2020
“ The intent of this solicitation, DARPA-BAA-09-38, Comprehensive Interior Reconnaissance, is to investigate technological approaches that leverage building infrastructure to opportunistically collect information for interior awareness. DARPA believes that opportunistic sensing may be exploited to infer urban interior building awareness using exterior observations. Specifically, DARPA asserts that:
The geometry and stimulus response of building infrastructure contains tactically useful information on the interior structure. Infrastructure includes, but is not limited to, the structural, electrical, plumbing, and ventilation systems. . Such information may be acquired through access to the exterior of buildings that may include direct contact with an exterior umbilical, but does not require contact or deployments within the building. STO: Solicitations - Comprehensive Interior Reconnaissance (CIR)
The geometry and stimulus response of building infrastructure contains tactically useful information on the interior structure. Infrastructure includes, but is not limited to, the structural, electrical, plumbing, and ventilation systems. . Such information may be acquired through access to the exterior of buildings that may include direct contact with an exterior umbilical, but does not require contact or deployments within the building. STO: Solicitations - Comprehensive Interior Reconnaissance (CIR)
Because they couldn’t mathematically determine a “perfect” solution, the researchers decided to task the slime mold with a problem human designers had already tackled. They placed oat flakes (a slime mold favorite) on agar plates in a pattern that mimicked the locations of cities around Tokyo and impregnated the plates with P. polycephalum at the point representing Tokyo itself. They then watched the slime mold grow for 26 hours, creating tendrils that interconnected the food supplies. Different plates exhibited a range of solutions, but the visual similarity to the Tokyo rail system was striking in many of them (via Slime as Engineer - brainless mold mimics Tokyo subway Boing Boing)
“ Life in cyberspace can be nasty, brutish, and short. So says a new report (PDF) on international cybersecurity, which argues that the Internet is a Hobbesian “state of nature” where anything goes, where even government attacks maintain “plausible deniability,” and where 80 percent of industrial control software is hooked into an IP network.
No rules: Internet security a Hobbesian “state of nature”
Augmented (Hyper) Reality
Clever spamfighters are allowing botnets to infect one isolated computer, then analyzing the spams it sends to figure out the template used to generate its messages. This template is then propagated to spam-filters (via Fighting spam with captured botnet hosts Boing Boing
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