DARPA

Good Apple, bad Apple: Tough call to unlock phone

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Which side are you on regarding the FBI’s request that Apple unlock the phone of a killer?

I lean on the side of the agency because I would want those who protect us to have every possible lock-picking device to thwart criminal behavior. But I can see Apple’s point of not wanting to give up liberty for security, as it could tip the balance when citizens (and businesses run by citizens, never mind if they are global corporations) hand over their freedoms to the state.

Incidentally, that Ben Franklin quote, which must be resounding in your ears about how Those who would give up Liberty for safety deserve neither, is one of the best mis-quoted statements by old Ben. He actually said that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  (Note the qualifiers – ‘essential’ and ‘temporary.’) 

What if Apple gives up a little temporary liberty, and stop making a huge thing of this Apparently Apple has unlocked some 70 phones before, but had done it without the media baring down on it. Given that there are dozens of websites that provide back-door services, and there being ‘ethical hackers’ who could unlock phones, I’m surprised no one has offered to do it for Apple, thereby freeing them of the PR nightmare.

Perhaps the government ought to hold a hackathon and see what surfaces. After all, DARPA holds cyber-security hackathons, don’t they?

Did DARPA’s network challenge tell us anything we didn’t know already?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Last Saturday’s experiment baffles me.

The idea of the Defense Department trying to understand network effects is understandable. DARPA (which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) sent up 10 of these across the country.

Balloons to study social networking how information travels across the Net seems like a bit odd. Sure DARPA did invent the internet, but…

Why use a large object in the sky? On Twitter people resort to “wide area team-building and urgent mobilization” without any interest in a reward. Just ask Tiger Woods, and (you knew this was coming, all you balloon fans, didn’t you?) the dad of Balloon Boy.

Here is how it was handled: Teams were asked to take part in locating ten moored weather balloons at fixed locations in the US. They were visible from roadways (spottings here) and accompanied by DARPA representatives –hopefully not inside the balloon, as that would have been too much like the Falcon incident.

They went up at 10 am (Eastern) and supposedly stayed there until 4 pm on Sat, Dec 5.

Attached (hopefully not to the aforementioned rep) was a $40,000 prize “to the first participant to submit the correct latitude and longitude of all ten weather balloons.”

I have an idea, DARPA: Why don’t you do this once a  month, and then ask the winner to give half of the reward to someone who’s lost a job? The network effects of this would be huge since there could be 15.4 million people (the official unemployment figure as of Nov 09) Tweeting, talking and Facebooking this. Larry King would love to cover incidents like this and regularly point  to the bottom of his screen to show us his Twitter address.

Or maybe you could hire a few people to increase the network effects of your Facebook page –which had only 19 people leaving nice messages about this.

OK, enough of having a bit of fun at DARPA’s expense. Let me say what I liked about:

  • I like the fact that an organization like this is not sitting on its laurels, but trying to learn how this thing they created works, and morphs. (Watch this vid, below) as Peter explains.
  • I like the idea of encouraging collaborative efforts. Throwing it out to the hoipolloi. Nerd Fighters took up the challenge, and though they didn’t quite win, their efforts were very impressive.

Not enough organizations take risks like this. It’s time many did send up some trial balloons, red or otherwise.