• Report: Is Stealth Technology Obsolete?

  According to Watts, countries like Russia and China are developing stealth-detection systems that include VHF and UHF radars. There is also a “passive-detection” system that “uses radar, television, cellular phone and other available signals of opportunity reflected off stealthy aircraft to find and track them.” The U.S. is betting big on stealthy aircraft, with the purchase of 1,700 F-35s coming up. (These planes are $100 million a piece). What if they can be detected after all?

  tags: stealth

• Abingdon garage owner could keep Spitfire replica on forecourt as memorial to wartime women pilots (From The Oxford Times)

  AN Abingdon garage owner might try to keep a full-sized replica Spitfire on his forecourt as a permanent memorial to brave wartime women pilots. The model of the famous Second World War fighter has been catching the eye of passing motorists and passengers since it was installed at Peter Jewson’s Lodge Hill Garage on Oxford Road last month.

  But owner Mr Jewson said the plane did not yet have permission to become a permanent landmark.

  tags: Spitfire ww2

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• Book cipher – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  A book cipher is a cipher in which the key is some aspect of a book or other piece of text; books being common and widely available in modern times, users of book ciphers take the position that the details of the key is sufficiently well hidden from attackers in practice. This is in some ways an example of security by obscurity. It is typically essential that both correspondents not only have the same book, but the same edition.

  Traditionally book ciphers work by replacing words in the plaintext of a message with the location of words from the book being used. In this mode, book ciphers are more properly called codes.

  This can have problems; if a word appears in the plaintext but not in the book, it cannot be encoded. An alternative approach which gets around this problem is to replace individual letters rather than words. One such method, used in the second Beale cipher, substitutes the first letter of a word in the book with that word’s position. In this case, the book cipher is properly a cipher — specifically, a homophonic substitution cipher. However, if used often, this technique has the side effect of creating a larger ciphertext (typically 4 to 6 digits being required to encipher each letter or syllable).

  tags: cipher

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