Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K

coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."

Comments

Floating?

[rossdee]

Don't weather ballons float around on high altitude winds?

Of course UFO's are often claimed to be weather baloons by the Govt. Is this a cover up?

Re:Floating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Darpa is covering up its lack of innovation with balloon hunt - the successor program to duck hunt

Re:Floating?

[davester666]

Obviously, this is just an attempt to use crowdsourcing to find a bunch of lost weather balloons. In this day and age of gov't budget cutbacks, every balloon saved is a slightly bigger performance bonus at the end of the year...

Re:Floating?

[Skevin]

Or maybe each of the ten weather balloons may or may not have a live six-year-old boy riding in it, and DARPA full well remembers what happened last time with just *one*.

Solomon

Re:Floating?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no real point to it. Here's what they did: There are five balloons around, numbered from 1-5, and four balloons numbered from 7-10. Just like the prank where you release a 3 pigs, painted with a "1", "3", and "4" into a high school.

They're just 5 months early.

Re:Floating?

[Anonymous Coward]

The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.

Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?

Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.

Any other ideas come floating to mind?

I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).

In that case, you've just broken their experiment.

But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)

I was going to post the same message, but then realized that perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate of the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)

Re:Floating?

[jackspenn]

Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.

Re:Floating?

[JWSmythe]

  The "trawling for information" idea is an easy one. Set a Google News alert for it. You can specify it to provide notifications for other things like website updates. I've already gotten a few, but they were all talking about the contest, and how it could be subverted. :)

    I'm just trying to figure out where to buy an 8 foot red balloon. Since I already know the risks associated with being identified as a contestant, I'd rather play the other side, and give people a false target. I already have magnetic signs for DOD, FBI, DHS, and FEMA to put on my truck to allow easy movement depending on what the disaster is. :) The DOD sign should be close enough for folks to believe I'm DARPA. :) I'll taser any contestants who come close enough, so I can steal their lists (and wallets, and GPS devices, and laptops, etc, etc, etc). :)

    (just kidding, I don't own a taser.)

Oh great....don't fall for it everyone!

[VinylRecords]

Not another balloon hoax!

Re:Oh great....don't fall for it everyone!

[bennomatic]

Shhhh! It's for the TV show!

Indentifying the Balloons

[NuclearError]

Here's a handy chart for finding the balloons.

Not Enough Red Ballons

[kaleth]

There should have been 99.

This can't end well.

[ipc0nfig]

A big red balloon with guys waiting around it all day, yeah, that's not going to freak anyone out.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html

Re:I sense. I sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to disappoint, but this is only 10 Luftballons.
I think you were looking for 99 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

Nothing better to use $40,000 for?

[kheldan]

The economy still sucks, DARPA; why are you wasting taxpayer money on bullshit like this?

Wow, who drew the short straw?

[Anonymous Coward]

and accompanied by DARPA representatives

There's going to be 10 or more unlucky bastards standing around by these balloons, in all kinds of weather, until the fifth of December.

But hey, on the bright side, your tax dollars at work.

Bloons

[blavallee]

Do I get an extra bonus if I pop them all?

Decoys

[slasho81]

What happens if people start setting their own balloons as decoys?

Re:One person?

[hoggoth]

While the internet public at large is attempting to mobilize to find the red balloons, DARPA will be monitoring the 'net attempting to stay on top of an unknown number of organizations comprised of an unknown number of individuals coordinating using unknown protocols and communications channels. This will be valuable information similar to finding and shutting down terrorist cells. Expect the front-runner group to be infiltrated by a covert DARPA agent and some key people to "disappear" until after the deadline. (OK, did I go too far there?)

Re:My guess: half of a high-tech vs low-tech conte

[guyminuslife]

I didn't know that. That's bad. Imagine all the four star generals sitting around twiddling their thumbs going, "If only we could bomb Russia, we'd get that last fucking star!"