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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 $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
Don't weather ballons float around on high altitude winds?
Of course UFO's are often claimed to be weather baloons by the Govt. Is this a cover up?
An unholy mashup between Twitter and a bunch of cell phone cameras.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not another balloon hoax!
DARPA is just going to claim that the weather balloons are pockets of swamp gas.
Come help find the balloons at a collaborative website--first to find each balloon gets to share in the prize money! http://balloonfinder.superfunhappy.com
Anyone with access to satellite imagery? If you have a satellite camera, you could open a website,"FindDarpaBallons.com" and pay people who find the balloons 500$ each to report them to you. Then just use your Satellite to confirm it. Send in to Darpa, make 40k, pay out 5k, and be up 35k.
God spoke to me.
So, only one person wins the prize, even though it will almost certainly require the effort of an online community? This sounds like a breeding ground for betrayal.
Here's a handy chart for finding the balloons.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
well let the spam begin! here's my email: robbie.h.wilson@gmail.com i want to collaborate with others from around the US to win this as a team! if we get together as a team, then we split the prize amongst us all. i'm thinking that only the team members who contribute the coordinates would be in the pool, but there could be a dozen team members who found that particular ballloon- that's only fair! maybe this would be a great way to make friends and a small amount of cash! email me if you want to join up! and no if i end up winning then i won't be a jerk and not share the wealth. i just have these morals and an ethical compass that some have never heard anything about. it's a matter of trust!
There should have been 99.
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
Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.
What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?
What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?
Perfecting the art of insanity since 1982
I think the best way to attack this problem would be to agree to donate the profits from the award to some worthy cause, letting people with the capability volunteer some time to a solution. Its a fairly complicated problem to solve for the amount of money given to solve it. Lets say a group of capable programmers united for lets say an open source project develop a website that takes in the coordinates in the format required for the contest. The trick is going to be figuring out who is telling the truth when it comes to submitted data... You may be able to assume that if a number set is entered often that it is a candidate to be the real location. The task obviously requires coordination of many life humans as I doubt anyone that can compete has access to satellite time to do an automated search. I am wondering how many people will attempt to put up fake balloon sites to either trick their competition or just get some publicity of tech people to come visit the site and take a GPS reading.
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The economy still sucks, DARPA; why are you wasting taxpayer money on bullshit like this?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
And offer $3500 to the first person to submit each unique balloon's coordinates and a photograph of the location to a team organizer, provided the team wins.
8% to the team organizer for handling all the work involved in coordinating the team.
And $150 to the person who agrees to go confirm the location of balloon submitted by someone else, by getting a report of its general location, going there, and reporting its coordinates for confirmation.
Noone can cheat, provided everyone has an ironclad contract, if only the team organizer receives the actual coordinates reported, and processes them in order received.
Sending all reported ballons to be confirmed by someone else. Requiring a deposit from everyone reporting a balloon in the amt of $100, forfeit only if it turns out there was no balloon there.
My guess is, we're seeing half of a contest pitting high-end defense technology vs the "stupid cheap easy" solution.
SCENE: PENTAGON STAFF ROOM
Mil Contractor: "And so you see, with our latest satellite imaging systems, we can search and pinpoint the location of a human-sized target object within 10 days for a nation the size of the US or Russia."
Dumb General: "Wow. We need to spend some billions on this."
Smart General: "Pff. I bet you could do better by plain old "boots on the ground" spywork. You'd need a pretty big network of observers though..."
Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."
at least, this is a good enough story that I *hope* it's what's going on...
The purpose of this exercise can be found here:
To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.
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.
Do I get an extra bonus if I pop them all?
Here's a sample image. Yes, that's from orbit.
Each satellite images about 1 million km^2 per day, so in 250 days, they can image the entire planet at high resolution. But they'll do the populated parts of the US more often (they can aim the cameras for each pass), so they will pick up many of the balloons.
Microsoft Bing is buying all the data, so it's going on line. The data rate is about 50GB/hour. Start programs looking for red dots.
I'd be willing to bet that it's actually an attempt to encourage probing/attacks on it's website /network. $40k is a pretty good incentive to try and find the answer sheet. Possible goals range from your traditional smoke-out-the-troublemakers-by-having-an-archery-contest to using it to identify skilled individuals for recruitment.
I thought that the mind / clairvoyance study had been axed. I see they are reviving it.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/overture/themenwhostareatgoats/themenwhostareatgoats-clip1_480p.mov
Step 1. Set up a website: Go to Darpa Balloon Challenge Group
...
...
...
Step 2. Get lots of people organized and figure out who gets how much
Step N. Profit!!!!!
I bet it's a social experiment, not tech. There are all sorts of obvious ways to get people to work together, but how can you eliminate bad actors and false data?
If you have a central clearing house, the data can be stolen by others. If the submitted data is kept private, then the participants need to have a high level of trust in the central organizers. You also need to be resistant to spoofing from other parties, including potentially organized efforts by other groups trying to win the prize.
My best idea would be that the contest needs to be taken up by a web site that already has a large web of trust; large enough that they can be trusted, and that they can get enough data that anomalies and deception become evident. The prize money could be redistributed among the first N people that accurately reported a balloon... or, a lottery could divide the prize among N number of people who submitted accurate information. The second makes more sense to me.
So I just registered a website, and will set it up in a few days... if you are the first person to submit a correct balloon location, and if we get the 40k, I will paypal $3,000 to the first email address on the submission.
-John Fenley
With all that money you've appropriated, what better way to waste^H^H^H^H^H spend it then on a tribute to Lamorisse.
coding is life
If some folks want to pile into a 172 and go flying around San Diego County/Southern California/anywhere else we can get to from here armed with binoculars and split the cost 4 ways I'm game. I'm not sure what our chances of actually spotting anything would be though.
Anyone else noticed DARPA's recent major marketing/publicity campaign? There is now this well-publicized balloon hunt. There was the televised robotic vehicle challenge. Even very recently, DARPA was central to the plot of an episode of NCIS: LA. Its research efforts have been given very visible press in magazines such as Scientific American. (Look here for another recent SA article about DARPA research.) DARPA has also been featured twice on 60 Minutes in the past few months. And, it now has quite a following on Facebook.
All of these somehow involve or inform the general public--not exactly par for the course given DARPA activities historically have been kept very much under wraps. What's really going on here? Why the recent publicity barrage? Two years ago, or less, I'm willing to bet 98% of Americans had no idea DARPA even existed. Might it be the old magician's trick of having us watch one hand while the other hand is actually performing the "magic?" For example, have you seen iRobot's shape-shifting Chembot recently developed with DARPA funding?
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
What happens if people start setting their own balloons as decoys?
Unless a technological approach using sattellites, automated analysis of flikr photos etc.. quickly wins out then presumably the ballons will end up being seen by some people aware of the contest. So suppose you have seen a balloon and wish to use that knowledge to claim part of the prize. What do you do?
Well what you want to do is find a group of other people who have located the other balloons and agree to pool your info in exchange for shares of the prize. Importantly nothing in the rules prevents you from drawing up legal contracts with other participants and if you are clever you might even be able to make delibrately feeding you false information into criminal fraud. So it seems straightforward to ensure there are big incentives to only agree to join such a coalition if you do indeed have valid data. Moreover, your claimed data can be verified relatively quickly for low cost by paying close friends and associates who live nearby to go out and check.
In short it seems to me the optimal strategy is simply to hope you stumble upon a balloon and then creating a legally binding contract with others who claim to have complimentary information.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
but perhaps you could find a single red balloon and win $3000...
Red40k.com will be setup to take balloon location submissions and paypal $3000 to the first email address associated with a correct balloon location, if we win the $40k.
-John Fenley
Sounds like a particularly disturbing dystopian universe.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's obvious now that the government not only knows that aliens exist, but that it also knows they are large, rotund, crimson and warlike - and they're on their way!!!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Maybe the real game is to try to disrupt those groups searching for balloons. Does DARPA still have enough control to stop groups forming and co-ordinating via twitter/mobile phones/etc? For every civilian team searching for balloons, there is a military team trying to stop them communicating? Watch this message disappear in a minute or two... BTW, balloons make the perfect symbol because DARPA love The Prisoner.
If I were going to try to understand how to analyse Twitter in real-time, then I would want a 'planted story' (and this seems like a perfectly reasonable candidate), and then I can read the firehose (later, *I* don't have to do it realtime) and from that start to develop programs that can help me understand the stream (realtime) in later cases of distributed crises, e.g. 9/11.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know, at first, I thought this was going to be some valid balloon chase, where we would be finding balloons that had actually been released into the atmosphere, until I read "...and accompanied by DARPA representatives.". Er, how is this a balloon "hunt"?!? What the fuck is the point in finding balloons DARPA already knows the location to?
Gee, I just love paying taxes for shit like this. Makes paying thousands for finding the gazillionith obscenely-large-prime-number(EFF) look like a Warren Buffet investment.
Absolutely, 6 months later.
So my girlfriend and I had the idea that people would really get motivated to help if they new it was for a greater cause. $40k divided 10 or 11 ways only goes so far. Think however how much impact $40k, the publicity of winning the DARPA challenge, and the power of social networks can go in terms of helping various peace initiatives in the world. Being a /. nerd I quickly set up a site and threw up a forum so people could post their ideas to help this project out. Any help any other /.ers could give in spreading the word for this good cause would be appreciated.
Strange that nobody has mentioned it yet, but I guess it's a good bet that there will be hundreds of red balloons rising on Dec 5. Besides the obvious "because we can" motive, if you are after the prize money, it makes sense to launch a few decoys the location of which is only known to yourself. Even a few of those and the contest is no longer about spotting the balloons, but about picking the correct 10 out of the confirmed sightings.
It would have made a lot more sense to launch the balloons before announcing the challenge.
I'm going to try to start a group that can work together to win the prize (and donate it to charity).
http://groups.google.com/group/open-balloon-finder
The idea is to do things in an open manner, similar to an open source project...however there will need to be some secrecy when the results come in, but the idea is to be open.
Hopefully we can use some of the web tools like google maps to help out the team, and general just have fun on Dec 5. Check it out :-)
It has nothing to do with finding the balloons or how the data is shared among social networks.
DARPA doesn't need us to find those balloons. There's a small handful of agencies with 3 letter names that have software sufficient to troll the intertubez for all chatter about red balloons, filter said chatter, then train local traffic cameras or CCTV cameras on the balloons to verify.
It's probably a gimmick to see how far behind the government agencies that the private sector is.
This is my hypothesis as well.
I was thinking about that possibility, maybe they should put codes on the balloons and allow people to verify their sightings online, although that could cause the event to end faster than DARPA would like. Right now you presumably have to go to the balloon's anchor point and talk with the DARPA staff there to verify a sighting (and that's nothing that can't be faked with some social engineering, especially since with the balloons spread far apart to encourage online participation, one person will be unlikely to see multiple balloons first-hand).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Warrants aren't really necessary when you're dealing with freely available public API's for the services in question. It's public speech, not private property.
If you were coordinating the information on your personal website behind a secure login, you would probably have a valid argument, otherwise you've really got nothing to get riled up over.
Good point. I remember reading about how the cops were having trouble containing the protesters at the G20 in Pittsburgh this year because the protesters were staying one step ahead of the cops by sharing intel very quickly. The fact that a group of citizens can wield an intelligence advantage over the police/military would certainly scare the shit out of any government - if those protesters really knew what they were doing (a single, stationary "base of operations" was probably their biggest mistake, but they were also unprepared to face the sonic weapons) they would have been MUCH harder to stop and it might have come to a point where deadly force would have to be used. Notice how soon this challenge comes along after those events...
Er, how is this a balloon "hunt"?!? What the fuck is the point in finding balloons DARPA already knows the location to?
Your geek license has been suspended, please hand over your card at the door. You will be eligible to regain your license in 8 weeks upon passing a new Imagination Test.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Shouldn't it be neunundneunzig?
What?
My bet is this won't be won by a truly spontaneous group - the noise level and odds of betrayal are too high. You need a group that is a) national in scope, b) owns a GPS, c) is already reasonably organized and possesses a web of trust, and d) already has an existing communications network.
My money is on geocachers.
And, it seems, to find the wayward DARPA representitives who are accompanying the balloons.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I think that this is a ruse to coverup something else. DARPA, "We need to fly 10 balloons for over a month to calibrate/check out our secret targeting/tracking system but everyone will notice 10 big balloons hanging out at visible places and know we are calibrating/checking our tracking system -- what do we do?"
Answer: Make up a stupid contest to find them and then also skim out data from it.
OR
See if anyone detects the cloaked UAV flying between each balloon
Earn money tracking government weather balloons. Send $30 to PO Box 666, Slimetown, CA to find out how.
Place this ad all over the place. Snail-mail back a printout of the PDF to the suckers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Large hard-on collider?
I smell a movie deal!
So while we are searching for the red balloons, a crack military team is searching for the blue balloons with every high tech resource at their disposal. Let the better metaphor win!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."
I realize your story was a bit tongue-in cheek and the ranks were listed for humor purposes, but someone might find it interesting that there currently are no 5 star generals currently active in the United States military as a 5th star requires service as a General during a time of war (a real fuck-em-all war, not the police actions we've been involved in perpetually since the 60's). Anyways, pedantic, but worth noting.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
If you find a balloon, hide it and talk the people accompanying it into splitting the prize with you. Wait until the locations of the other balloons leaks. Collect prize. If people accompanying it won't play, kidnap them.
http://www.marxist.com/
I smell a bunch of lawsuits coming up... can you imagine 10 or more people all over the US trying to split the "reward" without issue?
pass the tupperware, i have to barf again.
OK - Who is going to head up Team SlashDot?