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Showing posts from August, 2023

Ukrainians Took Apart a Tornado-S Rocket and Found AliExpress Parts

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  The  Tornado-S  is one of the newest Russian  multiple launch  rocket systems. Russia doesn’t have a whole lot of them and some they already lost in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military analyzed a captured Tornado-S rocket and said that the chips found inside were made in China. The rocket itself was manufactured on February 1, 2023. Tornado-S system somewhere in Ukraine in 2023. You can see the boxed Z marking on the side. Image credit: Mil.ru via  Wikimedia  (CC BY 4.0) The Tornado multiple launch rocket system has been in service in Russia since 2014. The Tornado launcher has a wheeled truck chassis and, depending on the type of rockets, has a range of up to 200-300 km. It is a very dangerous weapon with a crushingly devastating power. There are several versions of the Tornado systems. The Tornado-S is special in that the rockets of this system have GLONASS satellite navigation modules borrowed from the Smerch system. A single Tornado-S system can laun...

FCC issues historic $300 million fine against the largest robocall scam it has ever investigated

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  Klaus Vedfelt/Digital Vision/Getty Images CNN  —  The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday cracked down on a massive illegal robocall operation responsible for billions of auto-warranty scam calls in recent years, with regulators imposing a record $300 million fine on what authorities said is the largest such network it has ever investigated. The globe-spanning illegal operation violated US telecom laws by making more than five billion robocalls to more than half a billion phone numbers over the course of just three months in 2021, the FCC  said in a release Wednesday . But the campaign had been in existence for even longer, the FCC added. Using a multitude of shell companies, aliases and fly-by-night phone providers allegedly under their control, the people behind the network — which  CNN has previously reported on  — had sought to dupe unwitting consumers into buying shoddy service contracts for their vehicles since 2018. The ringleaders of the...