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Military To Spend $42M To Build Advanced Network Control
coondoggie writes "BBN, which was bought by defense giant Raytheon today, got almost $11 million to help build self-configuring network technology that would identify traffic, let the network infrastructure prioritize it down to the end user, reallocate bandwidth between users or classes of users, and automatically make quality-of-service decisions.
The advanced network technology is being developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will include support for features like 32 levels of network traffic prioritization that will let data with a higher priority will be handled more expeditiously than traffic with a lower priority."
Does it work via twitter? If it does I think IBM's lawyers want a word...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And what exactly is low priority traffic?
$11M to reimplement IPv6 QOS. I suppose it's a bit more advanced since it makes QOS determination based on users or groups, but that doesn't seem that difficult.
Consider me unimpressed.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
It's about f-ning time.
From the article:
"This one-year contract includes two, one-year options, which, if awarded, would bring the cumulative value of the contract to about $42 million, BBN stated. "
Interesting, could be a precursor to the next evolution of the Internet.
I don't know how well people would like QOS determination on users though, but I see the appeal to the government(s).
"self-configuring network technology" I seem to remember something about this in a movie once, I think it sounds like something that was called skynet......or something like that. I dunno maybe y'all can help me remember
I'm counting the new Internet Control Czar in the White House to use this to shut down the Internet as-needed for "national security" or other "emergencies" so I'm going to dust off my old BBS software and install another landline.
Can it prioritize my SPAM over to that homing pidgeon network?
Advanced network control build YOU !
Yours in Samara,
Kilgore Trout
if it isn't, an awesome example of government stupidity, since just as this thing gets off the ground, ipv6 will probably finally take over
it it is ipv6, look for ipv6 to be mandated on the industry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we hear the death knell of net neutrality.
The corporate think-tanks that envisioned the internet have known for a long time they had unwittingly created a network without strong authentication. This means anyone can jack-in anonymously and spread whatever socially dissident or commie/terrorist agenda they want. So in the interest of controlling our minds and the accessibility of information they are now attempting to re-implement the internet and in doing so shape traffic along arbitrary guidelines which of course will be entirely influenced by corporate profiteering.
I know that this project is only for military use, but it is only a matter of time before corporations are lured in by the promise of an unprecedented amount of power/control/oversight on their networks.
to move net neutrality to /dev/null
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
That sounds like enough to pay for the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything!
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
With stars, bars, stripes and other insignia attached as GIF images ?
Looking at the countries where the government doesn't have an effective monopoly on armed force, I really prefer the monopoly in that case. At least as long as it is democratically controlled.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
US has begun research on Secret Project "Network Backbone". "Where do you want your Node today?"
Looking at the countries where the government doesn't have an effective monopoly on armed force, I really prefer the monopoly in that case. At least as long as it is democratically controlled.
So 51% of the population can put the other 49% into camps?
The 2nd amendment was supposed to ensure that the government didn't have a monopoly on armed force.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
This is about censorship, plain and simple.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm a contractor. That means I will be below the lowest Civil Service employee. My connection will be worse than dial up while the guys mowing the grass will have T3 speed during their lunch breaks.
The DoD is big into what they're calling "Network-Centric Warfare". US doctrine relies heavily on information dispersal and access.
This is (currently) an effort to make sure the right info gets into the right hands on the battlefield.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This slashdot post was deadlocked on resources with another higher priority slashdot post and has been chosen as the deadlock victim
Are they calling it SkyNet?
to run an On/Off button to the Oval Office?
This way he can take down the Internet to save us all.
Change YOU can believe in.....
WTF? Over?
Wasn't BBN.com the second domain name ever to be purchased? (Was reading the article about Symbolics.com earlier.)
811.29.3.2
It's my tax money anyway and I have no saying on it.
Starting founding plan9/minix for distributed micro-rebooteable systems.
Typical Defense mentality here; pay 1000x the price of proper net admins to have equipment that supposedly doesn't need it. The only catch is that the people to fix the new system cost 100,000x what it would have cost to properly admin the existing system.
Oh well. Nothing new under the sun here.
the problem with this will be that any idiot general or SES exec (as in idiot in terms of comms/technical issues) will be able to order his "comm guys" to make "priority one" all traffic having anything to do with him and/or his cronies. the sycophantic bureaucrats hanging onto this general's/SES's coattails and their hours of grainy video-laden powerpoint slides about the battalion/unit/agency bake sale will crash base networks all over the world. packets carrying beat-the-dead-horse PowerPoint slides with 30mb pictures of smiling ethnically-diverse suit-drones waxing poetic about how neat the government budget system is will take priority over mission-related packets.
anyone who has spent any time in the military or working for the federal government will know exactly what i'm talking about. it will be, as always, some guy with a powerful, shiny tool to use for his own interests.
32 levels of traffic prioritization? That sounds like prioritization by bitshift.
I call dibs on Priority 0!
how is babby formed?
$11 million to do what Comcast already does?
I hope the military enjoys it more than the average peer-to-peer user on cable.
Yeah...nuclear missiles and stealth bombers should be the property of private companies...what could the harm be? (rolls eyes)
and will include support for features like 32 levels of network traffic prioritization
...a fixed number of levels means a badly designed program. Or else it would not put any limitations on the number of levels.
Why not just make it go trough the rules recursively like all cascading rule parser? You could even put a configurable limit on it, so it does not crash when coming in contact with infinite levels of rules.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
An $11 million infrastructure/research project doesn't strike me as excessive. Assuming about $1 million of parts, equpment and travel, that leave $10 million for salaries. A fully allocated (or loaded in the accounting sense) employee is probably about $300k/year (salary, overhead, space) which means the project employed about 33 people for one year. Some of those were probably engineers, tech writers, while others administrators. A small team at cisco, IBM, apple or other non-government firm would probably cost about the same and produce equivalent results.
There might be a bit more overhead for DOD projects if it needed security requirements. Security adds to the cost and means that the project can't be off-shored to cheaper employees.
If we do not have Net Neutrality, military communication coming from non-military IPs or encrypted data could be stalled by the major ISPs if that data crosses their networks. Building your own network sounds like the logical choice to me.
Sounds a lot like traffic shaping.
Is the government condoning this??
Media born, Media killed. Nothing more than that. Fuck the media. And, while you're at it - fuck ALL of the banks who raped us - while laughing.
> The advanced network technology ... being developed by ... DARPA .. will include
> support for features like 32 levels of network traffic prioritization that will
> let data with a higher priority will be handled more expeditiously than traffic
> with a lower priority
Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa .... "advanced technology" ?
We were doing this in 1980 with the ICL VME mainframe operating system using their proprietary comms protocol "ICLC03", which prioritised traffic according to which of 6 different categories the relevant device was defined to be in. That's how we could support a cluster of 16 dumb terminals and half a dozen printers down one 9.6Kbps line without all the terminals stopping dead every time somebody printed something.
I hardly think the technique can be described as "advanced" ... "common sense" maybe. I've always wondered why TCP-IP doesn't include such a feature.
(Sorry - ICL died such a horrible death that I can't find a link on this modern intarweb thingie to anything usefully describing VME operating system features such as its ICLC03 protocol - but I assure you it's well described in technical manuals in various ring binders in my spare room.)
If you don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church.
Word is there is already a patent out there, but we won't know until this has been around for 15 years....
The Thing is.