NSA Technology Transfer Program – 2014 Technology Catalog [pdf]
nsa.gov
nsa.gov
I believe I'm going to write my Congressional reps later today and suggest pushing for the elimination of licensing fees for tech from NSA, NASA, DOD, etc. I'm sure it won't go anywhere, but what can ya do?
One thing that would happen immediately: people would stop discussing marital affairs via telephone. (And there'd be a brief spike in murders if the historic data were released!)
The knee jerk reaction is to extend that idea to would-be terrorists, too--to imagine that they'd simply change their communication habits (they already try to avoid monitoring, I presume).
But, let's think a little harder, and let's start with the married folk.
Bob and Mary are married. Eve is Bob's co-worker. Don't you think that Eve-Bob communication is going to contain some tell-tale signs _before_ the affair? Could Mary (or Bob, or Eve) use this information to prevent the affair (or proceed in a less painful manner, depending on their situation)?
I was interrupted and now I've put that line of thought on hold and developed a new one.
Remember IRC? Did you ever choose your stance in a dispute by reviewing the logs? ...Was there anything wrong with that? Wasn't it generally helpful?
Of course in that world, PRIVMSG does exist. In our world, it doesn't.
I dunno.
The thing is, I really was just joking. But somewhere out there, there's probably somebody who thinks this is all actually a good idea.
If there are relatively few people who benefit the sales will also be meaningless. You'll also have a bunch of losses for things that didn't sell well, liability for when something goes wrong, etc etc. The government isn't a business, it should not try to be one.
Can you explain this part? I don't understand why anyone would have to pay for public domain technology.
There are other ways to find out the what is important, ways that are less prone to errors, ESPECIALLY for research...
My point was that selling the IP instead of giving it away is revenue neutral to society (and, in fact, a positive to the taxpayers who are not buying the IP) and so selling it does not decrease welfare and may well improve it if it provides some data to the agency on what the users of their research value. This is entirely unlike what happens with NSF-funded research which is given away to journals who charge a fortune to read it. In this latter case (unless you think that peer-review is incredibly valuable, which no one besides the publishers seem to believe) the overall effect is welfare reducing.
He didn't say it is a way to find what's important, he said it is an important signal to find what people value enough to spend their money on.
No, he didn't, he said:
> is an important signal as to where they should spend their research time
anyone who has looked at basic research knows that immediate commercialization potential is a horrible guide for where to spend time.
As a quick example, would you pay for someone to research the immune systems of sharks and camels? No technology transfer office can sell a description of how the immune systems work. It seems ridiculous. But after years were spent researching these topics, describing them in detail in the publicly available literature, companies have taken features of these systems and built products based on them.
The goal of government-funded research is not to run a business, directing research into immediate commercialization, it is to do basic science that would not be funded by companies because it does not appear prima facie to have commercial application.
Sez you. Basic science/pure research is NOT the goal of all government research spending. There happens to be some funding put in place for basic research by Congress (much of the NSF and NIH budgets, for instance) but there is also purpose-driven research that is not "basic science." The department of defense is one of the largest spenders on research in the US government, but much of their research is not "basic science," and even if you termed it that, they are not doing it for the love of knowledge. I assume the NSA is more like this than it is like the NSF.
"Digital Transcription System" (that can handle foreign languages). This would be awesome to release OSS. Finally the tech giants wouldn't have a monopoly on good voice recognition.
"All Fiber Optically-Controlled Optical Switch" So they have all they need to make optical processors/routers. If this is the declassified tech, it's time to start paying attention to http://pqcrypto.org/
"Port Protector Assembly for D-Sub Connectors" I haven't heard of much spying happening by someone hooking something up to an unused DVI port. Good to know.
From the actual patent text (https://www.google.com/patents/US7788659): "Because of the possibility of looping and branching within loops, a brute force attempt to enumerate the paths through a computer program will most likely fail. Therefore, there is a need for a method of converting a computer program that contains loops to one that does not."
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_analysis
The Wikipedia article on it is quite good with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_unrolling
DETERMINE RANGE AND VELOCITY OF AN OBJECT PATENT NOS.: 7,755,536 AND 7,545,325
This method provides the ability to determine the position and velocity of a transmitter over a wide range of bandwidths. The second invention models the Doppler process as a time shift and change of scale of the original signal. In this process, the received signal is delayed in time and dilated. In this invention, the method of performing the resampling function is to apply a forward Fourier transform of one length to the zero-padded signal and apply an inverse Fourier transform of a different length to the results of the first transform. This pair of operations results in a resampling of the signal at a rational multiple of the original sample rate. The scale correlation is then computed as the normal correlation of the transmitted signal and the resampled signal.
VALUE Accurate model of Doppler process Rational signal resampling
This could help improve performance for data stores in general.
FABRICATING AND INTEGRATING DECOUPLING CAPACITORS PATENT NO.: 7,297,613 This technology provides a method of fabrication and integration for high quality decoupling capacitors with high capacitance values, low parasitic losses, good yield, and long-term reliability. This method enables high-yielding capacitors and other passive elements to be placed very close to the processor or other integrated circuit design and provides improved signal integrity. VALUE
[Value:] Reduced signal loss and footprint Reduced cost and increased yields for RF systems
lol, they patented a privilege escalation rootkit
Edit: Upon more reading from (https://www.google.com/patents/US7945947?dq=7,945,947&hl=en&...)
It appears to be non-specific, but an admin computer is needed.
[A] user-definable process is associated to the terminal services session. The user-definable process is selected so that the process can interact with the user connected to that terminal services session and can identify all the desktops registered in the terminal services session that the user-definable process is running in.
[...]
Again, by example, once a process has registered a low-level keyboard hook on a desktop, it is notified of all keystrokes that occur when the input for the keyboard would go to that desktop. Each Vista system prompt service process examines the keystrokes and if the user-definable key sequence (such as CTRL-F10) was pressed, the system performs the action of creating a command shell running as the LocalSystem account.