An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [S]tate-owned telecommunications company Rostelcom has raised the possibility of moving some Russian data centers underground in talks with the nickel and palladium mining company Norilsk, according to Russian newspaper Vedomosti. The industry publication Data Center Dynamics also pointed to a recent proposal by a Russian regional governor to build data centers within open-pit coal mines while planting green public parks above as camouflage. On November 2, Putin also signed a decree ordering Russian data center operators to set aside 10 percent of available space and capacity in case the Russian government requires it, according to independent Russian news publication Meduza. That may indicate growing Kremlin concerns about the vulnerability of Russian cloud computing infrastructure during its war with Ukraine. Putin's decree also allows a special Russian government commission to authorize use of foreign data centers in consultation with Russia's Federal Security Service. That marks a notable policy change because Putin and the Russian parliament previously enacted Russia's "Sovereign Internet Law," which has blocked Russian companies from using cloud computing infrastructure outside Russia's borders. Russia's push for a sovereign and increasingly closed Internet has resulted in a highly centralized system under a few Russian tech companies like Yandex. That hyper-centralized system has now proven vulnerable during wartime, as Ukrainian drone strikes on key Russian data centers created widespread disruptions for popular payment and digital banking apps, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, and ride-hailing and food delivery apps, among others. Yandex has also been forced to relocate all three of its main supercomputers after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted the AI data centers where they were originally housed, Meduza reported.

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Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from CNN: The Pentagon has given the Department of Homeland Security permission to test a military-grade heat ray and develop tactics to potentially use it in operations at the southern US border, according to a memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month and obtained by CNN. The heat ray, officially known as the Active Denial System, is a nonlethal weapon that shoots an invisible beam of electromagnetic waves that can reach a little more than half a mile away, according to the US military. The energy beam causes a burning sensation when it comes into contact with the human skin -- which Pentagon officials have previously compared to feeling a blast of heat when opening a hot oven. Military officials have said the resulting "tingling effect" lasts between 10 and 15 minutes but also generates "an instinctive and irresistible urge to run from the effect."

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Ukraine says it carried out the world's first evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone, using a heavy-lift hexacopter after enemy drones and landmines made conventional ground evacuation too dangerous. NBC News reports: Shared by the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade on Monday, the video shows the soldier strapping himself into a large drone and being flown at what appears to be relatively low altitude over blurred-out territory. The drone carefully lowers him, and the drone operator greets him with "Welcome back to the ground!" The video also shows blurred faces of drone operators who carried out the mission. The post said the unidentified infantryman was wounded at his position. "Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible," the brigade said. "At that point, the specialists in our unit took it upon themselves to attempt something that had never been done before: evacuating a serviceman using an aerial drone," it added. The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer. It looks about twice the size of the soldier in the video. The specialists working on the mission had to ensure the drone could carry a human being without flipping over or swaying excessively, according to the unit.

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A 45-year-old U.S. citizen pleaded guilty to running a widespread identity theft and fraud scheme that defrauded thousands of U.S. servicemembers and veterans while living in the Philippines, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Robert Wayne Boling Jr. exploited stolen personally identifiable information (PII) to compromise victims’ bank accounts and steal their money and veterans’ benefits during a five-year period ending in July 2019, according to court records. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering and faces up to 40 years in prison upon sentencing. 

“Those who courageously served our nation deserve our gratitude and protection — not to become targets for criminals seeking to profit from their sacrifice,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. “This defendant betrayed our country by exploiting personal information belonging to thousands of military-affiliated individuals, including elderly and disabled veterans, in a calculated scheme to steal from those who have given so much.”

Boling was arrested in May in Los Angeles after he was deported by the Philippines to the United States to face charges related to the scheme, officials said.

He was originally indicted in July 2019 along with four co-conspirators, and a warrant issued for his arrest in October 2022. Two of Bolling’s co-conspirators — Frederick Brown and Trorice Crawford — previously pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 151 months and 46 months in prison in 2021 and 2020, respectively. Other alleged co-conspirators Jongmin Seok and Allan Albert Kerr remain at large.

Prosecutors describe Boling as the “principal orchestrator of the scheme.” He received PII of thousands of military-affiliated individuals from Brown, who worked as a contractor medical records administrator for the U.S. Army in South Korea from 2010 to 2015, officials said. 

Boling used the sensitive data to compromise various accounts belonging to U.S. servicemembers and veterans. 

Officials said the crew also worked with dozens of money mules in the United States who provided bank accounts to deposit stolen funds into and sent a portion of the funds to the Philippines. 

Prosecutors said they’ve worked for years to bring Boling to the United States to face charges. He was raised in South Korea as a U.S. military dependent and lived in Angeles City, Philippines, according to the indictment.

“This defendant and his fellow fraudsters served themselves by stealing from those who selflessly serve our country,” Justin R. Simmons, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said in a statement. “We will always work tirelessly to fully prosecute those who prey on others in this manner, especially when the victims of those crimes are servicemembers.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia's digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia's centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the "data center war" it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine's decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia's system if the countries continue trading such blows. Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine's power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks. But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as "Russia's Google," in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a "symmetrical response." [...] More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex's data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex's search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex's cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia's largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

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