The Pentagon As Silicon Valley's Incubator 27
An anonymous reader writes "The Times has an article about how people coming out of the Pentagon are helping create a boom in technology start-ups. From the article: 'In the last year, former Department of Defense and intelligence agency operatives have headed to Silicon Valley to create technology start-ups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats. Frequent reports of cyberattacks have expanded the demand for security tools, in both the public and private sectors, and venture capital money has followed. In 2012, more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security start-ups, more than double the amount in 2010, according to the National Venture Capital Association.'"
Not just in the last year (Score:5, Informative)
One needs only to look at the origins of In-Q-Tel, and its connection to Peter Thiel, to know that the defense department has been funding some of the biggest and best known companies for the past 2 decades. Google, PayPal, Facebook, and Palantir all come to mind, although there are many others.
Re:World [cyber]war 3 (Score:4, Informative)
Who modded this "troll?"
Plenty of shill account/bots around here. In fact some of the "tools" [slashdot.org] the article is referring to are applied to do just this [slashdot.org].
All points to a new market opening up: Tools to identify and track propaganda/shill/astroturf accounts, IP address blocks etc. Envisage something like a voluntary spam network where all the forum software/websites can band together to make these nefarious activities much more costly to operate and maintain...
Re:World [cyber]war 3 (Score:4, Informative)
Well said. For those who've never seen it, Dwight nailed it over 50 years ago:
classic address [youtube.com]
So sad that what happened is pretty much exactly what he feared.