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Comments: 128 +- Technology: Android Goes To the Battlefield on Saturday October 24, @11:23AM
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wiseandroid writes "Google's mobile operating system Android has won plenty of adherents among cellphone makers and gadget manufacturers since its 2007 debut. Now defense contractor Raytheon is preparing it for a more urgent mission: saving lives in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using Android software tools, Raytheon engineers have built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. Raytheon calls the entire framework the Raytheon Android Tactical System, or RATS for short. Mark Bigham, a vice president of business development in Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems unit, says the company selected Android because its open source nature made developing applications easy."
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Saving lives?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Saving lives?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.
The lives they're saving are on our side. Also, this article isn't talking about Android being used as a weapon.
Parent
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I heard about people in Redmond using chairs as weapons.
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The lives they're saving are on our side. Our "side"? Imperial stormtroopers Their "side"? Mothers, children and helpless villagers, "inconveniently located" on top of something we want to steal.
Ahem. As one of those "Imperial stormtroopers", I'd ask you if you've ever deployed overseas to see what really happens over there. In the Army we call CNN "Pravda [wikipedia.org]". Because their reporting has the same relationship to the truth that the old USSR paper did. I deployed to Iraq for a year. I didn't kill anybody, and our unit helped to build schools and hospitals. But that doesn't help CNN's political agenda, so they never reported it, though we had a CNN reporter embedded for about a week.
Re:Saving lives?? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that you consider CNN "Pravda" is disconcerting. I suspect there's a bit of indoctrination going on in the Army. How many of those who enlist had actually heard of Pravda until they joined the military?
Besides, CNN was quite the cheerleader when the Iraq war started and didn't do their job of keeping the government honest.
Of course, the sacrifices that men and women like you made are real and we appreciate it. We just hate to see your valor wasted on an unnecessary war.
Parent
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"The fact that you consider CNN "Pravda" is disconcerting. I suspect there's a bit of indoctrination going on in the Army."
Old Navy here. Naturally, I can't speak for the Army - but we had our own opinions of the newspapers. They seldom reported anything the way it was. When we made the papers, each paper put it's own spin on things, sometimes to the point that the story was simply untrue. Left leaning newspapers generally try to make us look bad, right leaning newspapers try to make us all look like he
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Have you ever watched JayWalking? They probably cut out all the people who knew the answers, but there's a lot of people who don't know less obscure stuff than the name of a Russian Newspaper.
Many of today's rank-and-file soldiers were still in diapers when the original Pravda shut down in 1991.
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The bit about "inconveniently located" I can understand in Iraq. Afghanistan? Not so much.
As for mothers, children, and helpless villagers - give it a break. We went into Afghanistan on a legitimate mission, and I think we are justified in almost everything we've done there. We ain't killing women and children, and those adult male villagers aren't so very helpless as you might think. Men seldom are.
The Taliban should have handed over their Al Queda buddies when the US asked for them, and we wouldn't B
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I didn't defend anything. Reread his post, then mine.
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Unless you look at the fact and realize that the country of Afghanistan's innocent people were being help hostage and terrorized by what can only be described as gangsters, terrorists and organized crime bosses. Not saying the US doesn't have other motives for helping restore order to the country but to say the US just invade for the sake of resources is unfounded (please show me evidence that we have taken any natural resource at below market price). So to the point of your #3: who really is invading? S
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It all makes sense now. You are from Argentina. I was offering middle ground. Explaining why everything is not as black and white as you are painting it. You are shoving your black/white opinion down everyone's throat without even thinking about reality.
Certain American companies are gaining business from the efforts in the middle east that is true. They are NOT gaining it by stealing or unfairly taking anything from any country in the middle east. In fact its quite opposite. The American taxpayer is
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Don't forget the "fight for freedom" which means ours and not theirs.
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Re:Saving lives?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Having visited Iraq now and then during the war and "post" war period, I disagree. People almost invariably say they lost more than they gained. They used to have limited political freedom. Now they can't leave the house without worrying about getting shot.
Parent
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Re:Saving lives?? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a fascinating distinction for people halfway around the planet to debate about in online forums.
For the people in Iraq who just want to live their lives in peace, it's not really that salient on a day-to-day basis. What matters to them is that their existence is orders of magnitude more perilous post-invasion than it was in the Saddam days.
Parent
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~_~ God this is as bad as in the olden days. Sure we killed 2/3rds of the populace and they will likely not survive the winter, they have god now, and with love and fear in their hearts a couple of them might go to heaven. Except democracy doesn't even promise heaven, just that maybe 50years from now the country might b
Re:Saving lives?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm most certainly not a liberal or a neocon - but you've sampled the Koo-Aid. The fact is, life in Iraq was much more stable under Saddam than it is today. Immeasurably more stable. You really should find some articles about the bookstores in Iraq. What happened to them epitomizes what has happened throughout Iraq.
Yeah, Saddam was an evil sumbitch, and he deserved to die, but he was a stabilizing force, no matter how much we disliked him. IMHO, pure arrogance on the part of a neocon president forced the military to invade Iraq.
Parent
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Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications?
Honestly, I have not noticed this trend at all. This is the first instance, in fact.
Re:Saving lives?? (Score:5, Informative)
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
Parent
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He also said something about fixed fortifications and stupidity and yet managed to get bogged down by undermanned third-rate forts on the rear-guard of the Maginot line. I wouldn't exactly quote him for anything related to military matters. Bombast, bluster and looking like a pimp, maybe. After all, he was a cavalry officer who derided dragoons around ww1.
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A quote by Gen. George S. Patton. Likely the most over-hyped military leader in all of US Military History. The only thing he was particularly good at was PR. He's a completely mediocre commander otherwise.
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It's quite obvious that's who they are referring to. But effective soldiers kill a lot more people on the other side. Lives are not, in the balance, being saved -- unless the device somehow brings the conflict to a very rapid close. It may or may not be a good thing, but it's a fact.
acronym (Score:3, Funny)
Enemies List? (Score:2)
I wonder if they have an enemies list to complement the buddies list. Tactical systems are funny like that. You have users of the application -- the enemy combatants -- who don't really want to be users of your application.
Limited Distribution Benefits (Score:5, Interesting)
Android apps don't have to pass through a central app store to get widely distributed to a set of Android phones. So the military can limit distribution of the apps. They could even distribute an Android OS distro with a crypto key that is bonded to that phone's serial#, which is needed by any app to run or even to decompress/decrypt from the distribution package, so military apps can't be used or inspected outside the military's own phones.
Is there any way to do something like that on iPhones? Like at least just developing an app that doesn't get run through Apple at all (signing or uploaded to the App Store), but is just an install package downloadable from a website (perhaps with a password) and installable on a phone, perhaps with an unlock code. AFAICT, that's all locked out by Apple's iPhone architecture. Has anyone figured out how to do "distributed distribution", without needing Apple at the center of all of it? On iPhones that aren't jailbroken, just the stock iPhones that anyone can have?
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Is there any way to do something like that on iPhones?
Evidently, the iPod touch is already providing popular service to US troops in Iraq.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623 [newsweek.com]
Admittedly - that article's for translation software. It may not directly answer your question about military / restricted apps for the iPhone - but it seems to lay the foundation in that the DoD is already pretty okey-dokey with the use of these devices by the troops.
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http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/#deploying [apple.com]
There is the Apple Enterprise Developers program for creating and deploying in house apps.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/apply.html [apple.com]
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If you want to encrypt an app so it can't be opened without the proper key, you can just encrypt it with ANYTHING. PGP seems the best candidate. You don't need any special hardware or software configuration.
If you, instead, expect
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No. Because that would violate the law, alienate Apple (which is a major US corp, with all the politics and kickbacks that implies) which works on projects with DoD, and very likely result in a lawsuit that could set precedents against the DoD (not to mention consume some of that big budget without either its defense or its contractor kickback results) that pushed it away from some grey areas where it already does so (ie. violate the DMCA), and probably create trouble with congressmembers who are paid by th
G I JOE (Score:2)
Once again, Sci-Fi begets reality. This time toys go to the battlefield.
http://www.toyarchive.com/STAForSale/NEW2001+/GiJoe/MOSC/AFAPacRatMachineGun85a.jpg [toyarchive.com]
I believe there were three, and I had all of them as a kid. Seems like they were super flimsy and basically fell apart without even touching them.
I'll wait for the field trials (Score:2, Interesting)
It sounds good, but then again so did Land Warrior.
I can see it being useful in an urban environment, but can see a lot of issues with it in the mountains of Afghanistan. First being connectivity. Relying on a cell network in a 3rd world country doesn't seem like all that good of an idea. Getting a reliable signal in the mountains is hard as it is. It would be very bad for a unit to get used to using this system, and then get somewhere that it no longer works.
Second problem is EM signature. Cell phones
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Frequency hoping helps with this on regular military radios and cell phones can't do this.
What's that, "I hope this frequency hasn't been compromised"? Anyway, aren't CDMA phones spread-spectrum? It'll work in the USA! Er, wait...
But not really. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an article based on a Raytheon press release. What hardware does said application run on? Even the article suggested there's no established contract yet.
I like the idea that open source/free software is getting more traction in this area, but no platform, no contract suggestes this is just fluff. Whether or not your bullshit meter started twitching that they've been working on this for two years is up to you.
Bonus BS points that they throw in the "Oh, and it could also be a biometric scanner". Feature creep comes early.
Android Validation (Score:2)
Android's been getting a lot of tech press lately. I'm not sure who that press impacts - and while we're smarmy about the new Droid ad, I'm not sure who that's impacting either - the existing Android faithful or a new market.
Now Forbes - the darling of investors and managers - is telling that audience that a major defense contractor with an iconic American name in electronics has selected Android.
To top it off, the follow-on links given to Forbes readers are:
Motorola CEO Talks Android [forbes.com]
Google's Android To In [forbes.com]
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http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1417047&cid=29857831 [slashdot.org]
We'll see.
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And the Slashdot article mentioning it - http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/2312233 [slashdot.org]
Software developers and the US Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a "ballistics calculator" called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight's Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.'
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Thanks - thought it was covered, but evidently didn't search right.
Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there any way for contributors to the free software movement to block use of their software by military contractors?
That would be contrary to the goals of the GPL, which aims to grant freedom to use the software for any purpose and to modify it to achieve those purposes. You'd need to use a different license to achieve your aims.
Parent
Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? (Score:5, Funny)
If you shoot a projectile that contains embedded GPL'd code do you have to provide the victim with a copy of the code since there was a "distribution"?
Parent
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Geneva conventions? What part of "you are free to use the program for any purpose" don't you understand?
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The US's wars right now are not a very good example, but sometimes wars ARE about saving lives and helping people, not just about mobilizing one's political base, handing money to VP's friends, grabbing oil and avenging daddy's rep.
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Is there any way for contributors to the free software movement to block use of their software by military contractors?
OK - so you want to restrict military contractors from using Linux, anything GNU and any other F/OSS?
Did you just wake up?
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If the military in my country relied on proprietary software written by a foreign corporation I would be very afraid for my country.
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Mark Bigham, a vice president of business development in Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems unit, says the company selected Android because its open-source nature made developing applications easy." (emphasis mine)
If that was the case, then Open Source systems would have more applications than closed source counterparts. But this is hardly the case.
They do. I'm sure you'll find a dozen office suites even if you are not counting forks.
In addition, I see far more substandard, half-baked software on "open" systems than closed ones. What's going on?
What is going on is that companies have a separate testing department (read: separate people) and software (such as litmus) to support the process. Open-Source projects partially don't have the man-months to fix all bugs. Sometimes they just stop developing after they solved their use case and disregard others (in the worst case this means the program is accessible for people who have coded in it).
An example: Open Source OO.o is still as buggy and a pain to use on its Open source native OS (read Linux), though it runs and feels better on closed source Windows. This is after a decade of development. Do not tell me OO.o does not have resources. I just do not understand this argument.
That has to do with the
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What is a US provider of "defense" doing abroad, instead of defending the US?
I think that this all has something to do with the name change from the War Department to the Department of Defense.
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Did Raytheon miss the announcement that linux is open source too?
You know, it's entirely possible that they did. You should email them this link right away!
http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html [android.com]