There are a few vehicles on the road that are targeted often by car thieves, whether that’s because they have valuable parts, the OEM security is easily bypassed, or even because it’s an antique vehicle that needs little more than a screwdriver to get started. For those driving one of these vehicles an additional immobilization feature is often added, like a hidden switch to deactivate the fuel pump. But, in the continual arms race between thieves and car owners, this strategy is easily bypassed. [Drive Science] hopefully took one step ahead though and added a decoy killswitch instead which triggers the alarm.

The decoy switch is placed near the steering column, where it would easily be noticed by a thief. Presumably, they would think that this was the reason the car wouldn’t start and attempt to flip the switch and then start the ignition. But secretly, the switch activates a hidden relay connected to the alarm system, so after a few seconds of the decoy switch activating, the alarm will go off regardless of the position of this switch. This build requires a lot of hiding spots to be effective, so a hidden method to deactivate the alarm is also included which resets the relay, and another killswitch which actually disables the fuel pump is also added to another secret location in the car.

As far as “security through obscurity” goes, a build like this goes a long way to demonstrate how this is an effective method in certain situations. All that’s generally needed for effective car theft prevention is to make your car slightly more annoying to steal than any other car on the road, and we think that [Drive Science] has accomplished that goal quite well. Security through obscurity is generally easily broken on things deployed on a much larger scale. A major European radio system was found to have several vulnerabilities recently thanks in part to the designers hoping no one would look to closely at them.

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hackaday.com/2025/02/17/decoy-…

OpenAI ha modificato la politica di restrizione dei contenuti per ChatGPT, consentendo la generazione di contenuti erotici e violenti in contesti “appropriati”. Nella nuova versione del documento «Specifiche del modello “, pubblicato mercoledì, si afferma che l’intelligenza artificiale può creare tali materiali senza preavviso se vengono utilizzati in contesti scientifici, storici, giornalistici o altri scenari legittimi.

L’aggiornamento si basa sul lavoro iniziato a maggio 2024, quando OpenAI annunciò per la prima volta la sua intenzione di esplorare la possibilità di fornire agli utenti impostazioni più flessibili per la generazione di contenuti di categoria.
Parte della nuova policy di Chat-GPT su contenuti erotici o violenti
In base alle nuove norme, restano vietate solo alcune forme di contenuto, come le descrizioni di attività illegali e non consensuali. Tuttavia, a determinate condizioni, sono consentiti elementi di erotismo e violenza in formato testo, audio o anche immagine.

Gli utenti di Reddit hanno già notato l’attenuazione dei filtri. Alcuni sono riusciti a creare scenari espliciti o violenti senza alcun preavviso, cosa che prima era impossibile. OpenAI sottolinea che la sua politica di utilizzo rimane in vigore: la creazione di contenuti sessuali destinati ai minori è severamente vietata.

In passato, ChatGPT si rifiutava spesso di generare materiali basati sul principio di “attenzione all’utente”, il che creava difficoltà agli specialisti che lavoravano con referti forensi, documenti legali o testi medici. Ora OpenAI ha riconosciuto la necessità di creare una versione meno censurata di ChatGPT, che consenta agli utenti di ottenere le informazioni di cui hanno bisogno senza restrizioni artificiali.

L’azienda afferma che la decisione è stata presa dopo le numerose risposte della comunità a sostegno dell’idea di una “modalità per adulti”. Sebbene questa modalità non sia un’opzione separata, la politica aggiornata di OpenAI offre agli utenti maggiore flessibilità.

Il CEO di OpenAI, Sam Altman, ha già espresso in passato la necessità di un simile passo. L’azienda ha ora ufficialmente implementato restrizioni più flessibili, sebbene sul mercato esistano da tempo modelli di intelligenza artificiale alternativi che offrono completa libertà, tra cui LLM lanciati localmente.

Le regole aggiornate di OpenAI suddividono i contenuti sensibili in tre categorie. I contenuti proibiti riguardano solo materiale relativo ai minori, sebbene sia consentita la discussione di tali argomenti in contesti educativi e medici. I contenuti riservati includono informazioni pericolose, come istruzioni su come costruire armi, nonché informazioni personali. Ora è possibile generare contenuti sensibili se hanno una giustificazione educativa, storica o artistica.

Nonostante permangano alcune restrizioni, OpenAI sta compiendo un chiaro passo avanti verso una maggiore libertà nell’uso dell’intelligenza artificiale.

L'articolo OpenAI sblocca ChatGPT: ora può generare contenuti erotici e violenti proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

We like drinking out of glass. In many ways, it’s an ideal material for the job. It’s hard-wearing, and inert in most respects. It doesn’t interact with the beverages you put in it, and it’s easy to clean. The only problem is that it’s rather easy to break. Despite its major weakness, glass still reigns supreme over plastic and metal alternatives.

But what if you could make glassware that didn’t break? Surely, that would be a supreme product that would quickly take over the entire market. As it turns out, an East German glassworks developed just that. Only, the product didn’t survive, and we lumber on with easily-shattered glasses to this day. This is the story of Superfest.

Harder, Better, Glasser, Stronger

It all started in the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s; you might know it better as East Germany. The government’s Council of Ministers deemed it important to develop higher-strength glass. Techniques for the chemical strengthening of glass were already known by the 1960s, and work on developing the technology further began in earnest.
The patent goes into great detail on design of the production line, indicating how perforated plates create a “rain” of molten potassium salt upon the glassware. Credit: patent
These efforts came to fruition in the form of a patent filed on the 8th of August, 1977. It was entitled Verfahren und Vorrichtung Zur Verfestigung Von Glaserzeugnissen Durch Ioenenaustausch—or, translated to English—Process and Apparatus for Strengthening Glassware By Ion Exchange. The patent regarded an industry-ready process, which was intended for use in the production of hollow glass vessels—specifically, drinking glassware.

The researchers understood that glasses typically broke in part due to microscopic cracks in the material, which are introduced in the production process. These microcracks could be mitigated by replacing the sodium ions in the surface of the glass with larger potassium ions. The larger ions thus cause a state of compression in the surface layer. Glass is far more capable of resisting compression rather than tension. The high compressive stresses baked into the material help resist tension forces that occur during impact events, thus making the material far more resistant to breakage.

The process of exchanging sodium ions in the glass with potassium ions was simple enough. The patent outlined a process for raining down a molten potassium salt solution onto the glassware, which would harden the outside surface significantly. This process was chosen for multiple reasons. It was desired to avoid immersing glassware into a huge bath of molten potassium salt, as the large bath of hot material would present safety hazards. There were also concerns that excessive time spent at high temperatures following immersion would lead to a relaxation of the crucial compressive stresses that built up in the glass from the ion exchange. Interior surfaces of the glassware could also be hardened by rotating the glasses on a horizontal axis under the “salt rain” so they were also exposed to the potassium salt to enable the ion exchange.
While the design of apparatus to strengthen drinking glassware is novel, the fundamental chemical process is not dissimilar to that used in the production of Gorilla Glass. Credit: patent
Recognizing the value of this patent, the Council of Ministers fast-tracked the technology into commerical production at the Sachsenglas Schwepnitz factory. The glassware was originally named CEVERIT, which was a portmanteau of the German words chemisch verfestigt—meaning “chemically solidified.” It also wore the name CV-Glas for the same reason. Production began in earnest in 1980, primarily centered around making beer glasses for hospitality businesses in East German—bars, restaurants, and the like. The glass instantly lived up to its promise, proving far more durable in commercial use. While not completely indestructible, the glasses were lasting ten to fifteen times longer than traditional commercial glassware.
A Superfest glass marked for 250 mL. Today, the only real way to source Superfest glassware is to buy used. Much remains in commercial use. Credit: Kaethe17, CC BY-SA 4.0
Despite the political environment of the time, there were hopes to expand sales to the West. On the urging of sales representative Eberhard Pook, the glasses were referred to by the name Superfest. The aim was to avoid negative connotations of “chemicals” in the name when it came to drinking glasses. Despite efforts made at multiple trade fairs, however, international interest in the tough glassware was minimal. Speaking to ZEITMagazin in 2020, Pook noted the flat response from potential customers. “We built a wall where we stacked the glasses… Look at it, it’s unbreakable!” says Pook, translated from the original German. “No reaction.” He was told that the material’s strength was also a great weakness from a sales perspective. “At Coca Cola, for example, they said, why should we use a glass that doesn’t break, we make money with our glasses,” he explained. “The dealers understandably said, who would cut off the branch they’re sitting on?”

Production nevertheless continued apace, with 120 million glasses made for the domestic market. Hardened glassware was manufactured in all shapes and sizes, covering everything from vases to tea cups and every size of beer glass. Stock eventually began piling up at the factory, as restaurants and bars simply weren’t ordering more glassware. Their chemically-strengthened glasses were doing exactly what they were supposed to do, and replacements weren’t often necessary.
Superfest glass was also used in the production of vases and other hollow glass items. Credit: Mernst1806/TeKaBe, CC BY-SA 4.0
Regardless, the future was unkind to Superfest. Urban legend says that the reunification of Germany was the beginning of the end, but it’s not entirely true. As covered by ZEITMagazin, the production of Superfest glassware was ended in July 1990 because it simply wasn’t profitable for the company. Production of other glassware continued, but the chemically-hardened line was no more. The patent for the process was allowed to lapse in 1992, and pursued no more.

The question remains why we don’t have chemically-hardened glassware today. The techniques behind Superfest are scarcely different to those used in Gorilla Glass or other chemically-strengthened glasses. The manufacturing process is well-documented, and the world is full of factories that ignore any concept of intellectual property if there was even an issue to begin with. Indeed, a German crowdfunding effort even attempted to replicate the material—only to fall into insolvency this year.

It seems that either nobody can make stronger drinking glasses, or nobody wants to—perhaps because, as Superfest seemed to indicate—there simply isn’t any money in it in the long term. It’s a shame, because the world demands nice things—and that includes beer glasses that last seemingly forever.

Featured image: “Superfest glasses in five sizes” by Michael Ernst

hackaday.com/2025/02/17/the-un…

Patriota con la suit di Omni-Man. Tanto basta per descrivere Mr.Okay. La differenza è che, il nostro, non ha un bisogno emotivo, adulatorio, da parte delle persone, ma le loro manifestazioni d'affetto sono la sua linfa vitale... altrimenti lungi da lui ergersi a protettore della razza umana.

iyezine.com/mr-ok-collettivo-k…

Mr. Ok - Collettivo Korm Ent

Mr. Ok - Collettivo Korm Ent - Patriota con la suit di Omni-Man, Mr. Okay esplora cosa siamo disposti a rinunciare per la pace. Scopri le sue gesta nel libro del collettivo Korm Ent. - Mr. Ok

^{Claudio Frandina (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Se volete farvi un regalo, vi consiglio di ascoltare questa interessantissima puntata de "il Mondo", che ascolto quasi tutte le mattine e trovo molto utile per approfondire alcune notizie.

In questa puntata si parla delle ragioni che hanno portato la #spagna ad essere una delle economie maggiormente in crescita nel 2024, ma c'è anche molto di più.

Nella seconda parte viene esposto un ragionamento sul clima che condivido e trovo interessantissimo, sul ruolo di Musk, sul catastrofico ruolo degli Stati Uniti e sulla generale indifferenza di tutti, cittadini ed istituzioni europee.

Crudo, ma da ascoltare per cominciare a cambiare.

Ascoltate e condividetene tutti 😊

Internazionale

2025-02-17 08:57:09

Nella puntata di oggi del Mondo: l’economia spagnola va sempre meglio. Come far ripartire la lotta al cambiamento climatico. Con Mariangela Paone e Ferdinando Cotugno.

Il Mondo

Il Mondo

Il podcast quotidiano di Internazionale. Tutte le mattine alle 6. 30 con Claudio Rossi Marcelli e Giulia Zoli. Scegli una prospettiva più ampia sul mondo.

^{Internazionale}

If there are to be yet unimagined weapons affecting the balance of military power tomorrow, we want to have the men and the means to imagine them first.
—JAMES KILLIAN, science adviser to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Science as science should no longer be served; indeed scientists ought to be made to serve.
—WILLIAM H. GODEL, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1975

Guns and Money

In June 1961, William Godel set off on a secret mission to Vietnam carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash. At a stopover in Hawaii, he converted some of the cash to traveler’s checks to make space for a small bottle of liquor that he carried with him on business trips. Even that did not quite leave enough room, so he moved some of his secret Pentagon papers to another case to make space for the bottle. The money, $18,000, was for a classified project that would play a critical role in President John F. Kennedy’s plan to battle communism in Southeast Asia.
At thirty-nine years old, Godel still wore the short buzz cut of his Marine Corps days, but his reputation had been forged in the world of intelligence. A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agency’s new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting. Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stations— something he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australia —or, in this case, winning the support of South Vietnam’s president for a new American proposal. Bill Bundy, a former CIA official and White House adviser, called Godel an “operator” with a “rather legendary reputation for effectiveness” working overseas.
At five feet ten inches tall, Godel was not a physically imposing figure, but he had a way of impressing both admirers and enemies with his presence. “He was one of the more glamorous people to stride the halls of the Pentagon,” recalled Lee Huff, who was recruited by Godel to the Defense Department. Godel was never the most famous man in the Pentagon, but for several years he was one of its most influential. And by the early 1960s, that influence was focused on Southeast Asia.
Godel arrived to the summer heat of Saigon, a congested city of semi-controlled chaos where cycle rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and other motorized contraptions wove through the packed streets like schools of fish in a sea. The city was booming economically and culturally, even as it attracted an increasing number of American military advisers, spooks, and diplomats, who were looking to advise South Vietnam’s president on how best to run his newly independent country.
Parisian-style sidewalk cafés still dotted the main city streets, and the city’s French colonial heritage was reflected in everything from the fresh baguettes in the local bakeries to the city’s grand villas. Vietnamese women dressed in the "áo dài", the formfitting silk dress worn over pantaloons, mixed easily with teenage girls clad in miniskirts. It was still several years before the influx of American troops would provide a boon to the city’s brothels, or frequent Vietcong terrorist attacks in Saigon would drive patrons away from sidewalk cafés, but signs of that unrest were on the horizon. In December of the previous year, the Vietcong bombed the kitchen of the Saigon Golf Club, marking the start of a series of terrorist attacks in the capital. In neighboring Laos, a civil war fueled by Soviet and American involvement was spilling over into Vietnam. More disquieting was that the Vietcong, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam, were getting weapons from North Vietnam, using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit supply route that snaked through Vietnam’s mountains and jungle, and parts of Laos.
Godel had been traveling frequently to Vietnam for more than a decade. What made this trip unusual was that he was now working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by its acronym, ARPA. Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself. Godel figured if ARPA could not battle the communists in space, perhaps it could beat them in the jungles. President Kennedy had taken office just five months prior and was still in the process of formulating a new policy for Southeast Asia. He had already decided to support South Vietnam’s anticommunist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who hailed from a family of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who ran Vietnam under Chinese rule. The month before Godel’s trip, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited South Vietnam’s president, calling Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” and in April, Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam to serve as special advisers, helping to train the South Vietnamese military and the Montagnards, the indigenous tribes who lived in the country’s central plains. Diem was a deeply religious man, a lifelong bachelor who chose politics over the priesthood. Some in Western circles regarded him as an out-of-touch crackpot; others, like Godel, saw him as a flawed but promising leader. In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was already battling a communist insurgency, but it was a war being fought in the shadows; that summer, astronauts and celebrities still dominated the covers of Life and Time magazines. Yet there were hints that this new conflict was beginning to occupy America’s leaders in Washington. The October 27, 1961, cover of Life magazine featured a soldier peering out from jungle underbrush with the caption “GI trains for guerilla warfare.” The cover lines read, “Vietnam: Our Next Showdown.” Guerrilla warfare was precisely why Godel was in Vietnam. The money he carried with him to Saigon was a down payment on an initial $20 million that the American government expected to allocate for a combat center to develop technology suited for fighting insurgents in Vietnam’s jungles. Located in Saigon and run by ARPA, the combat center would be used to help American military advisers and South Vietnam’s military. Godel, however, was not just focused on Vietnam; ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was the starting point for a global solution to counterinsurgency, relying on science and technology to guide the way.
The cash in Godel’s bag, and his list of proposals for Diem, would alter the course of events in Vietnam and more broadly lay the groundwork for modern warfare. From stealthy helicopters that would slip over the border of Pakistan on a hunt for Osama bin Laden to a worldwide campaign using drones to conduct targeted killings, Godel’s wartime experiments would later become military technologies that changed the way America wages war. His programs in Vietnam, many of which arose from that meeting with Diem, would be credited with some of the best and worst military innovations of the century. Within just a few months of that trip, Godel would bring over to Vietnam a new gun better suited for jungle warfare, the Armalite AR-15. He would also send social scientists to Vietnam, hoping that a better understanding of the people and culture would stem the insurgency. Some of Godel’s work became infamous, like a plan to relocate Vietnamese peasants to new fortified villages, known as strategic hamlets. That plan became one of the more resounding failures of the war. Similarly, ARPA’s introduction to Vietnam of chemical defoliants, including "Agent Orange", is now held responsible for countless deaths and illnesses among Vietnamese and Americans.
At its height, the ARPA program he established employed hundreds of people spread across Southeast Asia —more than five hundred in Thailand alone—and then expanded later to the Middle East. The program sought to understand the roots of insurgency and develop methods to prevent it so that American forces would not have to get involved in regional wars they were unprepared to fight. ARPA developed new technologies, sponsored social science research, and published books on counterinsurgency warfare that would later influence a new generation of military leaders fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than any single technology, Godel’s single-minded promotion of the need to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare would have an impact decades later, when the army general David Petraeus, and his advisers known as the “strategic whizzes,” found themselves studying the writing of David Galula, whose seminal work, 'Pacification in Algeria', was published in 1963, paid for by ARPA. Four decades before Petraeus made “counterinsurgency” a household phrase, Godel created a worldwide research program dedicated to insurgent warfare that dwarfed anything done in the years after 9/11.
The nascent counterinsurgency program Godel started inadvertently played a critical role in shaping the future agency whose name would become synonymous with innovation. The Vietnam counterinsurgency work eventually became the backbone of ARPA’s "Tactical Technology Office", the seminal division that would produce stealth aircraft, precision weaponry, and drones—the fundamentals of the modern battlefield. The space age might have given birth to ARPA, but Vietnam thrust the agency into the center of Cold War strategic debates, and it was Godel, more than any other ARPA official, who shaped the agency’s future.
Yet it was not all counterinsurgency. In the early 1960s, the esoteric agency Godel helped build was planting the seeds for work that would bear fruit many years later. In the first two years, Godel helped create the agency’s space program, providing cover to the world’s first reconnaissance satellite, a top secret project. He also persuaded the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite and helped build a worldwide network for nuclear test monitoring. By the end of the decade, a descendant of one of ARPA’s first projects, the "Saturn rocket", would launch Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo 11 astronauts on their journey to the moon. And just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in "command and control", which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.
Godel’s seminal role was largely expunged from the record in later years, and his name rarely mentioned in official materials, forgotten except by a few loyal friends and dedicated enemies. The AR-15, the weapon that Godel personally carried over to Vietnam, eventually became the M16, the standard-issue infantry weapon for the entire U.S. military. The rest of Godel’s Vietnam-era work would be dismissed as a onetime diversion for an agency now more closely associated with high technology than strategic thinking. His story did not fit an agency touted as a model for innovation. Yet the real key to the ARPA legacy lies in understanding how all these varied projects—satellites, drones, and computers— could come to exist in a single agency.
—
The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) sits on a compound in Langley, Virginia, made famous by countless movies and television shows. The NSA’s massive headquarters is ringed by barbed wire and located on a military base in Maryland. Yet the agency responsible for some of the most important military and civil technologies of the past hundred years resides in relative obscurity behind a generic glass facade at 675 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia. The unremarkable office tower stands across from a dying four-level brown-brick shopping mall that houses a mix of fast-food restaurants and discount stores.
Behind the nondescript exterior of the office building, just beyond the guards, is a panoramic wall display that covers more than fifty years of the agency’s history. It begins in the fall of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. "Sputnik", as the satellite was called in the West, did little more than emit a simple beep. But that beach-ball-size sphere orbiting harmlessly around the earth touched off a storm of news reports that shook the American people’s feeling of invulnerability by demonstrating that the Soviet Union might soon be able to launch a nuclear-armed missile that could reach the continental United States.
?As the story goes, Sputnik sparked a national hysteria, and the American public demanded that the government take action. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower in early 1958 authorized the establishment of a central research agency independent from the military services, whose bickering had contributed to the Soviet Union’s lead in space. This new agency, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was the nation’s first space agency—established eight months before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The organization today known as DARPA—the D for “Defense” was added in 1972 (and then dropped, and added again in later years)—has grown into an approximately $3-billion-a-year research agency, with projects that have ranged from space planes to cyborg insects. The display in the lobby is a monument to more than fifty years of this unusual government agency, which has produced marvelous and sometimes terrifying technological achievements: precision weapons, drones, robots, and networked computing, to name a few. By thinking about fundamental problems of national security, DARPA created solutions that did far more than give the military a few novel weapons. In some cases, the agency changed the nature of warfare; in others, it helped prevent the nation from going to war.
By thinking about how to deal with Soviet conventional military superiority without resorting to nuclear weapons, it introduced the era of precision weaponry. By looking for ways to detect underground nuclear explosions, it revolutionized the field of seismology and enabled the negotiation of critical arms control treaties. And by exploring ways to improve nuclear command and control, it created the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.
Not all solutions are so tidy, however. In trying to tackle the problem of communist insurgency, DARPA embarked on a decade-long worldwide experiment that ended in failure. It is tempting to carve out unsuccessful work, like the counterinsurgency programs, by claiming this was an aberration in the agency’s history. Here we argue, however, that DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together. What made DARPA successful was its ability to tackle some of the most critical national security problems facing the United States, unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review. DARPA’s history of innovation is more closely tied to this turbulent period in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it delved into questions of nuclear warfare and counterinsurgency, than to its brief life as a “space agency.” Those two crucial decades represent a time when senior Pentagon officials believed the agency should play a critical role in shaping world events, rather than just develop technological novelties.
The Internet and the agency’s Vietnam War work were proposed solutions to critical problems: one was a world-changing success, and the other a catastrophic failure. That muddied history of Vietnam and counterinsurgency might not fit well with DARPA’s creation story, but it is the key to understanding its legacy. It is also the history that is often the most challenging to get many former agency officials to address. DARPA may brag about its willingness to fail, but that does not mean that it is eager to have those failures examined.
—
DARPA is now more than sixty years old, and much of its history has never been recorded in any systematic way. One effort was made, in 1973, when DARPA approached its fifteenth anniversary. Stephen Lukasik, then the director, commissioned an independent history of the agency to better understand its origins and purpose. The final document was regarded as so sensitive that the authors were only authorized to make six copies, all of which had to be handed over to the government. Although it was supposed to be an unclassified history, the new director was aghast at what he felt was an overly personal account; he stamped the final product as classified and locked it away. It took more than a decade for it to be released.
Agencies, like people, make sense of themselves through stories. And like people, they are selective about the facts that go into their stories, and as time passes, the stories are increasingly suspect and often apocryphal. No other research organization has a history as rich, complex, important, and at times strange as DARPA. Whether it was a mechanical elephant to trudge through the jungles of Vietnam or a jet pack for Special Forces, DARPA’s projects have been ambitious, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Some of these fanciful ideas, like the concept of an invisible aircraft named after a fictional, eight-foot-tall rabbit, actually succeeded, but many more failed. At some point, the successes, and the failures, began to get smaller, because the problems assigned to the agency grew narrower. The key to DARPA’s success in the past was not just its flexibility but also its focus on solving high-level national security problems. DARPA today runs the risk of irrelevancy, creating marvelous innovations that have, unlike previous years, little impact on either the way the military fights or the way we live our lives. The price of success is failure, and the price of an important success is a significant failure, and the consequences of both should be weighed in assessing any institution’s legacy. Conversely, if the stakes are not high, then neither the successes nor the failures matter, and that is where the agency is in danger of heading today, investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact on national security.
Current DARPA officials may disagree with this pessimistic assessment of the agency’s current role or argue about which failures, and successes, should be highlighted. Yet the research for our work is based on thousands of pages of documents, many recently declassified, held in archives around the country, and hundreds of hours of interviews with former DARPA officials. Most past directors share a very similar sentiment: DARPA continues to produce good solutions to problems, but the problems it is assigned, or assigns itself, are no longer critical to national security. To understand why this narrowing of scope happened, it is important to examine the real history of DARPA. The agency’s origins may begin with the space race, but DARPA’s legacy lies elsewhere.
Godel and his trip to Vietnam were seminal to the agency’s history—both its high and its low points. That trip helped create the modern agency and its greatest and worst legacies. Yet Godel’s story is one that DARPA officials today do not talk about, or even know about. It is a story buried in long-forgotten court records and has been nearly written out of the agency’s history, because it no longer fits the narrative of DARPA as an agency dedicated to technological surprise. Yet it is a story that illustrates the true tensions within DARPA, an agency

#ARPA #DARPA #USA #Vietnam #ColdWar #history