The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln returned to its homeport in San Diego on Friday after a multi-month tour at sea — including an unusually long stint of 107 days without a port call. But the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier had something that’s been unheard-of until now: high-speed internet connectivity, even when it was thousands of miles from shore.

The connectivity sailors had available during the Lincoln’s sea tour was the biggest demonstration to date of a Navy project called Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore, which aims to bring shore-grade communications to underway ships, and the related Flank Speed Edge, the Navy initiative to extend its cloud computing offerings to places where bandwidth is a major challenge.

Using proliferated low-earth orbit satellites and 5G cellular networks, the Lincoln was able to transmit and receive volumes of data that previously would have been unthinkable in an afloat environment: about eight terabytes per day.

But the project first started more than two years ago, when officials first realized the technology was now available to connect ships to networks for purposes other than mission-critical tactical and business applications.

“In August of 2022, we went full-in on trying to figure out that solution. We also wanted to provide connectivity in a meaningful way for sailors, because we’re all connected in the world,” Capt. Kevin White, the Lincoln’s combat systems officer, told Federal News Network in an at-sea interview this month, shortly before the ship’s return home. “When you disrupt connections by going to sea, you disrupt one’s own identity and how they conduct their life. We believe that as you enable connections, it’s a way to enable retention in the United States Navy. It’s also a way for people to feel a more meaningful connection to their job.”

‘Layered’ approach to personal, mission-related connectivity

During the five-month deployment — covering some 78,000 miles — the crew used those new connections for everything from YouTube and Instagram to Navy business applications to the warfighting systems that the military’s older, much slower satellite communications links were first set up to serve decades ago.

And while the new Sailor Edge connections offer orders of magnitude more bandwidth than those traditional military SATCOM links, planners also had to keep in mind that they were going to be serving a crew of 6,000 people aboard the Lincoln, so some amount of rationing needed to be taken into consideration.

Still, as long as the ship was operating in areas where network connectivity wasn’t an issue for operational security, in general, there turned out to be plenty of bandwidth to go around, White said.

“What we did was we took a layered concept. One thing we expect is for sailors to be able to text message or call home anytime, so we built a series of layers in how we bucket the traffic and then how it is prioritized amongst available bandwidth,” he said. “We prioritize our business applications — we have quality of work traffic shaping layers, and those are our highest priority. But it also turns out that those are really kind of low traffic sources. And then we have many quality of life traffic shaping layers … at any given time, the layers are provisioning bandwidth across those services.”

Each sailor on board was given an account to log into the ship’s WiFi network, similar to the portals one might use at a hotel.

“And as they do, that tracks how much data they use, and then we have some mechanisms that enforce where they are allowed to go versus where they are not allowed to go per DoD policy,” White said. “We actually layer up content based on the value that content provides somebody combined with how bandwidth-heavy it is. I expect everybody to be able to make a phone call and send a text message, and then some level of personal entertainment value. However, it is definitely not unlimited.”

Testing the waters with more providers

During long transits far from shore (the Lincoln’s tour spanned from the Western Pacific to an unexpected deployment to the Middle East), the high-speed links were supplied mainly by Starshield, SpaceX’s P-LEO offering for government customers. But White said several other satellite providers have expressed interest in the Sailor Edge effort.

“We’ve had some awesome opportunities to exercise some of those game-changing capabilities,” he said. “It’s kind of like if you build it, they will come, and we’ve now seen a full force effort of folks interested to scale out both our capability on ships, as well as in various shore sites around the world. So that’s fantastic, and that was exactly what we envisioned from the start.”

But closer to land, the Lincoln’s latest deployment also demonstrated the ability to connect the ship to commercial 5G towers at what turned out to be surprisingly long distances.

“We tested a multi-5G cellular aggregation capability with cellular antennas, and the intent of the test was if a ship is in a foreign port, what value does (5G) that provide that ship from a cost and a scalability perspective? But we also wanted to see if we could actually get some measurable traffic to pass while we’re actually at sea,” White said. “And it worked. It worked phenomenally. I was quite surprised at how far away we were able to pass traffic at sea — in excess of 100 miles. And it just shows the scalability of one the Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore capability, as well as how we can integrate with other options and continue to move the needle.”

The post Lincoln returns to port after proving out ‘game changing’ connectivity first appeared on Federal News Network.

President Biden on Monday signed the SHARE IT Act (H.R. 9566) into law, mandating federal agencies share custom-developed code with each other to prevent duplicative software development contracts and reduce the $12 billion annual government software expenditure. The law requires agencies to publicly list metadata about custom code, establish sharing policies, and align development with best practices while exempting classified, national security, and privacy-sensitive code. FedScoop reports: Under the law, agency chief information officers are required to develop policies within 180 days of enactment that implement the act. Those policies need to ensure that custom-developed code aligns with best practices, establish a process for making the metadata for custom code publicly available, and outline a standardized reporting process. Per the new law, metadata includes information about whether custom code was developed under a contract or shared in a repository, the contract number, and a hyperlink to the repository where the code was shared. The legislation also has industry support. Stan Shepard, Atlassian's general counsel, said that the company shares "the belief that greater collaboration and sharing of custom code will promote openness, efficiency, and innovation across the federal enterprise."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bird flu has been around for a long time, but a major U.S. outbreak of H5N1, ongoing since March 2024, has raised concern for a wider spread that will affect more than just birds. Also at risk: indoor cats, who are highly susceptible to the virus and likely to experience severe illness if infected. Several animal deaths have already been reported across Oregon and California.

If you have a pet cat—or have feral or barn cats nearby—you should be aware of the symptoms of bird flu in felines and take preventive measures to protect your animals from infection.

What are the signs of bird flu in cats?

Symptoms of bird flu infection in cats may include lethargy, fever, and loss of appetite as well as mood and behavior change (such as unusual hiding or excessive sleeping). Some cats will also develop redness in their eyes and/or discharge from their eyes and nose, and may experience respiratory difficulty (labored breathing, sneezing, and coughing) or neurological symptoms (seizures or tremors).

If your cat shows any of these signs, keep them away from other cats and anyone with a compromised immune system and call your vet right away.

How to protect your cat from bird flu

There are a few preventive measures you can take to minimize the risk of your cat contracting bird flu:

• Do not feed them raw meat or unpasteurized dairy, including raw milk. (Cooking and pasteurizing kills viruses and germs that are dangerous for animals.) Check the ingredients in your cat's food to ensure it doesn't contain any raw meat or dairy. Northwest Naturals has already recalled frozen pet food with raw turkey—the affected batches were sold in 12 states and in British Columbia, Canada.

• You should also keep your cat away from livestock, poultry, and wild birds, all of which may carry the virus. Keep them indoors, or at least prevent them from wandering unsupervised around outside, where they are likely to encounter and hunt birds.

• Finally, you should wash your hands after touching poultry and any animals, including your cat. Do not interact with sick or dead birds without sufficient protection.

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The Defense Department spent years conducting various 5G proof-of-concept pilots in locations across the country. These pilots led to a great deal of optimism and enthusiasm for the possibilities 5G enables, but they also revealed a number of challenges to overcome. This is especially true for the Department of the Navy (DoN), with its unique operating environment: Ships at sea need to maintain their connectivity, but also link up to and take advantage of terrestrial networks when they’re pier-side.

“So how do we, the Navy at large, start to look like an Amazon warehouse?” David Sass, line of effort lead on the DoN 5G Integrated Product Team, said on Federal Monthly Insights — The Future of 5G for DoD and Critical Infrastructure Organizations. “How do we start turning around material ten times faster to be able to get that to our warfighter at the edge? So we really ultimately want to leverage the innovation and enable those capabilities. 5G is really the architecture for the network.”

The spectrum is one of DoN’s biggest concerns: Frequencies used within the continental United States (CONUS) are different from those overseas. That means conducting negotiations and having agreements in place with other nations regarding how that will work.

Further complicating the matter of integrating spectrums, the Navy is looking at both private 5G networks for ships at sea, as well as proliferated low-earth orbit satellites like Starlink, which differs even more in terms of spectrum used.

“We have had some success with some pilot sites, pilot efforts with StarLink on our carriers being able to use that for … morale, welfare and recreation on the ships,” Sass told The Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “We’ve seen some great success there. And just really taking that a step further for the DoN at large to be able to enable them to have that ubiquitous level of connectivity through that convergence of 5G and PLEO, and even [medium earth orbit] and [geostationary] type satellites.”

Securing 5G

That range of different types of connectivity also creates cybersecurity challenges; Sass said there’s “no one-size-fits-all type of policy with all these different communication channels.” That said, implementing a zero trust architecture and the hundreds of controls that entails is necessary. And new framworks are emerging as well, such as the MITRE FiGHT 3.0, which specifically deals with 5G.

Another complication is the wide range of 5G devices the Navy needs to secure. Phones, tablets and other mobile devices tend to be what people immediately think of, but there’s a wide range of Internet of Things devices as well that the Navy wants to integrate. Those include sensors for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, as well as drones. Those devices will be connected to and need to be secured on a range of different networks, from terrestrial to private 5G to Satcom.

5G use cases

Sass said the three enabling capabilities of 5G — increased throughput, low latency and massive machine-type communication — are broadening the horizons of use cases the Navy wants to try. That includes everything from SCADA systems and drones to augmented and extended reality (XR) training methods.

But new technologies like those can be difficult to move from a piloting phase to actual programs of record.

“The challenge there is really trying to get through that quote-unquote Valley of Death, where we show a good demonstration of the technology, how it’s able to be used effectively. We’ve use it for warehouse purposes and taken really ultimately some of these antiquated processes of just pen and paper and transitioning that into a completely virtual realm,” Sass said. “So showing that, proving that effectiveness out, but then also really trying to get that technology transition over to a program of record. That is a challenge at hand because ultimately it costs money. And it’s still emerging technology; costs are coming down, but it’s still pretty expensive. And really trying to package this as a cost effective solution is really the ultimate challenge.”

The post Navy confronting hurdles to implementing 5G-enabled technologies at scale first appeared on Federal News Network.