Military communications or military signals involve all aspects of communications, or conveyance of information, by armed forces. Examples from Jane's Military Communications include text, audio, facsimile, tactical ground-based communications, naval signalling, terrestrial microwave, tropospheric scatter, satellite communications systems and equipment, surveillance and signal analysis, security, direction finding and jamming. The most urgent purposes are to communicate information to commanders and orders from them. Military communications span from pre-history to the present. The earliest military communications were delivered by runners. Later, communications progressed to visual signals. For example, Naval ships would use flag signaling to communicate from ship to ship. These flags are a uniform set of easily identifiable nautical codes that would convey visual messages and codes between ships and from ship to shore. Then militaries discovered methods to use audible signaling to communicate with each other. This way of communicating was possible because of telegraphs. They are an electronic device that is used by a sender and when the sender presses on the telegraph key, they interrupt the current creating an audible pulse that is heard at the receiving station. The receiver then decodes the pulses to decode the messages. Since then, military communication has evolved and advanced much further. Today, there are many perspectives used to examine how troops around the world communicate. Anthony King states how Military sociologists have attempted to explain how military institutions develop and maintain high levels of social cohesion. == History == In past centuries communicating a message usually required someone to go to the destination, bringing the message. Thus, the term communication often implied the ability to transport people and supplies. A place under siege was one that lost communication in both senses. The association between transport and messaging declined in recent centuries. The first military communications involved the use of runners or the sending and receiving of simple signals (sometimes encoded to be unrecognizable). The first distinctive uses of military communications were called semaphore. Modern units specializing in these tactics are usually designated as signal corps. The Roman system of military communication (cursus publicus or cursus vehicularis) is an early example of this. Later, the terms signals and signaller became words referring to a highly-distinct military occupation dealing with general communications methods (similar to those in civil use) rather than with weapons. Present-day military forces of an informational society conduct intense and complicated communicating activities on a daily basis, using modern telecommunications and computing methods. Only a small portion of these activities are directly related to combat actions. Modern concepts of network-centric warfare (NCW) rely on network-oriented methods of communications and control to make existing forces more effective. == Military communications equipment == Drums, horns, flags, and riders on horseback were some of the early methods the military used to send messages over distances. The advent of distinctive signals led to the formation of the signal corps, a group specialized in the tactics of military communications. The signal corps evolved into a distinctive occupation where the signaller became a highly technical job dealing with all available communications methods including civil ones. In the middle 20th century radio equipment came to dominate the field. Many modern pieces of military communications equipment are built to both encrypt and decode transmissions and survive rough treatment in hostile climates. They use different frequencies to send signals to other radio stations to communicate. Radios have played a major role in military communication. Since they are capable of sending radio waves to transmit voice signals over long distances. This can be helpful for communication on the battlefield since it is a good way to send messages undetected over long distances. Radios are also very reliable because even in harsh weather conditions they are still able to help communicate among the soldiers. Militaries still use radios and continue to improve the technology because of their durability and reliability for military communication. Spelling alphabets such as the NATO phonetic alphabet are used to aid radio communications by reducing ambiguity between letters. Military communications – or "comms" – are activities, equipment, techniques, and tactics used by the military in some of the most hostile areas of the earth and in challenging environments such as battlefields, on land (compare radio in a box), underwater and also in air. Military comms include command, control and communications and intelligence and were known as the C3I model before computers were fully integrated. The U.S. Army expanded the model to C4I when it recognized the vital role played by automated computer equipment to send and receive large, bulky amounts of data. In the modern world, most nations attempt to minimize the risk of war caused by miscommunication or inadequate communication. As a result, military communication is intense and complicated and often motivates the development of advanced technology for remote systems such as satellites. Satellites have been improving and are being used more and more for communication. They are being made to have higher transmission capacity to help with their communication abilities. The military is upgrading satellites to be immune to interference during combat operations. This advancement will establish stable, high-quality information highways for long distance communication. Aircraft are also beneficial for communication, both crewed and uncrewed, as well as computers. Computers and their varied applications have revolutionized military comms. Although military communication is designed for warfare, it also supports intelligence-gathering and communication between adversaries, and thus sometimes prevents war. The six categories of military comms are: alert measurement systems cryptography military radio systems command and control signal corps network-centric warfare The alert measurement systems are various states of alertness or readiness for the armed forces used around the world during a state of war, act of terrorism or a military attack against a state. They are known by different acronyms, such as DEFCON, or defense readiness condition, used by the U.S. Armed Forces. Cryptography is the study of methods of converting messages to a form unreadable except to one who knows how to decrypt them. This ancient military comms art gained new importance with the rise of radio systems whose signals traveled far and were easily intercepted. Cryptographic software is also widely used in civilian commerce. == Commercial refile == In United States military communications systems, commercial refile refers to sending a military message via a commercial communications network. The message may come from a military network, such as a tape relay network, a point-to-point telegraph network, a radio-telegraph network, or the Defense Switched Network. Commercial refiling of a message will usually require a reformatting of the message, particularly the heading.
BeeSafe
BeeSafe is a personal safety mobile app launched in 2015 as a Slovak startup. It is a location-based security service that notifies family members and friends in case the user of the app gets in danger. The app has received numerous awards. The app has more than 700 downloads and 250 active logins from more than 60 countries worldwide. == History == BeeSafe was founded on March 20, 2015 by Peter Stražovec and Michal Kačerík. The project was a winner of Žilina’s Startup Weekend 2013 and a StartupAwards.SK 2015 finalist. Later on, the app was released in the Android and iOS marketplace. The whole BeeSafe project was in The Spot booster and incubator in Bratislava for three months. BeeSafe entered into an agreement with the city of Piešťany in November 2015 to increase the security of its citizen by connecting the mobile app with the police platform. It is the first city that started using the BeeSafe platform. Further on, the application tries to help people in other Slovak cities. The cities can see the users only if they are in danger. == Awards == BeeSafe app received the Via Bona award, it is a winner of a Slovak startup and has other nominations too.
GNU toolchain
The GNU toolchain is a broad collection of programming tools produced by the GNU Project. These tools form a toolchain (a suite of tools used in a serial manner) used for developing software applications and operating systems. The GNU toolchain plays a vital role in development of Linux, some BSD systems, and software for embedded systems. Parts of the GNU toolchain are also directly used with or ported to other platforms such as Solaris, macOS, Microsoft Windows (via Cygwin and MinGW/MSYS/WSL2), Sony PlayStation Portable (used by PSP modding scene) and Sony PlayStation 3. == Components == Projects in the GNU toolchain are: GNU Autotools (build system) – Software build toolset from GNU GNU Binutils – GNU software development tools for executable code GNU Bison – Yacc-compatible parser generator program GNU C Library – GNU implementation of the standard C libraryPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets GNU Compiler Collection – Free and open-source compiler for various programming languages GNU Debugger – Source-level debugger GNU m4 – General-purpose macro processor GNU make – Software build automation tool
Watch Duty
Watch Duty is real-time wildfire tracking and alert platform. It utilizes a combination of official data sources and human monitoring by experienced volunteers, including active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders. The service is operated by Sherwood Forestry Service, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. In 2025, Watch Duty had 48 full-time employees and approximately 250 volunteers who reported on over 13,000 wildfires. == History == Watch Duty was launched in August 2021 by John Mills, who experienced a wildfire shortly after he moved to Sonoma County, California. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) was unable to provide updates more than once a day due to time constraints, and residents of the area were unable to monitor the progression of the wildfire. Mills discovered that updates were being shared on social media by volunteers following radio scanners, and developed the Watch Duty app to make the information more readily available. It launched with a volunteer staff of "citizen information officers," initially serving Sonoma County before expanding to all of California in June 2022. As of December 2024, the service covered 22 states west of the Mississippi River. During the January 2025 Southern California wildfires, Watch Duty was downloaded millions of times, ranking among the most popular free downloads on the iOS App Store. On December 1st, 2025, Watch Duty announced an expansion to all 50 U.S. states. == App == The application is centered around an interactive map based on OpenStreetMap data with a variety of overlays visualizing fire risk, active fires and evacuation zones, weather conditions, and air quality observations. Watch Duty sources wildfire information from radio scanner transmissions, firefighters, sheriffs, and CAL FIRE publications. It has policies against the publication of personally identifiable information, such as the names of fire victims. Watch Duty is free to use, doesn't require users to sign up, and doesn't display ads.
TAChart
TAChart is a component for the Lazarus IDE that provides charting services. Similar to Tchart and Teechart for Delphi it supports a collection of different chart types including bar charts, pie charts, line charts and point series. Apart from a screen canvas, output is possible in form of SVG, OpenGL, printer, WMF, and other formats. TAChart is bundled with the Lazarus Component Library. Although not intended to be a TChart clone, why its usage differs in certain points, its basic functionality is very similar and some source code written for TeeChart may be reused. == History == The first version of TAChart was developed by Philippe Martinole for the TeleAuto project, a program for automation of astronomic observations. Later functionality was introduced by Luis Rodrigues while porting the Epanet application from Delphi to Lazarus. In the ensuing years the code has extensively rewritten, expanded and is now maintained by Alexander Klenin. == Data sources == TAChart is able to use input from various sources. Examples include lists of real values, user defined buffers in the computer's memory, vectors of random values, fields in databases, calculated values provided by pre-defined functions and results of embedded code written in Pascal Script
Lucy–Hook coaddition method
The Lucy–Hook coaddition method is an image processing technique for combining sub-stepped astronomical image data onto a finer grid. The method allows the option of resolution and contrast enhancement or the choice of a conservative, re-convolved, output. Tests with very deep Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) imaging data of excellent quality show that these methods can be very effective and allow fine-scale features to be studied better than on the unprocessed images. The Lucy–Hook coaddition method is an extension of the standard Richardson–Lucy deconvolution iterative restoration method. For many purposes it may be more convenient to combine dithered datasets using the Drizzle method.
Content Security Policy
Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard introduced to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. It is a Candidate Recommendation of the W3C working group on Web Application Security, widely supported by modern web browsers. CSP provides a standard method for website owners to declare approved origins of content that browsers should be allowed to load on that website—covered types are JavaScript, CSS, HTML frames, web workers, fonts, images, embeddable objects such as Java applets, ActiveX, audio and video files, and other HTML5 features. == Status == The standard, originally named Content Restrictions, was proposed by Robert Hansen in 2004, first implemented in Firefox 4 and quickly picked up by other browsers. Version 1 of the standard was published in 2012 as W3C candidate recommendation and quickly with further versions (Level 2) published in 2014. As of 2023, the draft of Level 3 is being developed with the new features being quickly adopted by the web browsers. The following header names are in use as part of experimental CSP implementations: Content-Security-Policy – standard header name proposed by the W3C document. Google Chrome supports this as of version 25. Firefox supports this as of version 23, released on 6 August 2013. WebKit supports this as of version 528 (nightly build). Chromium-based Microsoft Edge support is similar to Chrome's. X-WebKit-CSP – deprecated, experimental header introduced into Google Chrome, Safari and other WebKit-based web browsers in 2011. X-Content-Security-Policy – deprecated, experimental header introduced in Gecko 2 based browsers (Firefox 4 to Firefox 22, Thunderbird 3.3, SeaMonkey 2.1). A website can declare multiple CSP headers, also mixing enforcement and report-only ones. Each header will be processed separately by the browser. CSP can also be delivered within the HTML code using a meta tag, although in this case its effectiveness will be limited. Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11 also support CSP, but only sandbox directive, using the experimental X-Content-Security-Policy header. A number of web application frameworks support CSP, for example AngularJS (natively) and Django (middleware). Instructions for Ruby on Rails have been posted by GitHub. Web framework support is however only required if the CSP contents somehow depend on the web application's state—such as usage of the nonce origin. Otherwise, the CSP is rather static and can be delivered from web application tiers above the application, for example on load balancer or web server. === Bypasses === In December 2015 and December 2016, a few methods of bypassing 'nonce' allowlisting origins were published. In January 2016, another method was published, which leverages server-wide CSP allowlisting to exploit old and vulnerable versions of JavaScript libraries hosted at the same server (frequent case with CDN servers). In May 2017 one more method was published to bypass CSP using web application frameworks code. == Mode of operation == If the Content-Security-Policy header is present in the server response, a compliant client enforces the declarative allowlist policy. One example goal of a policy is a stricter execution mode for JavaScript in order to prevent certain cross-site scripting attacks. In practice this means that a number of features are disabled by default: Inline JavaScript code