optical

If China invades Taiwan, Taiwan will not notice because a drone has been disguised as an optical illusion for months

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In modern aviation, each aircraft carries a unique “digital license plate” that identifies it to the world in real time. It makes perfect sense. It is a system designed to provide transparency and security, but it also demonstrates a most disturbing paradox: what appears on a screen is not always what is really flying. China has just put it into practice. A bird, a fighter or a drone. A Reuters investigation has revealed that, since last August, at least 23 flights over the South China Sea have been registered under the callsign YILO4200, associated with a long-range Chinese military drone, although the signals it emitted told a different story. It happens that on civil radars it appeared as a sanctioned Belarusian freighter, also as a British Typhoon fighterlike a North Korean plane or even like a Western executive jet. These were not specific errors or programming errors. Was a deliberate impersonation of air identities by manipulating 24-bit transponder codes that identify position, course and speed. “We have never seen anything like this.” The middle counted that open intelligence analysts and those responsible for aerial tracking platforms agreed on something unusual: this pattern was unprecedented. It was not the classic drone flying “in the dark” without emitting a signal. It was just the opposite. He flew showing a false identity, changing it even in the middle of the journey, testing in real time to what extent he could “dirty” the aerial chart. “We had never seen anything like this,” summarized one of the experts who analyzed the data. It didn’t seem like an accident or a technical anomaly. It seemed like a conscious attempt at operational deception. The ultimate optical illusion. The drone, identified as a Wing Loong 2 With a 20-meter wingspan, it took off from Hainan and traced star- or hourglass-shaped patterns for hours over sensitive areas, including naval routes and areas frequented by submarines. In one of the missions the identity of a Typhoon of the RAF with that of three other aircraft in just twenty minutes before virtually “landing” like the Belarusian plane. On another occasion he posed as that same freighter while the real aircraft was simultaneously taking off in Europe. It was a full-fledged aerial optical illusion sustained for months. Taiwan as a backdrop. Not only that. Apparently, the trajectories were not random. Many were projected towards the Bashi channelcritical point between Taiwan and the Philippinesand when superimposed on a map of the island they crossed areas of military interest around Taipei and its southern coast. In fact, they also brushed against American and Japanese bases in Okinawa and the Ryukyu. It wasn’t just about surveillance. The pattern therefore suggests a digital rehearsal to a bigger stagea test of how to generate confusion in the early stages of a crisis in the Strait. Confusion in decisive milliseconds. They remembered in research that, in highly automated conflicts, milliseconds can separate detection from firing. Introducing noise, false identities and contradictory echoes can delay critical decisions and overwhelm chains of command. Although masking would hardly completely fool advanced military radars, it can sow doubts, hide intelligence missions, or fuel disinformation operations. The key is not so much to disappear. Is seem like something else. If China invades, the warning could be a fiction. Ultimately, the most disturbing idea is not only that a drone has been eight months in disguise in front of Taiwan’s radars. It is rather that that capacity has been tested with patience, repetition and apparent impunity. If you will, if China finally decides to go beyond in Taiwannot even the island itself is going to realize at the first moment what it is seeing on its screens. Because from now on, what appears might not be what actually flies. And that is the true revolution of the movement: a possible invasion that begins, not with missiles, but with a false identity flashing on the radar. An “ally” that comes close and that in reality is not so much. Image | 中文（臺灣）：​中華民國總統府, Mztourist – In Xataka | Satellite images leave no doubt: China has concentrated thousands of fishing boats off Japan, and its idea is not to fish In Xataka | China has just mounted the largest cannon in its history on the bow of a ship. And that can only point in one direction

In 1792, before the telephone, a Frenchman invented the first telecommunications system in history: the optical telegraph.

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We live in full Digital Ageand sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that until the end of the 20th century anything similar to the Internet was pure science fiction. But it is not true, because already in the 19th century the telegraph began to allow us to disseminate information in real time, which has earned Morse’s invention the nickname of the Victorian Internet. optical telegraph. But before Morse invented the telegraph in 1832, there were other attempts to make information travel long distances almost in real time. One of them saw the light in 1792 at the hands of the French inventor Claude Chappe. It is about the optical telegrapha tower with two mobile arms that changed position depending on what was wanted to be communicated, and which today is considered the first practical telecommunications system. The origins. This type of communication medium was first devised in 1684 by the British scholar Robert Hooke, although he never put his theory into practice. In 1767 Sir Richard Lovell Edgeworth proposed a first design optical telegraph to transmit the results of a race, but it was not until Chappe developed his that they began to become popular. Claude Chappe and his brothers developed their communication system in 1792, and it was so successful in France that the country created a network of 556 stations that communicated an area of ​​4,800 kilometers. The system was promoted for commercial use, but Napoleon Bonaparte liked the idea and decided to use it to coordinate his troops over long distances. How it worked. The system was made up of a mast from which two mobile arms came out. At two meters long each, the arms were so large that they could be seen from great distances, and only two levers were needed to make them move. As we see in the image, the position of the arms would determine the number or letter that was wanted to be transmitted. The milestone. The first message with the French optical telegraph network was transmitted from Lille to Paris in 1794, and 22 towers were used to carry it across 230 kilometers. It was used for national communications until the 1850s, and the model was modified and used in other countries such as Sweden, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Spain of Charles IV. became famous. In France it enjoyed great popularity, and reached be described in works as important as “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas in 1844. But the same desire to quickly and effectively develop communications that drove and led Chappe’s invention to success also ended up being his undoing. In 1846 and after several failed attempts, Samuel Morse finally managed to convince France to replace it with his new electric telegraph, which could be used at night and in poor visibility. And it ended up prevailing despite the fact that many experts of the time predicted its failure due to the ease with which its lines could be cut, although that is another story. Images | Wikimedia (1, 2, 3 and 4)

Almost all phones with optical zoom have the same problem. This Chinese brand believes it has solved it in a curious way

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The greatest illusion trick in mobile photography is continuity between cameras. When we zoom from 1x to 5x on a telephoto smartphone, we are not moving lenses like on a camera; the mobile jumps between fixed sensors and fills the gaps with digital cropping and AI. The result is those sudden jumps in color and image in the viewfinder and a loss of quality in the “intermediate zooms” that we make when pinching the screen. Tecno, the star brand of the giant Transsion—the fifth largest manufacturer in the world hot on Xiaomi’s heels in some markets—has taken advantage of its annual event to present two technologies that attack precisely this problem: a zoom that does not “jump” and a periscope that shrinks. Optical continuous zoom. And from an increase, up to nine. The most ambitious proposal is the “Freeform Continuum Telephoto”. On paper, it promises to maintain optical sharpness throughout. It represents an important leap, although it is not the first: Sony tried it with the Xperia 1 IValthough its range was more limited. LG also showed similar concepts a few years ago, but no one had promised to cover the main angle lens to the long telephoto lens in a single module. To achieve this milestone without turning the mobile phone into a brick, the Chinese firm moves away from the traditional design of lenses that move longitudinally. Instead, they turn to physical principle of the “Alvarez Lenses”: a system that employs two lenses with free-form surfaces that move perpendicular to the optical axis. By sliding one over the other from the side, they change the optical power of the set and achieve that zoom effect. This technology is related to recent reports that Samsung was developing cameras with continuous zoom for Chinese manufacturers. A periscope that folds on itself. The second innovation presented by Tecno attacks the volume. We are obsessed with increasingly larger sensorsbut the space inside the mobile is finite. Periscopic telephoto cameras require a lot of space, but Tecno and its “Dual-Mirror Reflect Telephoto” promise to reduce the size of the module by 50% and its height by 10%. Instead of a simple prism that bends light 90 degrees, the system uses coaxial optics that bounce light multiple times inside the lens using reflective mirrors. It is what allows long focal lengths in a shorter physical distance. However, this design has a physical trace– When using a central obstruction, the bokeh is not circular, but rather takes on a donut shape. Tecno sells it as an artistic feature, the truth is that it is a consequence of mirror optics. Battle against the accused. The new thing from Tecno comes at a time when mobile photography It depends a lot on the processing what are you looking for the photo instagrammable above realism. Going for better optics instead of digital cropping and AI rescaling seems to be the right direction to achieve naturalness. However, we must maintain some caution. The challenge of this zoom is not only that it works, but that it is bright. Maintaining a decent aperture throughout that range is no easy task. If the system is too dark, the ISO will shoot up, generating noise that the software will have to remedy: back to processing. For the moment, we must wait to see if these concepts end up in a commercial mobile phone. Images | Techno In Xataka | I am an amateur photographer, and I will tell you which are the best phones to take almost professional photos without leaving you a fortune.

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