoScience HD and GEOINT Camouflage at the GEOINT 2011 Symposium in San Antonio, the preeminent event of the year for the defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities, with an estimated attendance of more than 4,000.

SOA's Spencer, Mullins, and Tocci are on-site at the GEOINT event to schedule meetings with companies, military personnel, and key industry insiders. They are discussing SOA's approach to the "15 Must-Have Apps for Operators" to be released in 2012 for the forthcoming SF App Store; scouting developers and companies with app features to integrate into SOA app solutions; and looking for "great-but overlooked" apps already in the market.

GEOINT Symposia are presented annually by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), the only organization dedicated to promoting the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and building a stronger GEOINT Community across industry, academia, government, professional organizations, and individual stakeholders.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Thales Easy Talk

Posted by Christina Mackenzie at 10/21/2011 10:53 PM CDT

Remember the adage that you know you’re getting old when policemen start looking young? And what does every young person you know have? A smartphone. They all know how to use them; the technology requires no apprenticeship. So Thales applied the same technology for the Every Talk smartphone, a ruggedized Push-to-Talk terminal which adds broadband capabilities to existing Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) networks used by law enforcement, first responders and so on, having understood that those of an age to be on-the-street police officers, active fire-fighters etc. can just pick it up and will know how to use it instantly.



Thales was showing Every Talk at the Milipol show after launching it at the Tetra World Congress in Budapest six months ago.

The Every Talk, which costs just marginally more per unit than an off-the-shelf smartphone, will not only replace existing walkie-talkies and serve as a normal mobile phone but it also sends data, images and video instantly— either to the command center and/or to the user’s colleagues. The user can also receive maps and building floor plans, for example. It can also be used discreetly in a backpack with a small on-the-shoulder camera to send videos or photos of a crowd, for example.

The system can use both the public network and a private network, so it would continue to function even if the public network were being scrambled by authorities for security reasons, as happened in London in the 7 July 2005 bomb attacks when first responders found they could no longer communicate with each other after the Metropolitan police scrambled the mobile phone network.

Easy Talk was developed at the request of the French interior ministry and first responders, but can be used, just like any smartphone, anywhere in the world. But you'd need to wear baggy trousers if you wanted to put it in your pocket because the ruggedness does make it bulkier than your office smartphone.

[buglerbilly]

MILCOM 2011: USMC adopts MONAX for humanitarian exercises

08 November 2011 - 13:43 by Andrew White



The US Marine Corps (USMC) has selected Lockheed Martin's (LM's) MONAX tactical smartphone solution to support humanitarian and disaster exercises, company officials revealed on 8 November.

According to LM, the USMC Forces Pacific Experimentation Center will be supplied with a single MONAX base station and 20 handheld Lynx devices following their procurement by the Office of Naval Research.

It is understood the capability will initially be used for exercise purposes. However, there is potential for use abroad as USMC troops are regularly involved in humanitarian operations worldwide due to the force's expeditionary nature. Most recent examples include missions in Japan, following March's earthquake, and Haiti.

MONAX is designed to provide a portable and secure 4G network for voice, data and video capabilities, based around commercial smartphone technology. It is believed to have already been adopted by the US Special Operations Command in Africa.

The system is frequency flexible, capable of connecting hundreds of users to a single base station within the network and relies upon a secure RF link protected through exportable encryption for joint and coalition operations, LM said.

Tests conducted in September were also understood to include MONAX's integration onto a Persistent Threat Detection System aerostat at Yuma Proving Grounds in September, providing ranges up to 45km. Earlier in the year, MONAX was used during the Empire Challenge exercise to stream video intelligence to warfighters via smartphones.

[buglerbilly]

A bit more on this..................

LockMart MONAX

November 13th, 2011



Lockheed Martin’s MONAX is a secure 4G cellular network. It consists of the MONAX Lynx applique for smartphones that connects them with the MONAX XG Base Station infrastructure. What makes the system even more interesting is that it includes an inherent app store to allow the preview and use of smartphone apps while connected to the network. Additionally, the network infrastructure can exist on land or air platforms and can support hundreds of simultaneous users rather than the 40 associated with standard cellular systems.



Uploaded by LockheedMartinVideos on Jan 12, 2011

MONAX is a powerful, new communications system that combines the convenience of smartphone technology with the power and flexibility of a secure, highly portable infrastructure. MONAX gives our nation's warfighters the convenient and immediate communication capability they need to achieve mission success.

The Marine Corps Forces Pacific Experimentation Center has purchased a MONAX system through the Office of Naval Research. They will use it for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mission exercises.

www.lockheedmartin.com/products/monax

[buglerbilly]

Army may Change Standard for Classified Info on Smartphones

December 01, 2011

Stars and Stripes|by Chris Carroll

WASHINGTON -- The Army may take another look at how it decides what information is classified as it looks to ease the integration of popular mobile devices like iPads, iPhones and Android-based smartphones.

The only popular smartphones now approved for widespread use on DOD computer networks are Blackberries, and only for unclassified email. But an Android-based phone from Dell was recently approved for use in testing and pilot programs, and many experts say the Pentagon is likely to open the door wider in coming months.

But smartphones and tablets connected to wireless Internet or public cellphone networks are far more restricted in what information they are permitted to access than computers wired to secure networks. Classified communications are not likely to become a common smartphone use any time soon, but a partial solution might lie in reducing requirements for deciding what data or communications can go unclassified, an Army official said.

In an interview with Military Times, Army Chief Scientist Scott Fish said some battalion-level information could be downgraded to unclassified, making smartphones more operationally useful. Sensitive higher-level information would remain classified, however.

"One thing we’re looking at is allowing information to flow a little better," Fish told the newspaper.

[buglerbilly]

Android to be Approved for DoD Use Within Weeks

December 09, 2011

Stars and Stripes|by Chris Carroll

WASHINGTON -- A version of Android that runs on Dell devices will be approved for day-to-day use in the Defense Department by the end of December, officials said Friday.

But the department's computer network overseers still can't say when the Pentagon at large will get a taste of the other dominant smartphone operating system, Apple's iOS, which powers iPhones and iPads.

Security, experts say, is the sticking point.

Currently, the only widely used smartphone that can officially be used in day-to-day operations on DOD networks is Blackberry, which controls only about 10 percent of the general smartphone market but dominates the Pentagon and other government agencies.

But in October, the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, posted guidelines for IT managers to begin pilot programs and tests with Apple and Dell Android devices.

"This doesn't mean people can suddenly start connecting iPhones to the network," said Tracy Sharpe, a spokeswoman for the Defense Information Systems Agency, which oversees how devices connect to the network.

It's taken about two months to get from that point to being nearly ready to post a Security Technical Implementation Guide, or STIG, for Android. STIGs are detailed documents that instruct managers how to introduce new devices onto defense networks. So what's the holdup with Apple?

Pentagon officials have declined to elaborate when asked for an explanation by Stars and Stripes, but mobile computing experts say part of the difficulty may lie in Apple's tight control over the iOS software.

Android, developed by Google and other companies, is "open-source" software, meaning it can be easily configured by users -- including DOD tech whizzes who want to install antivirus programs or other security measures.

But installing third-party security software is not currently possible with iPhones and iPads.

Widespread use of smartphones may be not be imminent, but when it finally comes, it will change the Pentagon just as it has changed the civilian world, where people increasingly run their lives from the touchscreens of their mobile phones, the official in charge of monitoring the latest science and technology for the Army said in an interview Friday.

"It's having an amazing effect commercially on how we interact, and I believe we'll see a similar kind of revolution within the military eventually," said Scott Fish, Army chief scientist.

The Army is already doing widespread testing of prototype smartphone-like devices for use in combat, he said. The devices could change the Army's tactics, he said.

"Formations could change," he said. "You could see groups being a little more dispersed but still doing their same tactical jobs."

More and more devices reaching the field will bring increased feedback from soldiers, he said, who will tell Army and commercial developers what they need, driving new innovation.

Beyond combat, tablets and smartphones could change logistics and supply, simplifying operations to move mountains of materiel.

"I would see devices like this incorporating things like bar-code readers, image analyzers, magnetic swiping capability, [radio frequency identification readers,]" he said. "Eventually propagation of that stuff into devices on the battlefield make logistical tracking much more accurate, timely and effective overall."

[buglerbilly]

Rubber Band Gives Your Smart Phone a Zoom

Analysis by Nic Halverson

Fri Dec 9, 2011 09:29 AM ET



DNEWS VIDEO: Gadgets and Gizmos For all you smart phone shutterbugs out there who've pined for photos with sharper details, here's a brilliantly simple product. The Macro Cell Lens Band is a sturdy rubber band with a built-in macro lens that fits on just about any smart phone. With it, you can capture the unique pattern on a butterfly wing or snow flake. At $15, Santa probably can afford to grant that wish.

As Gizmodo notes, the band does cover up the iPhone 4's flash, but as long as you're not taking pictures in a cave, you'll probably be fine.

[Via PhotoJojo]

Credit: PhotoJojo

http://photojojo.com/

[buglerbilly]

App for Every Soldier

U.S. Army Initiative Explores Smartphone Technology

By LANCE M. BACON

Published: 11 December 2011

Whether you want to learn the different bugle calls or call in an artillery strike, there's an app for that.

And some of the most promising and powerful apps are proving problematic for a U.S. Army trying to provide this information without putting its network at risk.

Indeed, digital applications are off the chain. Most centers of excellence are developing their own apps. The Signal Center of Excellence recently surpassed 1 million downloads over iTunes and the Android market. The service is soon to launch the Army Market Place, which will offer "official" apps that are both Army-tested and approved.

The potential is limitless, as apps are already proving their worth.

For example, the Army Blue Book app provides easy access to information on Army culture, history, training and regulations - and it saved $750,000 in printing costs, according to Army data. The Sustainment Soldiers Advanced Individual Training course app showed improvements in proficiency test scores.

The Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications initiative stands at the heart of this endeavor. Conceptualized in September 2009, the unfunded program is run by the Army's chief information officer and Army Capabilities Integration Center, with support from Army Training and Doctrine Command. It provides applications for select administrative, training and tactical functions with three stated goals:

■ Evaluate new training approaches that allow soldiers to learn anytime or anywhere (providing a "persistent learning environment").

■ Explore smartphone potential to enable every soldier to access information and learning in any environment.

■ Develop means to rapidly update and share information - at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods...........................

EDITED.....only intro to article..........read more here: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=8537356&c=FEA&s=TEC