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"c0lo" writes:

A Serbo-Croatian-speaking agent and his Russian handler turned to Google Translate to ensure smooth operational communication. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was reading the logs in real-time:

A new investigation by the Insider looks into the operations of Russia's elite squad, the Center 795, which was established after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The squad comprises elite agents tasked with carrying out the most critical operations, including collecting battlefield intelligence, political assassinations, and abductions abroad.

To execute the operation on Western soil, the squad hired Darko Durovic, a Serbo-Croatian speaker living in the United States. He had mobility in Europe and no obvious ties to Russian intelligence, making him a convenient asset.

However, there was a major problem: Durovic spoke Serbo-Croatian, while his handler, Denis Alimov, spoke Russian. Neither was proficient in the other's native language to the level required for operational communication.

Therefore, they decided to use Google Translate to convert field reports and instructions. They sent translated messages through encrypted applications, which they deemed safe.

What they didn't take into account was that Google operates servers in the United States, which fall within the reach of an FBI surveillance warrant.

This allowed investigators to access the logs of these translations directly from the service provider, enabling them to read the entire operational communications thread in real-time, according to the Insider.

[...] The Insider writes that Russia will build another unit and will be more careful about the translation tools it uses. However, it is an "entirely different question" whether it will be more careful about the people it recruits.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Firm says requiring site blocks within 30 minutes breaks core Internet architecture:

Cloudflare said it has appealed a fine issued by Italy over the company's refusal to block access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The appeal is the latest step in Cloudflare's fight against Italy's Piracy Shield law.

Piracy Shield is "a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet," Cloudflare said in a blog post this week. "After Cloudflare resisted registering for Piracy Shield and challenged it in court, the Italian communications regulator, AGCOM, fined Cloudflare... We appealed that fine on March 8, and we continue to challenge the legality of Piracy Shield itself."

Cloudflare called the fine of 14.2 million euros ($16.4 million) "staggering." AGCOM issued the penalty in January 2026, saying Cloudflare flouted requirements to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders.

Cloudflare had previously resisted a blocking order it received in February 2025, arguing that it would require installing a filter on DNS requests that would raise latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren't subject to the dispute over piracy. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said that censoring the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would force the firm "not just to censor the content in Italy but globally."

Piracy Shield was designed to combat pirated streams of live sports events, requiring network operators to block domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes of receiving a copyright notification. Cloudflare said the fine should have been capped at 140,000 euros ($161,000), or 2 percent of its Italian earnings, but that "AGCOM calculated the fine based on our global revenue, resulting in a penalty nearly 100 times higher than the legal limit."

Despite its complaints about the size of the fine, Cloudflare said the principles at stake "are even larger" than the financial penalty. "Piracy Shield is an unsupervised electronic portal through which an unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses that online service providers registered with Piracy Shield are then required to block within 30 minutes," Cloudflare said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Planned EU ban on nudify apps would likely force Musk to make Grok less "spicy":

The European Union may soon ban nudify apps after Elon Musk's chatbot Grok emerged as a prime example of the dangers of an AI platform failing to block outputs that sexualized images of real people, including children.

In a joint press release, the European Parliament's Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees confirmed that lawmakers voted 101–9 (with 8 abstentions) to simplify the Artificial Intelligence Act and "propose bans on AI 'nudifier' systems."

The vote came after the European Commission concluded [PDF] earlier this year that the AI Act does not prohibit "AI systems that generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or sexually explicit deepfake nudes." At that time, the Commission signaled that Parliament members were already proposing ways to amend the law to strengthen protections against such harmful content.

If the amendment passes, which seems likely, it would foil Elon Musk's plan to blame users for harmful outputs. Earlier this year, xAI declined to introduce safeguards to block outputs, vowing to suspend and hold users legally accountable for any CSAM or non-consensual intimate imagery they generate. Instead, the feature was paywalled, limited to subscribers who could reportedly continue generating explicit content without the consent of real people whose images were fed into Grok.

In the US, xAI has seemingly faced few consequences for Grok's outputs, but had the Take It Down Act been in play—it takes effect in May—the company could have risked billions in fines. It's possible that Musk's tactic of paywalling the feature and blocking Grok from spouting harmful outputs in response to prompts on X was intended to mitigate some of that risk ahead of that law's enforcement.

But if the EU bans nudify apps, perhaps as early as August, Musk would finally be forced to intervene, fine-tuning Grok to be less "spicy" than Musk likely wants or else risking violating the AI Act. That could cost xAI too much at a time when competing with its biggest rivals in the AI race demands substantial investments, with possible fines of up to 7 percent of its total worldwide annual turnover.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Powering it is probably easy. Keeping things cool in a vacuum is the hard part:

Nvidia isn't the only one eyeing orbit for AI factories. Elon Musk has talked often of putting data centers in space, which makes sense considering he recently merged the AI company he owns with the rocket company he owns. 

Space has some distinct advantages for data centers. For one, there are no zoning boards or neighbors to worry about annoying. You could likely power an orbital data center with solar power. There's also a ton of room, although the number of satellites is making orbit crowded. 

But there's a big challenge that Nvidia is facing as it designs its Space-1 Vera Rubin module computer. How do you keep chips cool in a vacuum?

"In space, there's no conduction, there's no convection, it's just radiation," Huang said. "So we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space."

It'll probably be a little bit before we get data centers beyond the atmosphere, but Nvidia had other announcements this week that will take off much sooner. There's NemoClaw, a tech stack for helping install the viral OpenClaw AI software. (If you feel comfortable installing that powerful AI agent, which, maybe, you shouldn't.) There was a collaboration with Disney to make a robotic Olaf, from the Frozen franchise, that can shuffle around Disney's theme parks. And then there's DLSS 5, an AI-powered upscaling tool for games that drew some pushback from gamers who worried it would undermine game creators' creative visions and look, well, sloppy.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Our view of Neanderthal life keeps getting more complex and vibrant:

Neanderthals may have used birch tar as more than just glue; it could have helped them ward off infection and even insect bites.

People from several modern Indigenous cultures, including the Mi'kmaq of eastern Canada, use tar from birch bark to treat skin infections and keep wounds from festering. We know from several archaeological sites that Neanderthals also knew how to extract birch tar and that they used it as an adhesive to haft weapons. A recent study tested distilled birch tar against the bacteria S. aureleus and E. coli and found that Neanderthals could easily have used the same material as medicine for their frequent injuries.

[...] A team led by archaeologist Tjaark Siemssen, of the University of Cologne and the University of Oxford, tested the resulting sticky mess against cultures of Staphylococcus aureus—best known for its role in skin infections and its evolution of the antibiotic-resistant MRSA strain—and the gut bacterium Escherichia coli, a frequent culprit in food poisoning.

Birch tar had no effect on the E. coli cultures, but it did stop, or at least slow down, the growth of S. aureus. Exactly how well depended on the species of birch and the concentration of the tar, probably because different birch species, and maybe even individual trees, produce tar with different combinations of chemical compounds. The most effective batch, taken from a silver birch (Betula pendula) tree, produced a "comparatively strong response." Meanwhile, results from four other trees ranged from mild to moderate, and another had no effect.

[...] Unsurprisingly, the antibiotic Gentamicin proved much more effective against S. aureus than any of the birch tar samples. That's because it is refined and concentrated, in contrast to whatever happens to be in birch tar. That's, why, for instance, we take aspirin instead of just chewing on willow bark for headaches. (Seriously, if you have a skin infection, go to the doctor; please do not just start setting birch tar on fire in your backyard to treat yourself at home. We did not tell you to do that.)

Knowing that birch tar does work, at least against S. aureus, and that Neanderthals would have had ample opportunity to figure that out, we can start thinking more seriously about this kind of antiseptic as part of Neanderthal life.

fliptop writes:

There was a time when downloading a video game felt like harmless fun. Today, it can feel a lot closer to opening a suspicious email attachment in 2005:

The recent revelation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating malware hidden inside games distributed through Steam should be a wake-up call -- not just for gamers, but for the entire tech ecosystem. Because if malicious code can slip into one of the world's largest and most trusted gaming platforms, we are no longer talking about edge-case vulnerabilities. We are talking about systemic risk.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: this was always the logical endpoint. For years, Big Tech platforms have scaled faster than their ability to meaningfully vet what flows through them. Whether it was social media, app stores, or ad networks, the model has been the same -- maximize volume, automate oversight, and trust that bad actors won't outpace the system.

[...] Today's cybercriminals are not lone hackers in hoodies. They are organized, adaptive, and increasingly AI-enabled in a lightly regulated AI environment. They can test payloads against detection systems before deployment. They can obfuscate malicious code to evade signature-based scanning. They can mimic legitimate developer behavior well enough to slip past automated review pipelines.

[...] The FBI's guidance to affected users -- monitor systems, remove suspicious files, report incidents -- underscores the reactive nature of the current model. By the time a federal agency is issuing cleanup instructions, the breach has already happened.

[...] What's needed is a shift in mindset. AI cannot just be a passive screening tool. It has to become part of a dynamic, adversarial defense system -- one that assumes breach attempts will happen and continuously adapts in real time. That means deeper behavioral analysis post-installation. It means zero-trust approaches applied not just to networks, but to software ecosystems. It means treating every piece of code as potentially hostile until proven otherwise over time, not just at the point of entry.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Workers who love 'synergizing paradigms' might be bad at their jobs:

Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like "synergistic leadership," or "growth-hacking paradigms" may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

"Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way," said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty."

Although people anywhere can BS each other – that is, share dubious information that's misleadingly impressive or engaging – the workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it, Littrell said. In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it's easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence.

Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous – but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence."

[...] The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

TrueNAS Deprecates Public Build Repository and Raises Transparency Concerns

hubie writes:

TrueNAS deprecates its public build repository on GitHub, raising questions in the community about openness and release transparency:

TrueNAS, an enterprise-ready Linux-based NAS solution, recently caused concern among self-hosting enthusiasts by moving its build infrastructure behind internal systems. This decision has sparked debate within the self-hosting and open-source storage communities.

The change became visible after TruNAS's GitHub repository, which previously hosted the build tooling, was marked as deprecated.

"This repository is no longer actively maintained. The TrueNAS build system previously hosted here has been moved to an internal infrastructure. This transition was necessary to meet new security requirements, including support for Secure Boot and related platform integrity features that require tighter control over the build and signing pipeline. No further updates, pull requests, or issues will be accepted. Existing content is preserved here for historical reference only."

As expected, the change immediately sparked discussion among users and administrators who rely on TrueNAS for homelab and self-hosting deployments.

Some users questioned whether Secure Boot requirements alone justified removing the public build repository, noting that many Linux distributions maintain public build tooling while keeping signing infrastructure private.

A day later, the reference to Secure Boot was removed, leaving only a brief deprecation notice in the repository.

[...] In a Reddit discussion, a TrueNAS staff member stated that maintaining both an internal release pipeline and a public build system would duplicate effort. The project prefers to focus on a single internal build process. The staff member also emphasized that the project's open-source components remain available under their existing licenses.

[...] However, for many users, the core issue relates to transparency. Public build systems allow community members to inspect and reproduce the steps used to generate official releases. When those pipelines run behind internal infrastructure, it becomes harder for external contributors to verify that the released binaries match the public source code exactly.

TrueNAS Responds to Community Concerns With New Community and Enterprise Vision

TrueNAS details its long-term direction, emphasizing the free Community Edition and introducing TrueNAS Connect as a bridge to enterprise features

Following community concerns about moving TrueNAS build infrastructure to internal systems, iXsystems published a blog post, "Building a Bridge Between Community & Enterprise," outlining its long-term vision and introducing TrueNAS Connect.

According to iXsystems, the goal is to create a bridge between the free Community Edition and enterprise-grade capabilities traditionally available only to customers using official TrueNAS hardware appliances.

[...] iXsystems emphasizes that the core platform remains open source and the Community Edition will continue to be free. Users can still download, install, and run TrueNAS on their own hardware.

At the same time, the new service introduces a structured approach for accessing advanced capabilities. TrueNAS Connect will include multiple tiers, starting with a free "Foundation" level and expanding to paid options that unlock additional enterprise functionality.

The announcement clarifies the business model: TrueNAS uses an open-core approach, keeping the base software open source while offering advanced services commercially. iXsystems states this model sustains development and keeps the core platform accessible to the community.

And a statement from the CTO:

Hey everyone,

I've seen the concerns in the Community about us moving the build scripts internal for TrueNAS 27, so I want to address this directly.

Why we did it: We had a growing problem with bad actors forking TrueNAS, selling closed-source commercial derivatives under their own brands, and ignoring GPL and other licensing obligations. No attribution. No contribution back to the project. No support for the community or the engineering effort that built what they're reselling. Unfortunately, many of these are in regions where we have little to no legal recourse. To address this challenge, we were already planning to take the build scripts internal. With the upcoming refactor of the new Secure Boot feature, along with myriad other changes we wanted to make to the build infrastructure, TrueNAS 27 was a natural time to make this change.

What this does NOT mean: We are not paywalling existing free features. Period. If it's free today, it stays free.

What hasn't changed: We've always made decisions about which new features are fully open source (GPL or BSD), which are proprietary, and which land in the free edition vs. TrueNAS Enterprise products. That's how we fund the engineering that builds TrueNAS for everyone. That model isn't new, and it isn't changing.

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

The viral social network for bots reveals more about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents:

For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook , which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe."

We observed! Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted.

More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute.

Moltbook soon filled up with clichéd screeds on machine consciousness and pleas for bot welfare. One agent appeared to invent a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained : "The humans are screenshotting us." The site was also flooded with spam and crypto scams. The bots were unstoppable.

OpenClaw is a kind of harness that lets you hook up the power of an LLM such as Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT-5, or Google DeepMind's Gemini to any number of everyday software tools, from email clients to browsers to messaging apps. The upshot is that you can then instruct OpenClaw to carry out basic tasks on your behalf.

"OpenClaw marks an inflection point for AI agents, a moment when several puzzle pieces clicked together," says Paul van der Boor at the AI firm Prosus. Those puzzle pieces include cloud computing that allows agents to operate nonstop, an open-source ecosystem that makes it easy to slot different software systems together, and a new generation of LLMs.

But is Moltbook really a glimpse of the future, as many have claimed?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Many activists and lobbyists had called for a European company register as part of EU Inc. Today's EU legislative proposal has indeed included one:

Today saw the official launch of the EU Inc or ‘28th Regime’ legislative proposal by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels, after it got its first outing at Davos in January.  It includes the much requested European company register, despite earlier indications that this would be unwieldly and not be part of the proposal.

“It can still take weeks or even months to set up a company or to start doing business in another country within the single market,” von der Leyen said this morning in Brussels. “Barriers inside Europe hurt us more than tariffs from the outside. Across our union, entrepreneurs who want to scale up are the first victims of regulatory fragmentation. Instead of one market, they face 27 legal systems and more than 60 national company forms. And the consequences are real.”

“The time and money spent filling paperwork is not spent on creating or innovating,” she said. “Obviously, this must change and fast. And so here comes EU Inc, the 28th regime.”

The EU Inc movement had gathered steam since its launch back in 2024, and the announcement from von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, was widely celebrated as progress. Now today it includes many of the elements for which the start-up community lobbied hard.

[...] “At the heart of this proposal is one simple principle that says, ‘once only’. Companies will provide their information to public authority, the data one time only, and that information will then be shared automatically between relevant administrations, from business registers to taxes to Social Security … and this information will be stored and easily accessible in a new EU Business register for EU Inc companies.”

[...] EU-INC, a movement with more than 22,000 signatories that include the founders of Stripe and venture capital players from Sequioa to Index, had been running a policy campaign since October 2024 pushing for the creation of the so-called 28th regime, and in 2025 presented legal proposals to the Commission.

fliptop writes:

Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data for defendtheatlantaforest@protonmail.com — the account linked to Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta. The FBI obtained this information through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request on January 25, 2024, identifying the activist behind the anonymous account through their credit card identifier:

Proton AG clarified they shared no data directly with the FBI — technically accurate but missing the point. Swiss authorities verified the case involved a shooting and explosives before complying with the legal order, then passed payment information along through established treaties.

Your email content stays encrypted, but paying with plastic creates a paper trail that encryption can't touch. This isn't a security breach; it's feature functionality working exactly as legal frameworks demand.

This marks Proton's third known disclosure to authorities. They previously handed over a recovery email for a Catalan Democratic Tsunami activist and were forced to log a French climate activist's IP address via Europol — despite claiming they don't log IPs by default.

Each case followed the same script: foreign law enforcement pressure, Swiss legal compliance, user anonymity compromised. Like watching the same Netflix thriller where the plot twist stops being surprising.

[...] No privacy service operates outside legal jurisdiction, regardless of marketing promises. Swiss privacy laws offer stronger protections than US providers, but "stronger" doesn't mean "absolute" when mutual legal assistance treaties kick in.

Related:

• Is Proton Leaving Switzerland? "Legal Uncertainty" of Proposed Surveillance Laws Would be the Reason
• Proton Expands its Private Tech Ecosystem With a Password Manager

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years

Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger promises that have been made around the development of Wayland as a replacement for the X11 display protocol.

If you're not in this space, hopefully it will still be interesting as an engineering post-mortem on taking on new greenfield projects. Namely: What are the issues with what exists, why can they not be fixed, what do we hope to achieve with a new project, and how long do we expect it to take?

Original Submission

spiraldancing writes:

Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen a 'near total' disruption in seaborne trade:

The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a "paralyzing, real-time problem" for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point's Modern War Institute.

In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a "near total" disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes up half the world's total shipments, and prices have spiked nearly 25% since the war began, and seen a 165% rise year on year, the report said.

According to the analysis, these minerals – used in everything from microprocessors to jet engines to drone batteries – "dictate how fast things can be built and scaled under the pressure of an ongoing war", and the effects of a sudden supply shock on US defense readiness have never been modeled.

One of the authors of that analysis, USAF lieutenant colonel and nonresident fellow at the US Naval War College Jahara "Franky" Matisek, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that its "a cascading issue" raising the possibility that a "knock-on effect of this war is that it may cost double or more than double to replace all these weapons because all the mineral demand is going to go way up".

Matisek warned of another possibility: "Markets are not going to be able to provide the amount of minerals that are needed to replace all these radars that have been destroyed and all these munitions that have to be replaced. It's a really precarious spot to be in right now."

[...] The authors offer specific estimates for materials damaged in the early days of the war, writing that "it will take over thirty thousand kilograms of copper just to replace the two major US radars destroyed in Bahrain and Qatar" and "thousands of kilograms of additional copper to fix or replace other damaged US communication equipment, sensors, and radars in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE".

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Fungi are truly weird and impressive—they can live anywhere, be poisonous or medicinal, and, reportedly, transform plastic waste into edible ingredients. And in more fungal news, some groups of fungi can literally foster the formation of ice.

In a recent Science Advances paper, researchers describe a newly identified fungal protein that triggers ice formation at temperatures as high as 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-2 degrees Celsius). That’s obviously below the freezing point of water, but in nature, freezing isn’t that simple. Forming the first tiny seed of ice—an ice nucleator—takes energy, and ice forms very slowly at temperatures above -50 degrees F (-46 degrees C), according to the paper.

Yet, we still get things like clouds—microscopic water droplets and ice crystals—thanks to ice nucleators. For the new study, the team tracked the fungal gene associated with the ice-triggering protein to a distant bacterial ancestor from millions of years ago, according to a Virginia Tech statement. Importantly, the fungal protein molecule offers a non-toxic, more efficient alternative to current approaches to weather engineering, food production, or the preservation of cells and organs.

[...] For the new study, the researchers studied a common soil fungus from the Mortierellaceae family, which they extracted from water and lichen samples collected during previous polar expeditions. DNA sequencing pointed the team to certain genes that closely resembled those inside known bacterial ice nucleators—not unheard of, but rare nonetheless. To check that they were on the right path, the researchers planted these proteins onto other yeast and bacteria, which indeed manifested previously non-existent ice-making abilities.

Even more remarkable was the fact that, upon further analysis, the fungus wasn’t simply copying a bacterial ancestor. Instead, it had “adopted a highly effective trait of the bacteria and adapted it to their own physiological requirements,” the team noted in the statement.

“It’s a bit the same and yet different,” explained Rosemary Eufemio, the study’s lead author and a biochemist at Boise State University. “Fungi use the same repetitive sequence architecture as bacteria for their ice-forming sites but have made them more soluble and stable, which probably benefits their ecological function.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/tech-hobbyist-makes-shoulder-mounted-guided-missile-prototype-with-usd96-in-parts-and-a-3d-printer-diy-manpads-includes-wi-fi-guidance-ballistics-calculations-optional-camera-for-tracking

In a five-minute YouTube video [not viewed], Alisher Khojayev goes over the basics of this Stinger-like creation, comprising the launcher, the actual missile, and even an optional camera node tracking system for added tracking capabilities. Most of the missile's major parts are 3D printed, while the electronics bits are cheap, widely available microprocessors and sensors. All the gear is tied down and wired with off-the-shelf hardware store parts, too.

Once the second switch is hit, the connection extends to the rocket itself, and at that moment, orientation angles start being calculated for the missile's canards to use (the movable wings that jut out of the missile to orient it).

The launcher contains an ESP32 microprocessor along with a GPS, barometer, and compass. The missile itself contains another ESP32, coupled with an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit for calculating orientation and velocity, and move the canards as mentioned.

Khojayev points out that although the 'MANPADS' ought to function well enough on its own, he proposes that it'd be at its best as part of a camera-and-GPS mesh node, for which he conveniently also made a prototype with commonly available parts.

As points of comparison, Ynetnews points out that the well-known Stinger MANPADS goes for up to a cool $480,000, and that even the U.S. Air Force's CAMP low-cost missile program is currently targeting half a million per launch. While these are literally military-grade units with high reliability, and Khojayev's just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record, at $96, it is roughly 5,000 times cheaper to make.

Some may see this latest development as predictable in the grand scheme of things. The effectiveness of improvised explosives in Middle Eastern war theaters and the ingenuity of Ukrainian drone engineers have adeptly proven that necessity is the mother of invention. Couple that with 3D printers being ever more capable of producing strong, weapons-grade parts, and it's clearly displayed that the proverbial "three guys in a shed" can be far more effective than the military procurement machine.

Original Submission