defense

Forget China or Al Qaeda. In a twist that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago, the WikiLeaks.org Web site is being proposed as the first public target for a U.S. government cyberattack.

After the shadowy, document-leaking organization distributed nearly 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war on Friday, Washington officialdom responded with a torrent of denunciations alleging violations of national security and endangering U.S. military operations.

In a rare point of congruence, The Washington Post and The Washington Times both criticized the release, with the smaller paper arguing that WikiLeaks' offshore Web site … Read more

WikiLeaks defied a series of increasingly stern warnings from the U.S. military and other government officials today by releasing a massive trove of secret documents from the Iraq war.

Portions of the U.S. military reports, totaling nearly 400,000 classified documents, began appearing on the Internet this afternoon, including on the Web sites of some news organizations that had been handed the documents in advance.

The U.K. Guardian reported that the Iraq war logs show an Apache crew killed insurgents who had tried to surrender. Al Jazeera's analysis found a Pentagon directive told troops to ignore … Read more

MadMaks is a promising robot-combat arcade game with chunky old-school graphics, fun controls, and a short solo campaign.

You start the game controlling a maneuverable but relatively wimpy tank--a "Frogamo Mak"--and you can opt for good accelerometer controls (tilting left and right to steer, and forward and back to move) or a somewhat clunkier virtual directional-pad. You change weapons and shoot using touch-screen buttons, as you travel across a 3D sandbox terrain, destroying and defending various targets (all as cute as your Mak, with similar cartoony eyes) to accomplish varying objectives over 10 unlockable levels. As you … Read more

Axe in Face--Defense of the Daffodils is a silly, yet challenging game that borrows elements from many classic iPhone games in the iTunes App Store to make for a fun time-waster. The object of the game is to defend a garden of daffodils from an approaching onslaught of baddies (think Plants vs. Zombies) by drawing a path from your viking warrior across the screen to throw your ax.

The ax will return to you like a boomerang, which comes in handy for hitting foes as the ax circles back around, but be careful not to draw complex paths because you … Read more

No iPhone for Verizon? That seems to be the implication in news this week via AppleInsider. According to a Wall Street analyst with RBC Capital Markets, Verizon and Apple have not been able to come to an agreement on bringing the iPhone to Verizon. Apparently, both companies have issues with the deal; Verizon is wary of the iPhone cannibalizing Android's market share, and Apple may not want to settle for a lesser marketing campaign to lighten the impact of iPhone sales.

As you know, I already have an iPhone 4 (and needed one for my job, obviously) so I had no choice but to re-up my contract with AT&T. But what about you? Are you one of the people who decided to wait to buy the iPhone 4 for a chance to get a contract with Verizon? Do you think this really means the end of a deal between the two companies? I'm interested to know what people will do with this information, so please chime-in in the comments!

This week's apps include a fun way to see if your friends are telling the truth and a line-drawing game that has you hurling axes at approaching bad guys.… Read more

A malware-laden flash drive inserted in a laptop at a U.S. military base in the Middle East in 2008 led to the "most significant breach of" the nation's military computers ever, according to a new magazine article by a top defense official.

The malware uploaded itself to the U.S. Central Command network and spread undetected on classified and unclassified computers creating a "digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," William J. Lynn III, U.S. deputy secretary of defense, wrote in his essay in the September/October … Read more

Navy Patrol: Advanced Premium is the paid version of Navy Patrol, a naval-themed tower-defense game with several innovative features but a surprising number of missteps for such an expensive and mature app.

For the most part, Navy Patrol is a traditional open-map tower-defense game, in which you place defensive towers in a strategic pattern to defeat incoming waves of enemies before they reach your base. Fans of tower defense will find a lot to like here, with a handful of different upgradable tower types and some cool extras like tower-specific targeting controls (for tracking fast, strong, or weak enemies), optional … Read more

The U.S. State Department has denied asking other countries to open criminal investigations into Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.

"We have not approached any country to encourage them to do anything," Philip Crowley, assistant secretary of state, told CNET. The main Wikileaks.org Web site is located in Sweden.

Crowley acknowledged that U.S. officials have "had conversations with a variety of countries" about Wikileaks, but said those discussions were limited to expressing "concerns that we've had."

That conflicts with a report earlier this week on TheDailyBeast.com, which said the Obama administration … Read more

The U.S. Defense Department on Thursday formally demanded that Wikileaks return all military records that it possesses, saying they are the "property of the U.S. government."

Geoff Morrell, the department's press secretary, said the military "demands that Wikileaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records" and permanently delete them.

In addition, Morrell said, the Wikileaks.org Web site "constitutes a brazen solicitation to U.S. government officials, including our military, to break the law" by … Read more