Forget about a kill switch. Planned obsolescence? Already obsolete. The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers want tomorrow's military hardware to literally cease to exist at a predetermined point. Welcome to the age of suicidal sensors.
Darpa isn't imagining planes or ships that melt into a metallic puddle when their replacements come off the production line. The research agency is thinking, in one sense, smaller: sensors and other "sophisticated electronic mi
crosystems" that litter a warzone - and create enticing opportunities for adversaries to collect, study and reverse-engineer. Since it's not practical to pick them all up when U.S. forces withdraw, Darpa wants to usher in the age of "transient electronics."
If you've ever lost your phone and worried about random strangers sifting through your data, you have a sense of why the idea appeals to Darpa. But you probably never imagined Apple creating a piece of hardware "capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner." That's where Darpa comes in. Next month, it's going to invite interested scientists and manufacturers to a Virginia conference to kick around ideas for creating what it calls "triggered degradation." Oh, and some of that degradation will occur inside a soldier's body.
The program to create transient electronics is called VAPR, for Vanishing Programmable Resources. Darpa's going to say more about it in the coming weeks. But thus far, the idea is to make small hardware that performs just like current sensors, only fabricated from materials that can rapidly disintegrate on command.
Read the full article on Wired.com
Darpa isn't imagining planes or ships that melt into a metallic puddle when their replacements come off the production line. The research agency is thinking, in one sense, smaller: sensors and other "sophisticated electronic mi
© Darpa
Darpa wants to build small military hardware that can literally destroy itself according to pre-programmed instructions, as this demonstration image indicates.
Darpa wants to build small military hardware that can literally destroy itself according to pre-programmed instructions, as this demonstration image indicates.
If you've ever lost your phone and worried about random strangers sifting through your data, you have a sense of why the idea appeals to Darpa. But you probably never imagined Apple creating a piece of hardware "capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner." That's where Darpa comes in. Next month, it's going to invite interested scientists and manufacturers to a Virginia conference to kick around ideas for creating what it calls "triggered degradation." Oh, and some of that degradation will occur inside a soldier's body.
The program to create transient electronics is called VAPR, for Vanishing Programmable Resources. Darpa's going to say more about it in the coming weeks. But thus far, the idea is to make small hardware that performs just like current sensors, only fabricated from materials that can rapidly disintegrate on command.
Read the full article on Wired.com
