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CSIRO is (generally speaking) basic research.

DARPA will fund that too, but almost always only as part of a larger applied research project. DARPA project deliver working systems.

DARPA projects are also always limited term, without renewals. That gives a deadline, which is different to most research agencies.

(ex-PM for a research agency that worked with *ARPA here. Most of the non-DARPA US *ARPA agencies aren't as effective as DARPA itself though).

CSIRO does "basic research", but depending on what department you are in, project terms are limited and projects are focused on finding a way out of the building.

The projects I worked on were all on tight budgets and deadlines with the goal of finding a way to commercialize the research.

That being said, I'm not a researcher and my job was finding/developing a commercialization path for existing research.

> If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.

In 1998 I was setting up a shared internet connection in the apartment block I lived in. I remember wondering if I should go for a bundle of ethernet cables in the stairway or this newfangled WiFi thing. Neither I nor anyone else in the block had ever tried WiFi, and I believe it was still a few years before I did.

Went for the cables - and it ran without a hickup for all the time I lived there. Nobody else used the connection much so student-me ended up with an insanely fast 512kbps at 1/10 the price.

I was CSIRO DIT in times gone past, 1988 timeframe. It was an amazing place to be. We were doing OSI work. Perhaps it's better that didn't go the distance :-)

SEL is a modern miracle. The decision by the government to de-fund the work is a tragedy.

The thing most people don’t get is that wifi reflects off the human skin and goes through walls so guess what. Yup that’s right. You are visible through your walls from hundreds of feed away. It’s kind of a problem.

Oh and your phone? It’s like you are holding a flashlight as long as it’s wifi is on. The tech for this hasn’t hit mainstream yet

Not really, because we have rule of law. There are plenty of illegal ways to spy on people's private activity and we cope. If there's a hillside in view of your house, somebody can hide in the bush with a telephoto lens to watch you cooking dinner. Various active radar type technologies can see through walls. There are ways to pick up sound from a distance.

Last I heard, this seeing people with Wifi was very poor resolution and filled with noise but worst of all, the system had to be trained on the specific rooms it was being used on so you couldn't apply it secretly.

It's completely bonkers to claim that "rule of law" in the US protects our privacy from any type of digital intrusion. "cope" might be the right word if you mean "completely ignore/obseqiuously accept our lack of privacy".

Hackers on the internet are lawless because they're in Russia or wherever, but somebody looking through your walls with wifi will be personally present in your street where he's at risk of being caught so it's a completely different kind of risk.

You sound as if you aren’t aware of wifi beam antennas that can connect from about a mile away, or aware that drones can be equipped with multi-array wifi antennas.

I guess I used too extreme an example so you misunderstood. The distinction I'm making is that those things you mentioned put the person doing them at risk of arrest because they must be physically present while hacking from Russia doesn't.

Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.

Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.

Totally agree about peeping toms. But, if a company gets to spy on you via their devices with impunity, your politicians representing you get pay bumps.

> Not really, because we have rule of law.

Until we don't.

RIP Jon Lang. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFBeetiYMs

You clearly don’t want to have to worry about this lol. Your first response is that it is illegal (so is speeding).

Second seems to be that the tech is uncommon and has poor resolution.

^ this is true with the first digital cameras as well.

As the MIT researchers first publishing their work on this know, the minimumly viable tech needed to use wifi to passively see observe each breath someone takes is 5% hardware and 95% software. We aren’t talking about cutting edge tech. We are taking about commonly available tech that is just used to observe distortions in the 3d radio propagation geometries.

The actual hardware required to see exactly where someone is behind walls and what their hands are doing costs less than $300. Most of it is software needed to reconstruct the geometry from the signals. Software like this is notorious for being randomly and abruptly open sourced.

Yea, and you can make bombs in your house and mail them to people. You can buy drugs online. You can trade child porn, you can abuse your own children. You can commit all sorts of crimes easily and secretly but you'll go to jail if you get caught.

You can also see if someone's breathing by noticing condensation on their windows in winter or seeing them enter their house one day and come out another day. They must have spent the intervening time inside breathing. If that's the level of invasion, it hardly matters.

Just wait until smart home/HAR devices become more popular in ~10-20 years. We'll have grids of radar in our homes whose explicit purpose is to track our movements.

I feel there is an enormous difference between DARPA and CSIRO primary the "D". How many incredible innovations has DARPA made that will never reach the public because they give a strategic advantage?

Agreed, but in the context of governments hoping to clone DARPA success, it's more about the innovations than the "D" part.

"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, is an agency within the Department of Defense (DOD) responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the U.S. military." [1]

  [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf
  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for Congress

I commented above, Australia have the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) which is the military version of the civilian CSIRO. I worked at DSTO for a year, really interesting stuff.

I worked for DSTO, which is kind of the defence version of the CSIRO. Amazing place to work due to the large budgets and lack of any real pressure to deliver anything in particular in any timeframe.

As you said some fantastic projects, but a lot of political budget decisions.

> If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYNUcFMCIzw

Wifi made tons of sense and everyone was desperate for wireless connections, cables were a pain and it was obvious that laptops were going to be a big thing. It was easy to imagine because it's basically: cellphones+laptops = awesome.