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Android Goes To the Battlefield

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-the-terminator-kind dept.

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."

12 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.

    --
    "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    1. Re:Saving lives?? by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, 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.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    2. Re:Saving lives?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't forget the "fight for freedom" which means ours and not theirs.

    3. Re:Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think Iraqis enjoy quite a bit more freedom today than they did under Saddam.

      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.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    4. Re:Saving lives?? by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, 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.

    5. Re:Saving lives?? by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, 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."

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    6. Re:Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    7. Re:Saving lives?? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  2. Limited Distribution Benefits by Doc+Ruby · · 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?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  3. Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? by Hope+Thelps · · 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.

    --
    To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
  4. But not really. by transiit · · Score: 3, 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.

  5. Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? by ClosedSource · · Score: 4, 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"?