Both projects need, though, still several years until becoming operational while their Russian and Chinese equivalents are al-ready operational today (the Russian models were suc-cessfully used in the war with Ukraine)

The Columbia class boats will displace some 21,000 tons, mount 16 tubes for Trident D5 SLBM each, and be the most sophisticated submarines ever built by the US.

China has tested (and is about to introduce) hypersonic glider systems.

The Sarmat, the Avangard, and the Iskander-M are already deployed.

«Iskander-M»

«Status-6»,

«Avangard»

he airborne «Kinzhal»

«Zirkon» hypersonic glider (GL)

finds itself today – as far as armour is concerned – with two partially equipped, skeleton armoured di-visionstructures with a total of 244 main battle tanks.

Under the impression of having won the Cold War, the West felt it needed no longer armed forces capable to fighting a succession of major conventional battles against powerful Russian invasion forces.

The truth is that the US has, after the end of the Cold War, largely neglected its strategic nuclear forces.

national security cannot be ultimately guar-anteed without the possession of nuclear weapons.

Ukraine is helpless. It can prevail on the battlefield, but it cannot force an end to the aggression

The hell a nuclear war would un-leash would be too close to result in the extinction of the human race, and thus deprive words like «victory» of any meaning.

he ensuing ABM Treaty limited both sides to one field of 100 ABM interceptors. The Russians completed under this regime their ABM defensive ring protecting Moscow, while the US chose to protect an ICBM field in Wyoming

The US went down from a peak of more than 31,000 weap-ons in 1967 to an inventory of 5,428 today (of which 1,744 are deployed and ready to be launched, 1’964 in a stockpile, and 1’720 retired, awaiting dismantling). The USSR/Russia went from close to 40’000 weapons in 1985 down to 5’977 in 2022 (1,528 deployed, 2’949 in stockpile, and 1,500 retired, awaiting dismantling).

diate Range Nuclear Forces), at the conventional level CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe).

The nuclear nightmare would not disappear but be-come less costly

This German unease has always been recognized by the So-viet Union (and later Russia) as NATO’s Achilles’ heel

the US would rather go nuclear than being overwhelmed.

and frozen to death in the «nuclear winter»

would suffice to bomb the attacker back to the stone age.

to be the political destiny of our planet.

De-terrence and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had rendered the nuclear confrontation a dead end and hence essentially stable.

The TikTok threat to Google’s business isn’t just limited to YouTube, as it turns out. Core Google services, including Search and Maps, are also being impacted by a growing preference for social media and videos as the first stop on younger users’ path to discovery, a Google exec acknowledged today, speaking at an industry event.

The Candidates to be Standardized and Round 4 Submissions were announced July 5, 2022. NISTIR 8413, Status Report on the Third Round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process is now available. NIST has developed Guidelines for Submitting Tweaks for Fourth Round Candidates.

the Open Technology Fund

hese efforts could be used to improve legislative oversight of Chinese ICT companies and other entities seeking involvement in a host country’s digital information stack

closer to Chinese data policy regulations that focus on state sovereignty over personal data, even when couched in the language of protecting privacy.

extensive training programs at both the popular and elite levels aimed at fostering dependence on, and brand loyalty to, Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei and ZTE

a state-centric model of cyber governance

The digital information stack consists of five layers – network infrastructure, devices, applications, content, and governance – and each layer of the stack includes several components.

to be more aware of the tradeoffs of China’s involvement in their digital information stacks

Most who implement pqc will not see any difference, and have no need to fuss with the 600-digit numbers in use today.

nist’s new standards are unlikely to be the last, as quantum computers’ strengths develop and protocols are tested to destruction in the white-hat hackers’ white-hot heat.

Eventually the new standards must percolate through every device and service that transmits encrypted data—every browser tab, every nuclear facility, every payment gizmo, every military digital radio.

None has yet become a trusted standard, but now nist has picked a set of recipes that have survived years of tyre-kicking.

“post-quantum cryptography”

Cryptography protocols involve calculations that are harder to undo than do.

the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist)

When quantum computers reach their potential, decades of secret intelligence, credit-card details, intellectual property and military and medical data will become as easy to read as the words before your eyes.

One defence is to use encryption, but in the fast-approaching era of quantum computers that defence will fail.

We will now allow singular use of data alongside the plural. Specifically, when considered as a concept—as in data is the new oil—the singular will be acceptable, as well as when the data in question is considered as a mass (the data on this mobile-phone plan is insufficient). However, when data points are considered as a group of pieces of information, the plural should still be used: data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate the hottest summer of all time.

Plural data in the sense of “data points” will probably appear in one kind of story exclusively (ie, those reporting on a study based on a number of observations), and mass-style singular data in others (especially those to do with computing). In any case, our style guide already allows some collective nouns, like council or staff, to be singular or plural depending on whether it is the entity or its constituents under discussion, with no resulting chaos.

Singular data is now more common than the plural in books, and far more prevalent on the web.

Data, as every child at a grammar school once knew, is the plural of Latin’s datum, “something given”.

We will now allow singular use of data alongside the plural. Specifically, when considered as a concept—as in data is the new oil—the singular will be acceptable, as well as when the data in question is considered as a mass (the data on this mobile-phone plan is insufficient). However, when data points are considered as a group of pieces of information, the plural should still be used: data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate the hottest summer of all time.

As Sino-American tensions worsen, that is a game no one can win.

as well as its games, run the risk of arousing hostility from China hawks in America

Mr Xi’s crackdown on internet firms has hit its gaming arm, its fintech plans and local investments such as Didi. It has to censor itself vigorously.

Tencent is embedded in almost every aspect of life there

are fascinatingly idiosyncratic,

As Ms Chen puts it, it has become an incubator of startups, not a killer of potential competitors.

all of Tencent’s transformational ideas, including WeChat, came from second-tier teams competing against each other, not from the top brass

(“You either wait for someone to kill you or you kill yourself first,” is how he describes the firm’s constant efforts at reinvention)

That threatens its reputation in the West, where it is a huge investor in gaming (among other businesses) and where it is keen to expand its reach.

WeChat is Tencent’s flagship product, a “Swiss Army Knife” of a super app, offering messages, search, ride-hailing, food delivery and other applications on a single platform. But in a paranoid regime, its power is also a threat.

It was a rare moment when WeChat (Weixin within China) was used to express people’s anger and pain, rather than the blander stuff—swanky dinners, clouds at dusk—that people usually post.

"extremely straightforward, very open and friendly. He's got a pretty good sense of humor."

He was CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based national security think tank, before becoming CEO of Endgame, a cybersecurity software firm that was acquired by the cloud computing firm Elastic in 2019.

to make the case for developing countries to incorporate openness and freedom into their regulation of the internet rather than authoritarian control.

imit the flow of information to and among their citizens.

lighter regulation biased in favor of the free flow of information

It's a battle over who controls the digital environment."

for security and digital policy

The bureau combines three pre-existing policy units within the State Department: International Cyberspace Security, International Information and Communications Policy, and Digital Freedom.

Casting the prosecution of a presidential candidate as a deep-state conspiracy is peculiarly compelling.

Not charging Mr Trump gives him an air of impunity; charging him unsuccessfully would make him look invincible.

But the possibility of prosecution seems to fire Mr Trump and his supporters up, rather than turn them off. They treat it as offering a form of vindication—evidence of how much “the regime” wants him off the scene.

“People are happy—overwhelmingly—with the direction of the party. And that means America First,” says Ms Longwell. “Even if Trump the man loses some altitude…the party has now changed for ever.”

Much of it has come from former Trump donors who think the risk of another loss against Mr Biden is too high.

“We will bring Big Tech down to their knees!” screamed Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman.

The Republican parties in various other potential swing states, including Michigan and Nevada, have chosen to field Big Lie endorsers as their candidates for some or all of the same offices (see chart 2).

Any investigative committees they come to control will abruptly lose interest in Mar-a-Lago’s safes and turn their attention to President Joe Biden’s administration and family.

they will act as fierce Trump loyalists

The party’s base is still devoted to Mr Trump (65% net approval in polls) and to his Big Lie about the 2020 election (70% tell pollsters they believe it was stolen from him), and he can focus their ire on anyone whose head rises above the parapet. His power in the party is not absolute. But it is unquestionable.

“we will live in a world determined by others, with stifling constraints on our ability to shape our future”.

The mantra these days in Brussels is to provide “a Europe that protects”, whether from the vagaries of globalisation, a changing climate or foreign tyrants.

That model largely endures to this day. This is a disappointment to purists of European integration, for whom the project should aim to mitigate the power of selfish national governments, not enhance it.

during the euro crisis Brussels became a venue for national leaders to broker late-night deals rather than the home of institutions which themselves made decisions.

No national watchdog in Europe could boss around an Amazon or Google. The eu’s regulation of such tech giants, in contrast, has given the concerns of Europeans, whether on privacy or rapacious business models, real heft.

national leaders kick things up to the European level because they realise there is no way any single government can tackle them alone.

A decade ago the mantra in Brussels was “more Europe”: every problem had a solution that required power to be handed to the eu

the collective satisfaction of having come through a decennium horribilis in one piece (minus Britain)

Brussels is brimming with confidence, even as Europe’s prospects look more tenuous. What happened?

formula is “right on the cusp of a pharmaceutical”, because it is many babies’ sole source of nutrition. Getting exactly the recommended levels of vitamins—not 90%, not 110%—is crucial.

every foodstuff can be seen as a combination of fat, protein and carbohydrate.

The nascent nbs worked with iron founders to define the precise alloys that railway-builders should use.

They need physical embodiments of the standards they define.

Often they began as repositories for lumps of metal of precisely a kilogram’s mass or a metre’s length, though these fundamental units are now defined in terms of natural phenomena rather than iridium-platinum artefacts.

Standard methods and units are the bedrock of scientific endeavours from atom-smashing to astronomy.

He was saying that nato forces and the Ukrainian government had trained him to “eliminate” peace-loving citizens.

Schools are preparing to start teaching the Russian curriculum

Ukrainian mobile numbers no longer work.

Ukrainians can open accounts at one of two new Russian banks, but only if they get a Russian passport.

such as whether the party responded forcefully enough to the recent visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi

their support for Bo Xilai, a red-song-loving rival to China’s then leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping.

The neo-Maoists know well that the government watches them warily.

Among officials, the flare-up of neo-Maoist discontent will not be welcome.

Neo-Maoist websites, as well as others run by nationalists of a less ideological hue, often serve a useful purpose for the party.

It is tearing at America’s governing institutions.

the black hole at the centre of its politics.

what was it about Mr Trump that drew people to him like this? “I don’t think about it…” he called back over his shoulder, with a grin. “Whatever it is, it is.”

not giving direct orders that might implicate him but speaking “in a code.” The president who had the foresight to bar the White House photographer from his presence on January 6th, and leave no phone trail that day, seems unlikely to have left incriminating evidence lying around Mar-a-Lago.

The raid appears to stem from an investigation into how he handled classified information

America faces the possibility of an indicted or convicted candidate winning a presidential election while campaigning against the rule of law.

The constitution, which spells out the qualifications for serving as president, is silent on the question of a criminal record.

Mr Trump was able to present himself in his favourite light, as the victim of dark, partisan forces out to protect the establishment by dragging him down.

“Another day in paradise,”

When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition.

Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one.

The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all.

coming face to face with a lion.

“I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,”

completely zoned out

a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to prioritise, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day.

people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone.

Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unerring with experience.

Gut instincts can also be improved (call it “probiotic management”).

Processes are increasingly designed to stamp out instinctive responses.

when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions

During impulse propagation in the neurons of the brain, at the level of the synaptic knob of specific neurons, there is the release of Nitric Oxide which is a neurotransmitter. This Nitric Oxide then diffuses into the blood capillaries surrounding the neurons and it is transported to the lungs where it diffuses into the Alveoli and it is expired. The presence of this gas in the outer space influences the thought or state of consciousness of the indi-vidual around the area covered by the gas. This is done through inspiration of the gas which is transported to the brain by the circulatory system where it acts as a neurotransmitter to the neurons specific to it and produces the same thoughts. Much is not to be said about this means of communication because the quantity of gas produce and the area covered are mild

meaningfulconsequencesonstatesthatengageinitandthosethatwillfullyharborcybercriminalorganizations.

forCyberspaceandDigitalPolicy

Recommendation: Information procedures should provide incentivesfor sharing, to restore a better balance between security and sharedknowledge

is the human or sys-temic resistance to sharing information.

What all these stories have in common is a system that requires a demon-strated “need to know” before sharing.This approach assumes it is possible toknow, in advance, who will need to use the information. Such a system implic-itly assumes that the risk of inadvertent disclosure outweighs the benefits ofwider sharing.Those Cold War assumptions are no longer appropriate.The cul-ture of agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayerexpense must be replaced by a culture in which the agencies instead feel theyhave a duty to the information—to repay the taxpayers’ investment by makingthat information available.

In our research on Russian state-backed media coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we show how attributable state media outlets, posting on Facebook, strategically employed race and racism to simultaneously promote the movement (on some channels) and undermine it (on others).

coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB)

Russia has a long history of “full spectrum” information operations that span the range of available communication mediums.

Meta announced plans to demote Russian state-backed media (including regional channels) on Facebook and Instagram,

The Russia-Ukraine war has shown that platforms are not simply neutral or commercial entities: Their policies make them arbiters of geopolitics, and the decisions they make—or don’t make, in the case of Telegram—can mean life or death during times of war, conflict, and violence.

ncluding non-Western platforms like Telegram

by using official embassy accounts a

Telegram limited access to RT and Sputnik channels for those users who signed up with a European phone number, and TikTok adopted some transparency and labeling policies, expediting the rollout of state-backed media labels to Russian state-backed media.

YouTube blocked Russian state-funded media channels from operating globally,

transparency and labeling policies.

to state-backed media

On TikTok in particular, editorial teams employ millennial language and meme culture that mixes Russian state political content with dance videos and life hacks.

In the United States during the civil rights movement, for example, incidents of racism were published and amplified by Soviet media as a broader strategic effort to highlight American hypocrisy and undermine the United States’ position on the world stage.

overt information operations and the rise of social media propaganda on alternative platforms like Telegram.

However, even as the Western conversation focuses on Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s successes and failures, state war propaganda is increasingly prevalent on platforms that offer minimal-moderation virality as their value proposition.

Solve Reader Problems with Better Book Descriptions (for Non-Fiction)

It’s all about knowing what works, not about doing what works.

How well does it scale down?

if it’s invisible when the cover is shrunken down into a thumbnail.

what your book cover will look like as a thumbnail.

Smaller, unobtrusive, unobvious type tucked into the bottom of the page sends a pretty clear psychological message: This author isn’t important.

ur title can help move the reader’s eye across the page in one direction, and that’s handy. But as a graphic, the title can do the same job in multiple directions, through its style and orientation.

Titles are written—and we read from left to right. So titles usually need to be in a left-to-right position in our ‘Z’. For example, if you put the title at the top of the book, it’s the top of the ‘Z.’ And the bottom of the book—well, you get the idea.

Nothing wrecks a pretty picture faster than a title.

Controlling eye flow in an image allows you to invoke a sense of movement, and thus action. Action sells books. Invoking it is good.

But a good rule of thumb is to mimic the eye movement of reading. Because your cover can be the primer for the experience you want your will-be reader to have.

left to right and then down the page, and as that happens you’re engaged and your interest is empowering your comprehension. If your eyes weren’t moving over this page, it would just be blocks of gray—nothing but a sailboat hidden in plain sight.

is flow.

The second philosophy to bear in mind for cover imagery is professionalism. The image needs to tell the reader that A) you have the resources and the means to do this work at a standard above the hobby level, and B) you have the kind of respect for your readers that empowers, enables, and compels you to give them your best.

the reader’s attention to the problem you are solving.

the non-fiction covers that perform best are nearly always simple in design, with all of the reader’s attention focused on the title and subtitle.

An image related to your topic is the way to go, but there’s nothing that says you can’t push the symbolism a little.

We can scan an entire digital page or an entire physical display of books, and in seconds we’ll spot the one or two that make us feel that little twinge of excitement.

Humans are lazy. We’re constantly looking for ways to shortcut the decision-making process, and that includes looking for anything useful in helping us decide what we should read next.

Few things sell your book as successfully to a new reader as your cover.

we recommend self-publishing through IngramSpark for expanded distribution of paperbacks and ePub eBooks

if you use KDP for expanded distribution, IngramSpark cannot accept your book—at all (it’s complicated).

“If earlier in my career, I had been sent to be a general services officer in the management section in, say, Kazakhstan, and I’d learned how to fix people’s toilets, it probably would have prepared me better to be DCM in Warsaw,” Munter said.

A novice to diplomacy, Ashe was “grateful” to learn how the system worked and “didn’t boss you around,” Munter said, which was “most of my experience with political appointees.”

“You are utterly at their mercy” in order to be able to function, Munter added. While still in Warsaw, he also served under a political ambassador, former Knoxville, Tenn., mayor Victor Ashe.

For months, Lukens “acted as a buffer” between Johnson and the mission’s staff, “essentially protecting the embassy from some of his more outlandish demands.”

More political ambassadors fired their DCMs during the Trump administration than during any other administration in recent memory, he noted.

The DCM has to take care of the entire embassy community.

On one hand, they are in the host-country under the authority of the chief of mission, but on the other, those from agencies such as the Departments of Defense and Justice still report to their bosses in Washington.

kind of like a chief operating officer, but without the authority that most COOs have.

I was Mr. Inside,” and the ambassador was “Mr. Outside,” which didn’t mean that “I was cut off from the outside world.”

He noted that, since at least a third of U.S. ambassadorships — or chief of mission positions — go to political appointees, DCM is as high as many senior career diplomats aim to rise in the hierarchy.

From securing semi-conductor supply chains to regulating data flows, techno-nationalism is on the political agenda of western democracies and eastern nations alike. Over the next two years as the government seeks to put in place a comprehensive digital regulatory framework governing data, privacy, apps and algorithms, engaging the first digital generation of new voters on techno-nationalism will be crucial at every step.

While China requires licences for online games by a dedicated gaming regulator, Indonesia requires formal registration to be compliant with local laws governing what are called “private electronic systems”.

We are already witnessing a wave of regulatory moves from Indonesia on not just controlling online gaming apps and services but also actively promoting indigenously developed gaming apps.

Creative engagement of this digital-first generation would perhaps require interactive live streaming on platforms like Twitch apart from volunteer engagement efforts through “servers” on Discord.

While YouTube and WhatsApp are most likely their primary sources of news to them, Facebook and Twitter are already legacy social media platforms belonging to an earlier era.

as this cohort barely reads newspapers or watches conventional television.

that online gaming has nearly five times the number of users relative to those using the internet for online education.

this generation came of age with the touchscreen revolution. Their teen years witnessed an explosive growth in smartphone usage. This is also the generation that had the highest exposure to online education due to Covid-19 vastly increasing their screen time and use of internet tools and services.

As India’s largest cohort that has been “Digital First” from the cradle, this generation of first-time voters has experienced all the significant digital shifts in their formative years.

withdrawing the earlier proposed Personal Data Protection Bill,

the world’s most unique digital polity of first-time, non-English internet users who think, act and transact “mobile first”.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC), by contrast, sees the region as an important arena to challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken U.S. relations with African peoples and governments.

it represents one of the largest regional voting groups (28 percent) at the UN and other multilateral bodies