A massive change at DARPA

[jeremy.j.epstein at gmail.com (Jeremy Epstein)]

OK, many of you don't care about DARPA, but here's something that
happened there you *should* care about.  DARPA funds research, and has
historically drawn its program managers from the ranks of academia and
occasionally the military.  This is a massive change in outlook....


http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10450552-245.html

 Peiter Zatko--a respected hacker known as "Mudge"--has been tapped to
be a program manager at DARPA, where he will be in charge of funding
research designed to help give the U.S. government tools needed to
protect against cyberattacks, CNET has learned.

Zatko will become a program manager in mid-March within the Strategic
Technologies Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency), which is the research and development office for the
Department of Defense. His focus will be cybersecurity, he said in an
interview with CNET on Tuesday.

One of his main goals will be to fund researchers at hacker spaces,
start-ups, and boutiques who are most likely to develop technologies
that can leapfrog what comes out of large corporations. "I want
revolutionary changes. I don't want evolutionary ones," he said.

He's also hoping that giving a big push to research and development
will do more to advance the progress of cybersecurity than public
policy decisions have been able to do over the past few decades.

[...]