FedScoop: DOD needs some help digitizing a massive collection of respiratory disease samples. “The Department of Defense has the world’s largest collection of pathology specimens, including ‘invaluable’ data from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Now it wants help to digitize it. Digitizing the collection of more than a hundred years of data —in the form of 55 million glass slides, 31 million paraffin-embedded tissue blocks and 500,000 wet tissue samples — would create a potentially exquisite machine learning database for computers to gain broader understanding of global health issues.”
Department of Defense
Task & Purpose: Leaked Pentagon memo warns of ‘real possibility’ of COVID-19 resurgence, vaccine not coming until summer 2021
Task & Purpose: Leaked Pentagon memo warns of ‘real possibility’ of COVID-19 resurgence, vaccine not coming until summer 2021. “The Defense Department should prepare to operate in a “globally-persistent” novel coronavirus (COVID-19) environment without an effective vaccine until “at least the summer of 2021,” according to a draft Pentagon memo obtained by Task & Purpose. ‘We have a long path ahead, with the real possibility of a resurgence of COVID-19,’ reads the memo, authored for Secretary of Defense Mark Esper but not yet bearing his signature.”
CNET: Social Security numbers stolen in defense agency data breach
CNET: Social Security numbers stolen in defense agency data breach. “An agency under the US Department of Defense was hit by a data breach that affected personal information. Hackers stole Social Security numbers, names and other personal data, a department spokesman said Thursday.”
Military .com: Pentagon Announces Plans to Monitor Foreign Trainees’ Social Media Posts
Military .com: Pentagon Announces Plans to Monitor Foreign Trainees’ Social Media Posts. “The Pentagon has completed re-screening all Saudi students in U.S. military training programs following a deadly Dec. 6 shooting rampage at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Defense Department officials announced Thursday. No indications of additional threats have surfaced, they said. Moving forward, DoD plans to increase vetting practices for Saudi Arabian and other foreign nationals in training at military bases in the U.S., including checks of their social media posts.”
Ars Technica: DOD joins fight against 5G spectrum proposal, citing risks to GPS
Ars Technica: DOD joins fight against 5G spectrum proposal, citing risks to GPS. “The Department of Defense has weighed in against a proposal before the Federal Communications Commission to open the 1 to 2 Gigahertz frequency range—the L band—for use in 5G cellular networks. The reason: segments of that range of radio spectrum are already used by Global Positioning System signals and other military systems.”
ZDNet: DOD doesn’t keep track of duplicate or obsolete software
ZDNet: DOD doesn’t keep track of duplicate or obsolete software. “The US Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Air Force are not keeping track of their software inventories, according to a report released today by the US Department of Defense Inspector General (DOD IG).”
ZDNet: Pentagon discloses card breach
ZDNet: Pentagon discloses card breach. “Pentagon official said on Friday that the Department of Defense had suffered a security breach thanks to a third-party contractor. An investigation is still underway, so the exact details haven’t been made public, but according to an Associated Press report, a DOD official said that roughly 30,000 DOD military and civilian personnel are believed to be affected. This number is expected to grow as the Pentagon’s investigation continues.”
Report: US weapons systems are highly vulnerable to cyber attacks (Engadget)
Engadget: Report: US weapons systems are highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. “The Department of Defense will have to ramp up its cybersecurity efforts now that it’s planning to spend $1.66 trillion to develop major weapons systems. According to a new report (PDF) by the Government Accountability Office, nearly all of Pentagon’s weapons systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks.” Sometimes I have to do ResearchBuzz with a side order of Tums.
Bloomberg: Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition
Bloomberg: Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google has decided not to compete for the Pentagon’s cloud-computing contract valued at as much as $10 billion, saying the project may conflict with its corporate values.”
UPI: NIH, Department of Defense to develop limb loss database
UPI: NIH, Department of Defense to develop limb loss database. “The U.S. government is working to develop a database that will include the number of people in the United States living with limb losses for insight on their challenges and needs. The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense expect to have the Limb Loss and Preservation Registry operational in 2020, the NIH announced on Monday.”
MIT Technology Review: The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes
MIT Technology Review: The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes. “The tools for catching deepfakes were developed through a program—run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—called Media Forensics. The program was created to automate existing forensics tools, but has recently turned its attention to AI-made forgery.”
MIT Technology Review: The US military is funding an effort to catch deepfakes and other AI trickery
MIT Technology Review: The US military is funding an effort to catch deepfakes and other AI trickery. “The Department of Defense is funding a project that will try to determine whether the increasingly real-looking fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence might soon be impossible to distinguish from the real thing—even for another AI system. This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world’s leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio—and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically.”
ProPublica: Get an Inside Look at the Department of Defense’s Struggle to Fix Pollution at More Than 39,000 Sites
ProPublica: Get an Inside Look at the Department of Defense’s Struggle to Fix Pollution at More Than 39,000 Sites. “For nearly 45 years, the Pentagon kept its program — the Defense Environmental Restoration Program — out of the spotlight, and most of these sites have never been scrutinized by the public. However, the agency has meticulously tracked its own efforts, recording them in a detailed internal database. We were the first to see it, ever. Now we’re sharing it with you.”
CNBC Via Yahoo: Google is reportedly drafting ‘ethical principles’ for government work to calm worried employees
CNBC via Yahoo: Google is reportedly drafting ‘ethical principles’ for government work to calm worried employees. “Google cloud leader Diane Greene told employees that the company is drafting a set of ethical principals to guide the use of its technology in the wake of internal objections to its partnership with The Pentagon , according to a Defense One report.”
Federal News Radio: Amid congressional mandate to open source DoD’s software code, Code.mil serves as guidepost
Federal News Radio: Amid congressional mandate to open source DoD’s software code, Code.mil serves as guidepost . “As part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Department has until June to start moving much of its custom-developed software source code to a central repository and begin managing and licensing it via open source methods. The mandate might prove daunting for an organization in which open source practices are relatively scarce, especially considering that, until recently, there was no established open source playbook for the federal government. That’s begun to change, however, with the Office of Management and Budget’s code.gov, and its DoD corollary, code.mil, run by the Defense Digital Service (DDS).”
