Slashdot Mirror

The write-up and TFA conflate the Internet and (what became known as web). Maybe, the slines don't know any better, but Slashdot users ought to... The hyperlinked documents weren't the first "killer application" — e-mail was. The first systems weren't even using the Internet, but, according to Wikipedia:

In 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent

And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC only in 1993).

If you want to get "technical" the web (aka http/html) was first (1990 vs 1991 for gopher), but the graphical browser mosaic didn't appear until '93 and not to many folks were using the non-graphical web servers that were in existence at the time.

If email was the killer app, inter-domain mail (via unix mail via rmail/UUCP) was probably the real killer app, not ARPANET email as ARPANET was mostly restricted to non-commercial use. Gopher like the "web" didn't really pop up until '91 when the NSFNET (the modern "internet") was winding down and the commercial internet was ramping up (the various NAPs like MAE and CIX, etc were taking off). Prior to inter-domain unix mail, commercial email was generally *unconnected* (needed to be on the same proprietary system like compuserve to send/receive mail).

In 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent

And Sir Lee's was not even the first system for linking documents/files across the networks — Gopher was. And Gopher was not merely proposed in 1991, that's when an actual system became available (though protocol was codified in an RFC only in 1993).

Number 7 on the list of oldest registered domain names.

BBN is apparently owned by Raytheon.

Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a /24 block, I think.

When did microsoft.com get created?

My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.

Raytheon already do a 300bps voice codec for highly noisy environments (Helicopters!), given the crossover between speech compression and speech recognition (speech recognition is essentially just a special case of speech compression) maybe together they could work something out.

Both UUCP and TCP/IP had email (although the ip side lagged badly, mail was really invented at Bell,

No, it wasn't.

IP made very crude versions of this ad took forever to do it)

Inter-host email came out the same year that UNIX first existed, and wasn't invented at Bell Labs. It ran over NCP, because TCP/IP didn't even exist yet.

SMTP, which ran over TCP and NCP, was first specified in 1982, slightly after TCP was first specified.

300bps seems to be the current state-of-the-art for decent quality speech coding, but it takes the very latest hardware to manage it and the latency isn't so great (120ms)

Modern speech codecs can be much more noise-tolerant now (working purely in the frequency domain) so throat mics might not have have much of a future anyway I think.

A portable version would be a help. Hooked to an aiming system, it could ruin a sniper's day.

A portable (well, vehicle-mounted) system also exists, although it could always be smaller.

DARPA is not new to this: http://www.bbn.com/technology/networking/wnan

You guys suggesting ridiculously simple approaches don't do this problem justice. Dynamic Spectrum Access, MIMO, Multicast VOIP, and amazing routing smarts, it's all there. There's some crazy-smart people behind WNaN, and it scales beautifully. At the 102-node experiment in 2010, network services were far from "ineffective". I suspect that much larger MANETs would work fine, even with this already-built radio system. The summary doesn't accurately reflect the current state of the art.

That being said, this RFI addresses a different issue. The very premise behind IP networks is inherently non-optimal for ad-hoc networking. When IP was being developed, it was with a specific purpose in mind, with specific underlying assumptions. Many of those assumptions do not hold in a MANET. This RFI is about abandoning these assumptions and starting from square one to develop fundamental new ideas about ad-hoc networking that are optimized for this specific environment.

In some sense, those of you saying that this problem is solved are correct. It is solved. There are commercially available systems that "work". This RFI is not about making something that works. It is about developing new theory, protocols, etc., for MANETs from the ground up, and not extending or tweaking existing networking technology to "solve" a problem that it was not designed for. They want theory, not engineering.

I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either. So here.

Actually, I knew about Bolt, Beranek, and Newman long before Raytheon acquired the company.

Disclaimer: I've actually studied the history of the Internet ... so I'm cheating.

A snapshot of one of BBN's other training games (VESSEL) is available on their website. While not quite on the same level as Farcry, it does a little bit better than text only :]

http://bbn.com/technology/immersive_learning_technologies/vessel

This is true, and additionally most military grade simulators generally don't look like Farcry, I've worked on a $30 million dollar Lockheed flight simulator, and in the early 1990s it had probably graphics on par with microsoft flight simulator 98, or thereabouts.

I've also played with an Infantry simulator that was built on the operation flashpoint engine..fun stuff.

http://bbn.com/news_and_events/press_releases/2011/pr_sirius_111711
Actually it looks like a good idea to me from that.

A snapshot of one of BBN's other training games (VESSEL) is available on their website. While not quite on the same level as Farcry, it does a little bit better than text only :]

http://bbn.com/technology/immersive_learning_technologies/vessel

I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either. So here.

you would have lost the bet. BBN is pretty well known for networking related developments (first packet switch/router, first machine-to-machine messaging/email) and acoustic developments (UN Assembly Hall, forensic analysis of the JFK dictabelt & the Nixon Tapes, `Boomerang').

In fact, your computer probably has a fair bit of BBN code & configuration in it. Grep for 'BBN' in /etc, see what comes up.

I've never heard of Raythorn BBN Technologies and I bet you haven't either. So here.

Though there are interesting speech recognition products for other applications ; for this task Dragon and IBM ViaVoice, both sold by ScanSoft, are pretty much the only software choices until someone qualified gets an NSF grant to beef up Sphinx.

I can second the recommendation of the LDC's XTrans if you're going to do this yourself.

If you want someone else to do it, here are a lot of podcasters who want transcripts, and a bunch of transcription services have sprung up to address the market. They've already implemented a lot of the quality-control mechanisms you'd have to address in order to get good results from something like the Mechnical Turk.

The Wall Street Journal ran a side-by-side comparison back in 2008 and recommended castingwords.com, but another provider may very well be better by now. Shop around.

Oh hey, a /. topic where I have first-hand knowledge!

But are these "serious games" fun to play? That seems to be the most overlooked part of educational games.

They don't have to be. You're confusing serious games with edutainment - the latter is entertainment with an educational value (even if it, as you pointed out, quite often fails at the "entertainment" bit), while the former is basically education in the form of a game. Think "military war game" compared to "chess". Different aims, different audience. A lot of serious games would actually be called simulators, if that word hadn't carried so much semantic baggage with it.
The project I'm involved in, aimed at firefighters and other rescue workers, is intended to be an replacement for and complement to certain live (and therefore dangerous and expensive) exercises, for example. That means it's meant to be played with instructors present, as part of their normal education regime. Thus, there's no need to "sell" the game with entertainment. Trainees can practice on their own if they want to (PC-based software), but if they do, they do it for the sake of their own education.

Anyway, if anyone's interested in the subject I can recommend the freely available
From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games. It's DARPA-funded (DARWARS - I love that name!) so it's aimed at military educational gaming, but it's a good introduction to the field.

Why would LISP be interpreted? (that is your implication, is it not?).

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/index.html

Scheme (unadorned) is 30% slower that g++.

http://dan.corlan.net/bench.html

Choice quotes from the last page:

" Programming a 1 GHz Pentium [fastest, 1000$, 2002 PC] in Perl is like programming a 10 MHz something [overclocked, 50$, 1982 Z80-based ZX Spectrum] in FORTRAN!

This is no big surprise as we are looking at the classical trade-off between the power of a language (allowing the programmer to express something in a compact way) and the performace of an implementation (which classically was related to the language being close to the machine representation).

However, the huge exception is CommonLisp. Lisp is the most powerful language that is, representing the classical extreme choice for expressive power instead of efficient implementation. ...
For new projects in which one is free to choose the language, one should choose Lisp."

Here's one where Visual Basic .NET beats C:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2005-09/000588.html

Java beating C:

http://openmap.bbn.com/~kanderso/performance/java/index.html

Of course C is an extremely primitive language. It is possible to (on current hardware) write a C program to best most other systems. But, a proper program is much more difficult!

I think it's actually referring to S-BGP. I also thought it was just the MD5 signature option, but it's not.

Then again, one of the comments in TFA is that it won't require any new software or hardware to be installed, so maybe it IS just the MD5 option. The features didn't sound like it; it sounded like they were establishing a whole PKI.

Under DARPA sponsorship, and together with our academic colleagues Harvard University and Boston University, BBN Technologies has recently built and begun to operate the world's first Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) network. The DARPA Quantum Network employs 24x7 quantum cryptography to provide unprecedented levels of security for standard Internet traffic flows such as web-browsing, e-commerce, and streaming video.

The DARPA Quantum Network became fully operational on October 23, 2003 in BBN's laboratories, and has run continuously since.

source: http://bbn.com/technology/information_security/quantum_cryptography

Go read the thread on NANOG. Or read the timeline here: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube_1.shtml

The way this happened is the result of a fundamental weakness in BGP. A more specific prefix will trump a less specific one, so anyone who has a valid peer can advertise a more specific route and hijack IP space. This is frequently used by Cybercriminals to squat on unused IP space in larger netblocks.

There have been proposals to address this issue for some time. Maybe, now that a major site has fallen victim, something will actually be done about it.

Of course, we could solve the problem the way it was when the Internet was first designed: only allow trusted entities to connect at all. IMNSHO, if the Islamic world don't want to be in the 21st century, that's their choice, but they can't have their cake and eat it too. Unless and until they agree to the basic principles of the Internet: freedom of association and speech, they shouldn't be allowed to connect at all.

This was discussed yesterday, but somehow the mods didn't control the discussion degenerating into a debate about circumcision.

BBN's Boomerang http://boomerang.bbn.com/

The U.S. Army has had that for almost two decades with the Fire Finder radar system, but that's for heavy artillery. Now DARPA is downsizing the technology to the counter-sniper level.

BBN's page for quantum crypto

http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tkarag/papers/BLINC.pdf
http://guh.nu/projects/ta/safeweb/safeweb.html
http://www.ir.bbn.com/~krash/unpubs/TM1321.pdf
http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/stepping/

The project is part of a larger Program at DARPA nicknamed DARWARS that is building a series of game-based interactive training for the military.

DARWARS has been working with DoD contractors and game companies (and are interested in working with more game companies).

One of the games produced was BBN's Ambush!. Several other games are listed in the http://www.dodgamecommunity.com/ web site funded by DARWARS.

An official description of the program can be found here.

The original program was to produce a MMORPG for training in a persistent continuous war, but it has become more of a repository of games for military training.

First, let me say, Google is your friend. But since I'm really nice, I'll ask Ray Tomlinson:

http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/home.html

"I sent the first network email in 1971 using a program I wrote called SNDMSG. I have written a brief account of the first email with the intent of forestalling some of the more common questions about that event. If you want to see what the computer used to send the first email looked like, you will find that here too."

The first message was sent between two machines that were literally side by side. The only physical connection they had (aside from the floor they sat on) was through the ARPANET. I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them. Most likely the first message was QUERTYIOP or something similar.

This can be proved experimentally. Not only that but there are quantum encryption products that rely on this simple fact.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1130877,00.as p

http://www.bbn.com/For_Government_Customers/Networ king/Quantum_Cryptography.html

As for the peculiar syntax, you get used to it rather quickly. Just like with other languages, there are editor tools to help you be productive "in spite of the parenthesis."

As for the peculiar syntax, you get used to it rather quickly. Just like with other languages, there are editor tools to help you be productive "in spite of the parenthesis."

As for the peculiar syntax, you get used to it rather quickly. Just like with other languages, there are editor tools to help you be productive "in spite of the parenthesis."

As for the peculiar syntax, you get used to it rather quickly. Just like with other languages, there are editor tools to help you be productive "in spite of the parenthesis."

Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com, which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.

Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com, which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.

Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com, which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.

BBN Technologies Web site

GIS is a new-ish field, still developping very fast. A lot of tools are fairly mature, but the prices are still high, interoperability is getting good but there aren't many mature commodity components.

The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS.

Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver and OpenMap.

I found the learning curve too much at this point, and many of the OSS solutions didn't work straight out of the box. Proprietary solutions are so expensive that they made playing around impossible.

What's more, getting data was difficult. Your city should be able to share its digitized maps. Here in Canada, my city was reluctant to share them, as some are copyright to ESRI (imagine your city co-owning its information with a foreign company!!!). What I found out however is that there isn't any copyright if you take the paper maps they publish and digitize it yourself. Time consuming, I know :(

There are a lot of useful hacks that I wanted to do with geographic data, but I shelved those plans for now. Hopefully in a year or so we will have better tools and cheaper data. If you manage to help us get there, thanks in advance :)

...which already has some open source ties.

For example, the Vishnu planning engine (source code and project site here) is being used as part of FCS logistics planning.

I guess laser printers are OK, for letters and stuff. But they have to run Postscript. That way you don't need a word processor! You just hack out Postscript files (using ed, of course) and dump them to the printer.

Which just goes to show you that all this video stuff is just a gimmick that they sell to lazy people. Now if you'll excuse me, I got a program to finish. It takes longer without a compiler or assembler, but I like knowing exactly what's in my code!

Too right - it has all been downhill since the days of the ASR-33: (10 characters per second providing keyboard, printer, paper tape reader and paper tape punch) plus real exercise for the fingers (well two fingers...). The rot set in with the KSR-33 (but that did at lease receive the first email message - see this fine photo)

This information about a Secure BGP effort might be interesting.
There is also soBGP (you can google for it), but between the 2, I don't know which has more possibilities to go forward (if any).

BBN is Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the consulting company that did the original networking implementation for ARPANET.

See this timeline for more info.

Well, I stayed a big Common Lisp* fan - one idea I've been toying with (i.e. I'll probably never actually do it and even if I started I'd probably never finish) is an APL-syntax parser for Common Lisp arrays, so one could write (apl-eval "...") and have it transform the APL in "..." into CL functions operating on arrays. And with CL, one could easily implement even the fancy stuff like function composition.

Would be quite cool, because one could then mix Maxima symbolic math stuff, APL numeric math stuff and Lisp... stuff... in the one program.

There's a paper which shows that a good CL compiler can be competitive with a fortran compiler for numerical processing.

* Beware that Scheme is rather different in many ways to Common Lisp - if you've investigated Scheme but decided it wasn't for you, but haven't investigated Common Lisp, then I suggest having a look at it.

One example of why this system does not offer the level of anonymity/security it is claiming is the mistaken belief that adding random "cover traffic" prevents traffic analysis. For some reason amateurs seem to think that if you add a few random bits of message traffic and delay a few messages between nodes then this "noise" will make observation and message correlation harder for an attacker. This is incorrect. The simple example that should help the /. crowd understand this is that an attacker can simply view the entire internal network as a black box and do statistical analysis on the inputs and outputs of this black box. There is only one way to prevent this sort of statistical analysis -- fixed bandwidth (or at least constant traffic) pipes. For a recent paper on this subject check out this paper that describes some of the techniques.

There are several lists out there populated by people who actually know what they are doing when it comes to this stuff and simply lack the time/initiative to code up what they know. If the creators of IIP had simply asked a few pertinent questions they would have learned a lot and saved themselves a lot of frustration given that most of this will have to be completely re-coded if it is actually going to live up to the claims being made by this project.

Unlikely, since it's being worked on here already.

The laser-based system hopes to eventually bounce the signals off mirrors on satelites, sending keys anywhere in the world. (For a price... good for diplomats and military I suppose.)

The fiber systems are still in need of a repeater-like device before they can get more significant distances.

MIT's spinoff list is all well and good but if you add up Stanford's it'd eat them alive

Of course, the real difference between Stanford and MIT is that MIT got net 18, and Stanford had to settle for net 36 (and appears to have given it back to IANA since then).

Of course, what would you expect from the university whose spinoff BBN built the ARPANET, built routers before Cisco, and brought us the use of @ for email addresses?

Seriously, though, both Stanford and MIT have had a real impact. One study ranked the total economic value of MIT's spinoffs as the 24th largest economy in the world for 1994 (between Thailand and South Africa).

But I gotta thank Stanford for Google.

MIT's spinoff list is all well and good but if you add up Stanford's it'd eat them alive

Of course, the real difference between Stanford and MIT is that MIT got net 18, and Stanford had to settle for net 36 (and appears to have given it back to IANA since then).

Of course, what would you expect from the university whose spinoff BBN built the ARPANET, built routers before Cisco, and brought us the use of @ for email addresses?

Seriously, though, both Stanford and MIT have had a real impact. One study ranked the total economic value of MIT's spinoffs as the 24th largest economy in the world for 1994 (between Thailand and South Africa).

But I gotta thank Stanford for Google.

MIT's spinoff list is all well and good but if you add up Stanford's it'd eat them alive

Of course, the real difference between Stanford and MIT is that MIT got net 18, and Stanford had to settle for net 36 (and appears to have given it back to IANA since then).

Of course, what would you expect from the university whose spinoff BBN built the ARPANET, built routers before Cisco, and brought us the use of @ for email addresses?

Seriously, though, both Stanford and MIT have had a real impact. One study ranked the total economic value of MIT's spinoffs as the 24th largest economy in the world for 1994 (between Thailand and South Africa).

But I gotta thank Stanford for Google.