The Wall Street Journal reports: “A newly built supercomputer in China appears poised to take the world performance lead, another sign of the country’s growing technological prowess that is likely to set off alarms about U.S. competitiveness and national security.

The system was designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Tianjin. It is part of a new breed that exploits graphics chips more commonly used in playing videogames—supplied by Nvidia Corp.—as well as standard microprocessors from Intel Corp.

Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.

But Nvidia says the new system in Tianjin—which is being formally announced Thursday at an event in China—was able to reach 2.5 petaflops. That is a measure of calculating speed ordinarily translated into a thousand trillion operations per second. It is more than 40% higher than the mark set last June by a system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that previously stood at No. 1 on a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers…” (Imagine! A computer that is capable of 2,500,000 trillion calculations per second and Japan is planning to push this number to four times this amount or 10,000,000 trillion calculations per second. The antichrist and false prophet will have no problem keeping track of the citizens of the tribulation 7 year era – Revelation 13:1-18; 14:9, 11; 15:2; 16:2; 19:20; and 20:4. See also the next three reports.)

The London Daily Telegraph reports: “Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans.

It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet.

Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state.

The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them.

It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to ‘end the storage of internet and email records without good reason’.

Any suggestion of a central ‘super database’ has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time.

That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism.

The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages…”

Reuters reports: “Countries are already using cyber warfare techniques to attack each other and need to be vigilant round the clock to protect computer systems, the head of Britain’s communications spy agency says.

Iain Lobban, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said British government systems are targeted 1,000 times each month.

‘Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second,’ he said in a rare speech…

The internet lowered ‘the bar for entry to the espionage game,’ he said. Its expansion increased the risk of disruption to infrastructure such as power stations and financial services.

‘The threat is a real and credible one,’ said Lobban, whose GCHQ agency, a big eavesdropping operation similar to the National Security Agency in the United States, handles operations such as intelligence-gathering and code-busting.

Politicians and spy chiefs in Britain and around the world have increasingly been warning about the growing cyber threat.

The issue came to the fore when security experts suggested that the Stuxnet computer worm that attacks a widely used industrial system could have been created by a state to attack nuclear facilities in Iran…”

BBC News reports: “Attacks on computer networks are among the biggest threats to the UK, Theresa May has said ahead of the publication of a new National Security Strategy.

Cyber terrorism was a ‘new and growing’ danger, the home secretary said.

The BBC has learned there will be new money to bolster cyber security, focused on protecting critical infrastructure and defense assets.

The strategy will form the background for the Strategic Defense Review, with defense cuts of 8% expected.

The National Security Council, set up by David Cameron in May, is publishing an updated approach to national security which identifies 16 threats to the UK.

The most serious – which they are calling ‘Tier 1’ – comprises acts of international terrorism, hostile computer attacks on UK cyberspace, a major accident or natural hazard such as a flu pandemic, or an international military crisis between states that draws in the UK and its allies.

Speaking ahead of the strategy’s launch in the Commons, Mrs. May said she was not prepared to rank these in order of gravity but acknowledged they were of a ‘different nature’ to other potential threats.

On terrorism, she said the threat level to the UK had been at severe – which means an attack is likely – for ‘some time’.

‘We are facing a very serious threat from international terrorism… we must all be vigilant,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme…”