Binance claims it helped to bust Chinese crypto scam app in India It's not often The Register writes about a cryptocurrency outfit being on the right side of a scam or crime, but last week crypto exchange Binance claimed it helped Indian authorities to investigate a scam gaming app. India's Enforcement Directorate in August announced [PDF] it had arrested four people – one of them named " …
Roopee,
Depends who you mean by "we".
There's certainly work going on within NATO. The Netherlands are about to order a couple of small multi-purpose boats that can either carry containerised surface-to-air missiles for its frigates (doesn't have the radars to use them effectively itself) - or use that working deck to launch various underwater vehicles for seabed work. Norway are about to buy a bunch of high end anti-submarine frigates - and new subs as well. The UK has already ordered a new batch of top-end ASW frigates (type 26 - which hopefully Norway will also buy).
The Royal Navy also bought RFA Proteus - which is an oil rig support vessel, painted it grey and is using it to assess how effective this type of vessel will be at protecting underwater assets. The plan was to buy 3 - but they're not sure if off-the-shelf North Sea work boats are up to the job - or if they've going to have to build something customised. I've read they're having a few problems getting it to do what they want - but I'm hoping off-the-shelf is good enough - because at £60m for Proteus, it's much quicker and cheaper to just order a couple more, than to design and buy two specialist ships.
France have also agreed to buy Nokia's cable laying arm. I assume Nokia are selling because companies like Google have gone into laying their own undersea cables - so maybe its a harder market to sell into than when you were just selling to telecoms firms? But for France it gives them the right ships for undersea work, as well as the capacity to do cable repairs if attacks happen.
There's quite a lot going on, at least in Europe. Particularly around the North Sea - I've read nothing about what's happening in the Med. That could be nothing happening, or more likely me just not seeing it. How effective all this will be is another question.
Roopee,
It's being at least taken seriously. I'm not sure what the practical outcome is. One of the traditional roles of minesweepers was to do repeated surveys of your harbour entrances and then investigate if you noticed something change. It might be a mine, or more likely a listening device. Well most likely random junk of course, but that's a regular peacetime Cold War process that's being turned over to drones - which in the Royal Navy should be relacing the plastic minesweepers (on grounds of cost and not having people directly near the explodey stuff).
I'm presuming that defence of the undersea cabling and oil infrastructure is going to be a somewhat similar process? So some of the new drone minehunting / surveying kit is going to be perfect for the role. Then you just need some relatively cheap motherships with moonpools and/or cranes and working decks to operate them from. It's therefore possible there's quite a lot of existing capability that can somewhat do the job?
The other thing is resillience. Build extra cables - so we've got ways to route around damaged ones. Assuming France buying Nokia's cabling division isn't just them buying a company and running it as normal - then they're also creating extra repair capacity, over and above what the private market already has. But I've only seen the announcement, not what the French were planning for.
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