Network technology is being applied in lots of interesting ways.

Take this application, for example, detailed in DefenseTech.org:

Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it’s beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon’s answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to “detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments.” It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”

The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type — just 60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.

Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.

The way they’d keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track objects and people within the sensor net.

“The best way to learn about an adversary – what he’s done, what he’s doing, and what he’s likely to do - is through continual observation using as many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent surveillance,” Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa’s Information Exploitation Office, told a conference last year. “We’ve learned that occasional or periodic snapshots don’t tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to really understand what’s going on we have to observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out.”

According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new, minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of fiscal year 2007.

Gives a whole new meaning to the word “troubleshooting,” no?

by Sylvia Breau

The risk of monetary loss in the event of a computer security breach is frighteningly high. These days, an unprotected computer is likely to be infected with a pest within 20 minutes of being connected to the Internet. The average computer is checked for weaknesses by unknown parties 17 times a day.

If you are one of the 70% of users who has experienced an Internet-based attack that you were aware of, you probably shudder as you recall the time, money and aggravation it cost you to clean up your computer or reinstall your operating system. The costs are high enough to cause a business to fail. In fact, the majority of businesses that experience data loss or total system failure do fail, usually immediately.

In our work with small businesses and home users, we have observed that people are generally aware of the dangers, but at the same time, up to 90% do not have adequate protections in place. This is a cause for deep concern because of the enormous negative impact these attacks have on individuals and organizations.

It is also cause for curiosity. It’s as if 90% of the homes and businesses in a bad neighborhood weren’t locked up at night: Very risky. It made us wonder why.

So, we started asking. Here is an overview of the responses we got:

by Jennifer Fiocco

The need for organizations to monitor and control Internet usage in the workplace should be an accepted fact of doing business in a cyber-connected world. Statistics indicating that 30 to 40 percent of Internet use in the workplace is unrelated to work issues should come as no surprise. Neither should the report that 90 percent of employee computers harbor as many as 30 spyware programs. In fact, studies indicate that companies may be incurring average costs of $5,000 per year per employee in lost productivity due to Internet abuse. Other data suggest that as much as 72% of employees are downloading music and video clips, eroding bandwidth and leaving networks open to spyware and other malicious agents.