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October 2019

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System Jennings Brown

By on October 21st, 2019

HTTPS://GIZMODO.COM/U-S-MILITARY-WILL-STOP-USING-FLOPPY-DISCS-TO-OPERATE-I-18391

The systems used to control the United States arsenal of nuclear weapons rely on outdated computers. But the Department of Defense is updating at least one part of the archaic technology—the floppy disk storage systems.

A 60 Minutes segment in 2014 presented a tour of a nuclear control center, revealing to the public that the computers that would take a nuclear launch order from the President rely on 8-inch disks invented nearly half a century ago.

Defense tech news site C4isrnet reports that the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS)—the communication infrastructure that transmits emergency action messages for nuclear command centers—is ditching the floppy disks. Lieutenant Colonel Jason Rossi, 595th Strategic Communications Squadron commander, told C4isrnet the SACCS is upgrading to a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution.”

U.S Strategic Communications did not immediately respond to a Gizmodo request for comment on the report.

As C4isrnet points out, the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2016 that the SACCS operates on an IBM Series/1 computer from the 1970s, and the Pentagon planned “to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

New York Times Readers Offer Vicious Responses to Articles by Israelis Ira Stoll

By on October 21st, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/20/new-york-times-readers-offer-vicious-responses-to-articles-by-israelis/?utm_content=blog1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

In at least two recent cases, articles in The New York Times by Israeli authors were greeted by responses from Times readers who insisted that a Jewish state should not exist.

The Times published a page of letters to the editor in response to my former Forwardcolleague Hillel Halkin’s review of Bari Weiss’s book about antisemitism. One of the letters comes from Wayne Price of the Bronx, who insists, “There should be no Jewish state, no Christian state, no Muslim state, no Hindu state, and not even an officially atheist state. If such a view leads to a rejection of Zionism, then so be it. Democratic anti-Zionism is not antisemitic.”

Why the Times considers this view worthy of print publication is a mystery to me, particularly because while no one is working to wipe Vatican City or Saudi Arabia off the map, the Jews of Israel are regularly the target of eliminationist rhetoric from a nation with a nuclear weapons program. Because Jews are not only members of a religion but also of a people, the letter-writer’s sentence is like saying there should be no French state, no Greek state, no Italian state. Mr. Price doesn’t explain how he’d assure the physical safety of Jews in the absence of a Jewish state. The historical record on that front isn’t exactly encouraging.

The Times also published 262 online comments in response to an op-ed by Micah Goodman, the Israeli author, teacher, and institution-builder.

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