Slashdot Mirror
Boeing's CHAMP Missile Uses Radio Waves To Remotely Disable PCs
Dupple writes "During last week's test, a CHAMP (Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project) missile successfully disabled its target by firing high power microwaves into a building filled with computers and other electronics. 'On Oct. 16th at 10:32 a.m. MST a Boeing Phantom Works team along with members from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Directed Energy Directorate team, and Raytheon Ktech, suppliers of the High Power Microwave source, huddled in a conference room at Hill Air Force Base and watched the history making test unfold on a television monitor. CHAMP approached its first target and fired a burst of High Power Microwaves at a two story building built on the test range. Inside rows of personal computers and electrical systems were turned on to gauge the effects of the powerful radio waves. Seconds later the PC monitors went dark and cheers erupted in the conference room. CHAMP had successfully knocked out the computer and electrical systems in the target building. Even the television cameras set up to record the test were knocked off line without collateral damage.'"
What now?
I need a tinfoil house!
Will take care of that issue.
On the one hand I love reading about science stories. On the other, I am frankly tired of spending billions of dollars to prove the US has the biggest penis. Please cut our military spending 50 percent, focus on diplomacy and better targeted aid. Fund alternative energy to reduce our reliance on dictatorships.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Welcome to the age of industrial terrorism.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
So, the bad guys (junior grade) have to go out and buy aluminum foil to shield their gear.
The bad guys, senior grade, are worried about Tempest and already have shielding. (Note - if a missile can knock your monitor out, and that is a worry to you, you should also assume that a drone can pick up what the monitor is displaying.)
I don't suppose they are particularly concerned about the effects of the high-powered microwave radiation on the animated bags of water that are likely to be at the computers.
So what happened to the missile? Did it land in the yard in front of the building to be taken apart and sold on the black market?
"Even the television cameras set up to record the test were knocked off line without collateral damage."
That _IS_ collateral damage.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I hope that will suffice as protection from this. Surely the drones are protected from it in some way. If not, them I see no problem of placing such a weapon on the roof of every building, shooting skyward.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...with antennas to remotely disable machines. I've known people make them. However the issue was that 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). As such I don't think this will ever be used in anything other than a war setting, and even then, if you're going to cook the occupants to death, you might as well hit them with a conventional explosive, probably a nicer way to go.
TFA doesn't mention which microwaves they use, perhaps they other other ones which do not affect humans so much.
So what they've basically done is created a missile that does the same thing as my cat -- disables computer systems. Though since my cat is not available for deployment in a combat zone, I think the missile is the way to go.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
New-and-improved ways to destroy stuff!
Now, hopefully, history will proceed as it usually does, and other countries won't in response take the unprecedented step of developing their own improved ways to destroy our stuff.
Live by the sword... well, you know the rest.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Can this thing be used to take out the "Dancing With the Stars" and "American Idol" studios? Oh, please God.
The whole test was most likley setup to allow a maximum chance the missle would suceed. Reminds me of other tests of Star Wars tech that were rigged to explode. Circuit breakers loaded to near tripping point, etc.
Yeah, we do this to "them" but they'll never do the same thing to us.
I believe this would qualify as 'collateral damage', if they ended up burned instead of warmed and ready.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
It's a bit like saying taking down a building has no collateral damage if it doesn't cause other buildings to collapse.
That is exactly what it means. If it takes down the intended building, then the intended building is not collateral damage.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
On Oct. 16th at 10:32 a.m. MST
Mountain Daylight Time!
That faint buzzing? That's the sound of Freedom (being utterly destroyed by the Military-Fatherland-Industrial Complex)!
It's interesting that it can disable multiple targets, I wonder what the power requirements are. I figured the missile would detonate near the target and use the energy of the explosion to somehow how generate targeted microwaves like a shaped charge energy weapon more or less. It's on a missile because missiles are fast but I bet we see the same setup installed on drones in the near future.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
2. Creates a new PC industry designed to be withstand microwave blasts.
how do they know what happened to the other electronics- the TARGET?
...with antennas to remotely disable machines. I've known people make them. However the issue was that 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). As such I don't think this will ever be used in anything other than a war setting, and even then, if you're going to cook the occupants to death, you might as well hit them with a conventional explosive, probably a nicer way to go.
TFA doesn't mention which microwaves they use, perhaps they other other ones which do not affect humans so much.
The burden placed on the enemy of caring for the suddenly disabled is considered part of warfare and is in fact more damaging to the enemy than simply killing them. War is ugly.
The Internet.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Does anyone know exactly what is fried in the monitors and in the PC's? I would have thought that the metal cases found on most PC's would have provided some amount of protection.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
It should be noted that the Geneva Convention's bit about blinding seems to be specific to lasers. Thus would not apply... (as far as I understand it, and I'm no expert on the matter)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
how are you supposed to record electromagnetic radiation when you are shielding against electromagnetic radiation? (optical filters and/or faraday cage?)
Waveguides are excellent high pass filters with great ultimate attenuation. If you don't believe me, do two experiments and look down the center of a straight section, and then wave a 9-volt battery on one end and a voltmeter on the other. I can't be bothered to look up circ waveguide cutoff freqs vs a standard c-mount inner diameter, but right off the top of my head a cmount hole is probably small enough to stick inside a piece of rectangular WR-42 waveguide so just tune your master blaster missile to somewhere lower than 25 or so GHz and the attenuation thru a cmount is likely to exceed 100 dB or so. Best ask a EE to model it to make sure you haven't built a coupling iris instead of a waveguide. In fact put a tiny little CCD with a pinhole lens in a small metal box that is way too small to resonate at the master blaster freq. Talk to an optician about designing the longest narrowest possible lens system aka a submarine periscope and make the tube outta metal aka a long narrow circ waveguide operating way below cutoff.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Where does the missile go after it passes its target? What if the thing is being fired into New York or Moscow or Beijing? I can't imagine the thing would be able to find a "safe" landing spot, or even be concerned about it.
When I think "missile," I think "something going really really fast. That kinetic energy has to go somewhere.
If they were, I suspect the electromagnetic pulse would be reduced by the shielding. Controlling emissions also controls ingression. See Emission Equipment Selection Process for an overview of how NATO buys hardware.
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
:
eine kleine Volierendraht should take care of it!
Another Great Invention that's going to make our lives A LOT better !!!
They just made a non-lethal bomb, it is going to make someones life a whole lot better.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I work right near the test facility, and let me assure your PC is perfectly safe. This thing cannot shu
From the photo in TFA, all I see is old school tower type PCs. In other words, no laptops with batteries. So yeah, if you turn off the power you "knock out" the PCs.
Reminds me of the humorous IT support call, the punch line of which is, "Do you still have the box that the PC came in?"
Have gnu, will travel.
Can I please Please PLEASE get these delivered with the optional shark's head mounting kit?
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
I'm sure they're hoping analog turntables will make a comeback...
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
That's what the NSA does, their headquarters building is a giant faraday cage. It's not as simple as painting though, it's a lot of work and would be very hard or impossible to retrofit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Computers cost practically nothing these days. Put the servers and routers in the basement behind metal. If attacked, replace PC's.
I guarantee the missile costs *many* times more than the PC's it took out.
Maybe the platters would be fine ... but wouldn't this destroy any (increasingly computerized) intelligence [which they hope to gather], too? If so, that makes it less likely to be used in a raid, but rather as the van[guard] of an attack.
That's what the NSA does, their headquarters building is a giant faraday cage. It's not as simple as painting though, it's a lot of work and would be very hard or impossible to retrofit.
The only difficult part I see is at the service connections. Using all optical solves the communications part, but I don't know how you solve the power part. Isolation using motor-generator pairs? But you should be able to retrofit relatively easily, if expensively, using simple metal mesh and conductive glue, or crimping. Remove the siding, cover everything with the mesh and maybe glue it down (there's insulation products which work in this manner, so the installation ought to be straightforward and require essentially no training) and then seal any seams between strips somehow. Then slap some siding over the top of it; if it's anything but wood you'll probably be able to reuse whatever you took down.
This sounds expensive but feasible to me. And not even that expensive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I was an engineer with the local power company, we had a lineman working for us that could take out power for the entire county.
Delivery time was somewhat problematic, as he'd always stop for coffee on his way to a job.
Have gnu, will travel.
Building sized focus is a lot better than the old "city block" sized focus.
This is an excellent example of the type of device that the US needs to assure minimal casualties, both hostile and friendly. Proper usage would allow safe ingress/ egress from a target site for both strike aircraft and assault teams. The days of non-electronic warfare are over, and the new battlefield is the transistor junctions. Combined with surgical strike weaponry and proper intelligence, "collateral damage" can be kept to a minimum. For those that think this is a bad thing, study war through the ages and see what collateral damage really amounted to in past wars.
What, me worry?
Seriously i hate this fucking planet sometimes.
great, now if only they could fry backup data on harddrives
My understanding - and I am not an expert either - is that it prohibits weapons that are *intended* to cause blindness. It doesn't prohibit weapons which may cause blindness incidentially to their intended purpose, and this has come up in the past with regards to laser-guided missiles where the very high-powered targeting laser can be easily pointed into the enemy eyes to disable them while the missile closes.
Issues of time. If it takes you an hour to get all the spare PCs out and onto the desks, that's an hour during which your building is non-operational and the enemy knows it. If your building is where the generals have their offices, that's an hour during which your army is headless. That's when the attack will come.
Well, unless you throw them pretty hard, white vans don't fly through the air.
it boils and pops the people in the building.
Haven't seen that many CRT monitors operating in one place in many years. Whereas such a destructive test is a perfect application for whatever old junk monitors they might have had laying around, the history of weapons system tests being rigged to provide good PR makes me wonder if there was something else going on here...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
white vans don't fly through the air.
You haven't seen the way the typical 'white van man' drives around here!
But what do we use it for, how does this help us in the fields of war where we are not already the clear technical victors?
Because I really don't see this as good for anything other than a blitz against large highly technical installations of questionable utility, disguised command buildings or ballistic missile sites, where we can fire one of these off and still say "oops" afterwards and write a cheque if we were wrong.
Who would we shoot one of these at beyond MAYBE North Korea, Iran or Pakistan? Shooting anything at Russia or China is just the end of the world, in the Middle East everything is guerrilla tactics and cellphones no need for big missiles there and using these in the war on drugs is just more money down that particular toilet.
This is like when I was 25 and had no M:tG group, I kept buying the cards but had nobody to play with and eventually I had to ask "Why am I still doing this?"
Are they from the Department of Redundancy Department?
No brain, no pain.
Considering that the computers are all inside of grounded metal boxes how does this work?
I'm encasing my house in a quarter wave Faraday Cage. Take that, Tony Stark!!!
Advice for Arabian Micro Devices. 1. Buy few of these and send one (or dozen) to Santa Clara (Intel, nVidia) and one to each Intel fab (Israel, etc...). 2. Profit
I love how the U.S. military keeps inventing weapon systems that are far more effectively used against us than against the sorts of enemies we face these days. Sure, we get a few year's worth of lead time where we're the only one in possession of the new toys but once it's been invented, it's just a matter of time until everyone has it. Tell, me, who has more to lose from the wide availability of this sort of missile system? The people with the heaviest reliance on computers, of course. Same goes for Stuxnet, of course, except that was even worse because that weapon system delivers its own blueprint. Thanks, guys.
"The Pinch."
When they set it off, most all of them had their hands over their groins with their bodies 75% turned away from the direction of the blast.
Good movie, BTW.
http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Lo-Mo/Microwave-Weaponry-High-Power-HPM.html
To avoid corruption, one must remain dishonest.
"you can do this using microwaves with antennas to remotely disable machines"
I don't think microwaves can interfere with internal combustion engines. You must be thinking of EMP.
" 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). "
Guess what frequency 802.11b/g/n routers, Bluetooth or amateur radio work at?
Are you one of those "special" people who can "feel" cellphone towers?
Wouldn't like to be the pilot when my EMP just killed all the electronics in the aircraft at the same time it knocked out the stuff on the ground. Oh, and a drone with a fried guidance system is essentially a missile.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
True about the rhyming, and "Nachtmusik" didn't rhyme either. And I don't think we want to be pahking any coops in Hahvahd Yahd, though maybe you could put the coops in/near the Hahvahd Coop.
In the video when the microwaves hit, one of the computers ejects it's CD tray and something falls out. What was it? What could cause that to happen? Did something trigger the eject functionality, or was it caused by overheating pieces inside somehow?
Yea, you're totally right. We should go back to WWII style carpet bombing of entire cities with unguided manually aimed bombs dropped from 30k feet. That would be MUCH BETTER. Certainly way better than turning off someones pacemaker ... which for reference, isn't a death sentence or their heart monitor.
Get a grip, and stop using retarded sayings like 'this piece of kit', it makes you sound rather uneducated.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"you can do this using microwaves with antennas to remotely disable machines" I don't think microwaves can interfere with internal combustion engines. You must be thinking of EMP.
Both EMP and microwaves will fry electronic circuits. the engine itself will be fine mechanically, but without the ECU it will not function. Very old engines (pre 1980's) will still work no matter what hits them.
If you have a piece of electronic equipment you no longer want to use, you can try this. Go stick it in a microwave and run it for a bit. It will come out with all its chips fried.
" 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). " Guess what frequency 802.11b/g/n routers, Bluetooth or amateur radio work at?
802.11b/g/n routers are limited to what, 100mW? Perhaps a max of 300mW, most ham operators don't go beyond a few tens of watts (top tier licenced HAM's can go to a couple hundred watts), and even then don't go sticking their heads in front of high gain antennas at full power.
Your average household microwave can belt out 800W of power, and you can get even more powerful ones. That is why microwaves have kill switches so that they cannot function while the door (with the shield built in) is open. You must have seen how cooked meat comes out of microwaves?
Trust me, you stick your head in a microwave and turn it on, you will at least go blind, if not have some worse problems.
Back in the early eighties, I worked for a military contractor. At that time there was a chip on the market that would detect an EMP. Theoretically it would allow a circuit to do some remedial action before the electronics were destroyed by the pulse. Didn't seem very practical to me, but it led to a lot of theorizing about how it could be used. Launch all rockets? Turn on a light indicating that the computer probably didn't work anymore? Do the computer equivalent of bend over and kiss your behind goodbye? Someone at the time opined that every chip in our systems was a potential EMP detector. In some ways I miss those times.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The question is...
Does the Hahvid Coop have chickens?
--
BMO