Swedish Government split over defence and Russia increase their presence in the Baltic Sea.

Once again, the leader of the Liberal Peoples Party, Jan Björklund, publicly argues that the Swedish Armed Forces, more than today, must focus on national defence, and that further savings on the military must be stopped. This has angered the Minister for Defense, Sten Tolgfors, and exposed a rift in the government.

“The Swedish Armed Forces can not almost only be focused on participating in international operations,” says Jan Björklund, leader of the Liberal Peoples Party, to daily Svenska Dagbladet. The Liberal Peoples Party today present a new defense policy document, where they go against the stated policy that has guided the center-right government they-self are a part of. The change in policy is justified by developments in the surrounding are of Sweden.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the focus of our defense policy has gradually shifted away from the defense of Sweden. Recent decisions are the most far-reaching. But it has been built on assumptions that developments in Russia have gone in the right direction,” Jan Björklund says. But he feel that it is something that has not happened.

“Russia re-equips. They increase their presence in the Baltic Sea. With powerful ships like Russian Aircraft Carrier Adm. Kuznetsov. And the almost new Kirov class nuclear-powered guided missile battle-cruiser Peter the Great:

Peter the Great:

Sensors and processing systems:

Radars(NATO Reporting Name):
Voskhod MR-800 (Top Pair) 3D search radar, foremast
Fregat MR-710 (Top Steer) 3D search radar, main mast
2 × Palm Frond navigation radar, foremast
Sonar:
Horse Jaw LF hull sonar
Horse Tail VDS (Variable Depth Sonar)

Armament:
20 P-700 Granit (SS-N-19 Shipwreck) AShM
14 SS-N-14 Silex ASW cruise missiles
12×8 (96) S-300PMU Favorit SA-N-6 Grumble surface-to-air missiles
96 S-400 (SA-NX-20 Gargoyle) long-range SAM
192 9K311 Tor (SA-N-9 Gauntlet) point defense SAM
44 OSA-MA (SA-N-4 Gecko) PD SAM
2x RBU-1000 305 mm ASW rocket launchers
2x RBU-12000 (Udav-1) 254 mm ASW rocket launchers
1 twin AK-130 130 mm/L70 dual purpose gun (2x AK-100 100 mm/L60 DP guns)
10 533 mm ASW/ASuW torpedo tubes, Type 53 torpedo or SS-N-15 ASW missile
8x AK-630 hex gatling 30 mm/L60 PD guns
6x CADS-N-1 Kashtan missile/gun system

Armour: 76 mm plating around reactor compartment, light splinter protection
Aircraft carried: 3 helicopters

Russia Navy Kusnzov Aircraft Carrier

Next defence bill should include a strengthening of the defence capability of Sweden,” Björklund says. Minister for Defence and politician of the Moderate Party, Sten Tolgfors, directly attacked Björklund’s new stand on defence policy today. “Björklund has had eight budget cycles in which to operate and finance an increased spending on the defence. That has not happened. Media moves does not give the Armed Forces new resources. But it creates uncertainty in an organization that is undergoing its biggest shift in decades”, the minister responds on his blog. Tolgfors also reasoned that Björklund’s proposal would be costly for the state.

“His proposal would cost several SEK billion to implement. To pretend that it is free is the same as a policy of black holes for the economy of the Armed Forces,” Tolgfors writes.

This is the second time this year that the Liberal Peoples Party and the Moderates have clashed in public about the governments defence policy, the first time was during a conference on defence policy in January. Open conflicts between cabinet ministers is very unusual in Sweden.

It is hard to ignore the upcoming elections in September as the main reason for this rift in the government. As the second largest party in the coalition, the Liberals would like to specialize on defence issues, and thus take votes from the larger Moderates. At the same time, defence issues are an infected wound in the Moderate Party, in which a military-friendly faction lost their influence a few years ago.

To summarize this whole debate, with my personal view of it.  I believe that Sweden has to upgrade it`s Army and Navy to be at least some what able and ready to face any upcoming threat in the Eastern Sea.

Quantum teleportation now achieved over ten miles of free space

Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.

As I’ve explained before, “quantum teleportation” is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work.

Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the others state. When one of the items is sent a distance away, entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information, if not matter. However, the distance particles can be from each other has been limited so far to a number of meters.

Teleportation over distances of a few hundred meters has previously only been accomplished with the photons traveling in fiber channels to help preserve their state. In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance.

However, the long-distance teleportation of a photon is only a small step towards developing applications for the procedure. While photons are good at transmitting information, they are not as good as ions at allowing manipulation, an advancement we’d need for encryption. Researchers were also able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent decent enough for information, but still dangerous for the whole body human teleportation that we’re all looking forward to. And it will be achieved i`m sure of it.

More info

Internet to run out of IP addresses in 500 days?

If you have even a passing interest in the topic of IP addresses, then you should take a look at the following information. This strange and enlightening article presents some of the latest difficulties on the subject of IP addresses. IP Address stands for Internet Protocol Address and is currently made up of four “octets” or numbers separated by a period. Each octet can be a number from 0 to 255.

Well here`s a fun story because it has emerged that the IP addresses used in helping to distinguish one computer from another are expected to run out in approximately 500 days. The unique numbers, which are known as Internet protocol addresses, help identify the world’s networked devices. An IP address uses four numbers from 0 to 255 to distinguish one computer from another. As an example, computers around the world can recognize the IP address 203.26.51.71 as a server for fairfax.com.au, which publishes this newspaper online.

There are more than four billion combination’s. But the proliferation of networked devices means soon that will no longer be enough.
In a way, IP addresses are like phone numbers, which need to be entered correctly if a right connection is to be made. So the ability to uniquely identify everything in the computer world is essential. IP addresses are like phone numbers in another way, too. Just as Australia had to move from seven-digit phone numbers to eight digits in the early 1990s, massive change will now be required globally to resolve the problem. However, there’s a complication.

“Unlike the telephone system, it’s not easy to just add more digits,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, Geoff Huston, as saying.

Although every telephone number in Australia was successfully altered, the phones themselves didn’t change. Humans simply dialed an extra number and were connected to the person. But every web server, every iPhone, every router and everything else – possibly billions of devices – will need to be reconfigured or upgraded.

“The idea that every last one has to go back into the doctor for a new transplant does sound a bit frightening. It’s almost like having to teach every device a new language,” Huston said.

Fortunately, a new language exists. Computers now use IP version 4 and have since the 1980s. Its replacement is version 6, known as IPv6. For humans, little will change. The traditional way we visit a website, by typing google.com or facebook.com, won’t be any different and personal computers will automatically use IPv4 or IPv6 as required. The impending shortage has been apparent for more than a decade as the volume of networked devices has escalated but inertia has stymied efforts to prepare for IPv6, Huston revealed. While personal computers have been capable of understanding IPv6 since Windows XP and Apple OS X, Huston says only about 5 percent of devices are configured to do so. Among web servers, the figure is less than 1 per cent. Internode is one of the few Internet service providers that offers an IPv6 service. Telstra is among the many that do not. Tens of millions of mobile phones are on an IPv4 network only. Technically, it’s not all that difficult to enable IPv6. Logistically, it’s a horrendous challenge, and the conversion can involve substantial costs, with little in return.

“It doesn’t make your Internet any shinier or any brighter, so customers won’t pay more,” he said.

Consequently, Huston predicts we will get to a point where large numbers of people will no longer be able to see everything on the Internet. So far, the dwindling storehouse of IP addresses has been managed with trickery that translates one IP address to another. But by about late September next year, the key body that distributes IP addresses will run out of them. Three months after that, every drop in the pipeline will dry up and the only way to get an IPv4 address will be to buy one from someone else. Lacking that, consumers whose computers are not configured to use IPv6 won’t see new websites. Likewise, iPhones, which don’t understand IPv6, will be limited to the “old” Internet.

For businesses that are not prepared, this could spell trouble. Unless web servers and mobile phone services are configured to send information via IPv4 as well as IPv6, companies could be left with a fraction of their current customers. The good news is that once IPv6 is in place, it should satisfy demand as far as a computer can calculate.

“If every single address was one grain of sand, in IPv6 you could build 300 million planets the size of Earth,” he added.

Here you can check your own IP adress :

Or you can download vTrace and use it from your own computer. vTrace combines traceroute, ping, whois, nslookup (dig), netstat into an easy to use graphical interface that analyzes Internet connections to quickly locate where an outage or slowdown occurs.

In addition, vTrace identifies the geographical location of IP addresses on a map. While many IP lookup tools only provide network provider locations, this module uses GeoIP location engine to provide a much higher level of accuracy by identifying the actual physical city and country location of servers and routers.