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- In: 'Matrix' | - | Cyberwar | DARPA | InformationWeek | plans | Security
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The agency’s National Cyber Range for cyberwar simulation would be similar to Star Trek‘s holodeck or a Snow Crash-style Metaverse.
Police officers practice their firearm skills on a shooting range, so why shouldn’t government computer security experts have the same kind of training ground?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, on Monday issued a call for research proposals to develop the National Cyber Range, or NCR (NYSE: NCR), a virtual network environment for cyberwar simulation.
In other words, Darpa wants to build something along the lines of The Matrix, Star Trek‘s holodeck, or a Snow Crash-style Metaverse to test cyberwar strategies and drill cyberwarriors. That’s not to say Darpa is aiming for a visually immersive world to entertain people; rather, it wants a place to pit hackers against simulated machines.
Darpa’s interest in such matters reflects a growing U.S. government and military commitment to develop more sophisticated cyberwar capabilities. A major reason for this is that other countries, such as China, are pursuing similar goals.
“The NCR will become a National resource for testing unclassified and classified cyber programs,” Darpa’s announcement explains. “Government and Government-sponsored Test Organizations (TO) authorized to conduct cyber testing will coordinate with the NCR performer for range time and resources. …The NCR will support multiple, simultaneous, segmented tests and testbeds. At the completion of the test the NCR will sanitize and de-allocate the testbed resources, thus absorbing them back into the range.”
The NCR aims to provide the ability to replicate military, government, and commercial IT systems and infrastructure; to monitor and manage events; and to analyze, collect, and present test data.
- In: -- | Guide | InformationWeek | SP1 | Survival | Vista | Windows | Windows Vista
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Here’s how to get ready for Windows Vista Service Pack 1, due from Microsoft in March, with its much needed performance enhancements, security upgrades, and compatibility revisions.
After a little more than a year in the wild, it’s high time for Windows Vista to receive the service pack it deserves. While Service Pack 1 won’t change the way Windows Vista looks or feels, for the most part, it will improve many things about the way it runs, based on both Microsoft’s internal testing and the feedback of tens of thousands of users.
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SP1 has been both heavily anticipated and badly needed. While the gold release of Vista was for the most part solid enough to use as a production system, there were still many frustrating rough edges.
In the light of these problems, one of the most commonly repeated canards about using Vista was, “I’ll just wait until SP1 comes out.” Well, SP1 is now almost out. A release candidate, which is the version we tested, was made available towards the end of last year. More recently, Microsoft officially released SP1 to manufacturing in February to TechNet and MSDN customers. The actual, wide public release to users at large is expected sometime in March.
What’s In The Box?
Vista Service Pack 1 is a cumulative collection of all the fixes — performance enhancements, security updates, and compatibility revisions — published or created for Vista since its release. As with an artist’s greatest-hits collection, some of it is “previously released material” — but that absolutely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply SP1. Otherwise you won’t get the full benefit of all the changes made.
Keep in mind that SP1 will be large — quite necessarily so. The standalone installer for SP1 will weigh in at anywhere from 450 Mbytes (for the five-language edition) to 550 Mbytes (the all-language edition), and you’ll need at least 5 Gbytes of temporary space on your system to perform the install. Most PCs capable of running Vista right now should not have a problem sparing that much room, but if you do, then a cleanup — or maybe even a new hard drive, if it’s already time for one — is in order. (Note that there are ways to ameliorate both the storage and download requirements; see “Express” on page 3 for details.)
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