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San Francisco Team Wins DARPA's De-Shredding Contest
New submitter karlnyberg writes with an update to the recently announced de-shredding challenge posted by DARPA: "The team 'All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S.' has correctly solved all five puzzles, and the Challenge has now ended. You may view the winning team's submissions as well as the complete puzzle solutions by following the links on our homepage. We recognize that many of our participants have devoted countless hours to painstakingly piecing our puzzles back together, and we truly appreciate everyone's efforts. Hopefully you enjoyed the Challenge and learned something new along the way. We certainly did!"
Thanks for helping the government spy on me.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
There is a business opportunity for better shredders, the kind that would pulverize the paper or better just burn it.
A shredder with a vortex or a burner inside.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting technical challenge that this was done, but if you want to keep your paper out of government's hands you shouldn't be just shredding the paper.
You can't handle the truth.
Thanks for the memories, Slashdot. First thing I thought of was Hacker and haggling with the spies for shredded strips of Magma Ltd.'s world domination plans.
Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel Rainbow's End explained how a library was being digitized by shredding all the books, thus destroying the analog knowledge.
One step closer...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Wake me up when they have the Ash Challenge.
Previous topics included that the abilities gained were worth far more than $50,000.
So was this a fancy Job Application?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's not paranoid when they've established a consistent pattern of spying on citizens without cause in the wake of 9/11.
Dog is my co-pilot.
I don't see this being very useful for overseas operations. They mentioned before this would be good for recovering documents shredded by "warlords' operations" but that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Many of the warlords we are most concerned about right now have such a dramatically different sense of morality than our own that they use rape as a weapon - or tool, really - of war.
Why, then, would we expect them to use a shredder for their documents, when they can much more easily set fire to the documents? No amount of de-shredding is going to put back together documents that have been incinerated.
I suspect we are much more likely to see this used by the FBI than the CIA or DOD.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'd be happy to help train DARPA's AI, but not when it's going to assist such an unconstitutional monster as the Patriot Act. That's like, you know, pumping the bellows on the forge building your chains.
The test was actually much simpler than any real-world application might be. Each puzzle was really only one or two (or a few) shredded pages, with various degrees of shredding and various bits of writing. It is a first step, but nowhere near what you would be dealing with in any real-world situation where hundreds or thousands of pages of shredded documents would be mixed together.
I participated (a bit) with the UCSD team that basically made a crowd-sourced jigsaw puzzle to do it - at last check they were in the top 5, but I don't think they got the last puzzle (yet). This approach seems reasonable for the relatively simple puzzles of the challenge, but it really wouldn't scale very well - requires a lot of labor.
It sounds like the winning team had a much better (and more scaleable) strategy, where an algorithm scores all of the pieces for fit in a particular place and then allows the user(s) to choose the best piece from a few high-scoring ones. While I still don't think this would work very well in a real-world scenario, obviously it would work better than depending on massive crowd sourcing.
Here's a nice explanation of the participant which reassembled four of the five documents, finishing in third place.
You should probably start burning your mail: What I learned from the DARPA Shredder Challenge.
NSA-approved shredders are good enough for destroying classified documents up to TS; the shredded remains do not need to be controlled. The shreddings are fine enough that no piece of output can contain a single glyph at any reasonable font size. The shreddings of even a single piece of paper are shuffled together by the action of the blades. These shredders aren't cheap, but I bet they'll stand up to state-level threats of reconstruction for the next 10 years or so.
If that's not good enough, some locations use burn-boxes - never trust a machine to do thermodynamic's job!
like Islam Karimov, "president" of Uzbekistan.
...it'll cost you fiddy gees.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Four out of five documents? I thought it would be a trash bag with two reams of shredded low-quality office depot brand paper. Let's see them digitize that! It's not like they can use a document feeder.
Weren't "All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S" the cheating assholes that sabotaged their rival's (UCSD?) crowd-source effort?
In 1989 when the MfS offices were stormed they tried to shred a whole lot of documents, according to wikipedia there are still 16000 bags of shredded documents to reassemble. I think it would be a really useful application of the outcome of this contest to help put some of those documents back together.
Any time I shred serious stuff, I split the resultant shred into 5 different bags and deposit them in locked trash containers in various buildings over a 5 mile radius.
Or, I put one bag out with the trash each week over 5 different weeks.
Or, I burn one of the bags, and put the other four out in four separate trash cans.
That's how I roll.
This is why I send all of my old documents into the nearest Black Hole. Nothing comes out of those.
Shred.
Feed shreds to worm bin.
Use worm castings in planters/garden.
Grow sunflowers.
Collect sunflower seeds.
Seed-bomb empty lots.
Provide nectar & pollen for bumble bees and solitary bees.
Now the world will move on to burning, wet-shred/pulping, and chemical treatment/bleaching where ultra-high security is necessary.
I mean really, what did this prove?
That paper shredding is about as effective as triple DES?
Does anyone know of a site (other than slashdot) that finds and publishes open competitions like this one? Thank You.
Do you mean he (or seriously) blew cover to arrest you for a donut joke?
Around here blowing your cover for a non-serious issue can actually get an officer in trouble (according to what I've heard from other police).