by James T. Areddy, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
China’s military is under attack. At least its Web site is…from hackers.
In a sign that China’s Ministry of National Defense faces the same kind of Internet security challenges that militaries around the world have reported, its new Web site was attacked more than 2.3 million times within a month of its August launch. The state-run People’s Daily newspaper reported that revelation Wednesday in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Chinese defense department’s site, Ji Guilin.
by Sky Canaves, Lead Editor, China Journal, The Wall Street Journal
China’s normally secretive Ministry of Defense launched its first Web site for trial operation on Thursday, in Chinese and English versions, as part of an effort to promote the transparency and improve perceptions of the world’s largest military force.
by Amy Gahran, Contributor, Poynter Online, E-Media Tidbits
This morning when I checked the news about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, I saw many people on Twitter reporting that the Indian police or government had asked Twitter users to please stop reporting on police and military operations related to the attacks.
The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the “laws of cyberspace.”
In real life, people rarely want to get into a firefight. But in many video games, particularly military-themed first-person shooters (FPS) like the just-released Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you can’t wait to step into the line of fire. After all, you’re an elite commando, and there’s no way not to fight–no button to press to call your nervous wreck of a wife or go hang out with the kids. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you take while gunning down whole platoons of terrorists and mercenaries, because this is red-blooded escapism at its geekiest. So shut up and start shooting, guys.
But unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now–or at least loosely based on designs that could eventually reach the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, as optimistic as game developers might be about a high-tech replacement for the M-16 assault rifle, there are no plasma rifles or rail guns in your arsenal. … So as this successful genre continues to deliver best-selling titles, will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?
Call it Gruntbook. As part of its long-term effort to pioneer “network-centric warfare,” the U.S. military has rolled out a social-networking system for soldiers in Iraq. Called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR, the system was developed by DARPA, the same Defense Department agency that spearheaded the creation of the Internet 40 years ago.
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