A skirmish is filmed, using HD video cameras, by both sides. Storyful pinpoint the location. War as panopticon

Excellent stuff. Lessons to be learned from this: IRC has some key features that mean it can be useful in this case.
1. simple text, everything supports it, no fancy UI clients are necessary;
2. resilient against lossy/transient/low-bandwidth/high-latency networks;
3. standards-compliant and "battle-hardened" (so to speak);
4. open-source/non-proprietary.

Despite the U.S. military’s massive spending each year on advanced communications technology, the use of simple text chat or tactical chat has outpaced other systems to become one of the most popular paths for communicating practical information on the battlefield.  Though the use of text chat by the U.S. military first began in the early 1990s, in recent years tactical chat has evolved into a “primary ‘comms’ path, having supplanted voice communications as the primary means of common operational picture (COP) updating in support of situational awareness.”  An article from January 2012 in the Air Land Sea Bulletin describes the value of tactical chat as an effective and immediate communications method that is highly effective in distributed, intermittent, low bandwidth environments which is particularly important with “large numbers of distributed warfighters” who must “frequently jump onto and off of a network” and coordinate with other coalition partners.  Text chat also provides “persistency in situational understanding between those leaving and those assuming command watch duties” enabling a persistent record of tactical decision making.
A 2006 thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School states that internet relay chat (IRC) is one of the most widely used chat protocols for military command and control (C2).  Software such as mIRC, a Windows-based chat client, or integrated systems in C2 equipment are used primarily in tactical conditions though efforts are underway to upgrade systems to newer protocols. 

(via JK)

An attempt to catalogue some Emergency-era (ie. WWII) ground markings, used to notify US pilots that they were overflying the neutral Republic of Ireland

or, a very effective demonstration of a man-in-the-middle interception and replay attack, from a 1980s Namibia-Angola war, via Ross Anderson

Epic Reddit post. "Parallels to '1984' off the top of my head: 3 superpowers, a "communist" leadership in which technology has reached as far as it needs to go (end of technology tree), barbarian (resistance) uprisings constantly being stomped out by the totalitarian government, nuclear war rendering most farmland useless, constant breaking and reassembling of treaties between the 3 superpowers, seemingly infinite war (due to the previous point), an ever present and all knowing leader making the decisions of the nation..." (via oceanclub)