Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Funds Internet Tracking Scheme
Lifewish writes "The BBC is reporting that company MetaCarta is receiving DARPA cash to design a new system for tracking individuals based on their electronic presence. One company official is quoted as saying that 'The government and international security agencies have a desire to find, track and sometimes arrest people. Our system can be used to find them across the globe.' If you ever wondered where all that information the U.S. is collecting ended up..."
This reminds me of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where they go up against the Borg for the first time. They shoot at the one Borg guy, it's a direct hit, and he goes down. It they nail the second Borg guy too. The third one, though, generates a shield against the good guy's phasers and the shot just bounces right off. The good guys then realize that the Borg adapt to whatever they'll throw at them after a few shots.
Their solution was to do something that they called something like a "random phase fluctuation" on their phasers. Now, while that's just typical Trek techno-babble, the idea is a neat one.
What happens if a spam filter uses a different randomly generated algorithm every minute? Could that solve this problem?