Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.

What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?

What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?

They send most of their data nationally, as they all speak Japanese, and Japanese content pretty much all comes from... Japan. Australia and New Zealand are English-speaking countries, so most of the content we want to access is overseas (US, and to a lesser extent, Europe). Korea's similar - a very introverted culture as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Japan also has over 120 million people, New Zealand and Australia have around 4 and 22 million respectively. There's a simple economy of scale there - sure all of Japans metropolitan areas have 100mb Ethernet for cheap, but even their rural areas live on connections more similar to NZ/Aus.

Some of the cities in NZ/Aus have some OK competition (parts of my city have 10Mb Cable available - although where I live I only have the option of DSL). But yeah, we're always going to be fighting our scale and where a lot of our content comes from.

Luxury! Some open source projects have to run out of a paper bag in a septic tank. They get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down at the code room, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when they get home they get thrashed to sleep with a belt...

And imagine the hilarity when people put them on in the wrong order!

Waist band around your right arm, right arm band around your left leg - ahhh, I can just picture the legendary extensions to physics that the players' avatar will display... :D

Maybe they should have bought gold and a safe.

I mean, I use banks all the time, but if you're going to go the self-sufficient route, you DO have to do your own risk mitigation. And for your entire lifes savings, the cost of this isn't too extreme...

It's like hosting your own email server vs. using a free provider like Gmail or paying for one like your ISP. Sure, go ahead - just remember to set up backups!