MIT's Red Balloon Challenge team | Hacker News Reader

MIT's Red Balloon Challenge team

balloon.media.mit.edu

3 pointssvjunkie7 comments

So MIT is giving out the entire prize in bounty/donations. That's a luxury tax exempt or incorporated entities will have. Normal folk will have to pay income tax on the prize before paying out bounties.

I think if I were competing I'd already have a half dozen red weather balloons ready to be deployed in obvious places at about $100 each.

You could simply decide to eat the tax. For the previous DARPA challenges many teams spent much more than the prize money.

I'd already have a half dozen red weather balloons ready to be deployed...

Sigh. DARPA should make this FAQ #1 on their site. "The DARPA officials accompanying the balloon will have credentials to verify their identities." Not to mention that "jamming" the competition is pretty unsportsmanlike.

I'd worry more about all the bogus tweets, Facebook status posts, flickr pics, etc. that the motivated will be spamming the world with tomorrow. Seems like the best way to win is to stealthily compromise the websites and computer accounts of several of the major teams, then submit the balloon list before anyone gets their act together.

One of my friends at MIT called this site to my attention yesterday, and they were awful at security then. They sent your GMail/Yahoo password over the network in plaintext for a feature that automatically invited your contacts, as well as their password on the Django /admin/ page (both of these features seem to be gone now). They were also running Django with DEBUG=True, which was fairly entertaining (off now). I'd like to think that they got their act together partially as a result of my bitching, but who knows.

Decoys will increase the burden on the other teams. They will have to get someone to actually verify the credentials rather than some guy saying "I drove by the gateway arch and there is a big red balloon there that says DARPA on the side of it." (Yeah, my decoys would say DARPA.)

As for unsportsmanlike, you are working to advance the art of war.

my decoys would say DARPA

They would probably be more effective if they looked like the DARPA balloons.

https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/gallery.aspx

you are working to advance the art of war

And I suppose it would be better if that were left to potential enemies.

agreed... while I don't condone malicious attempts to throw off other teams, being able to filter through false info seems like an important component of the competition

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