DARPA will hold the DARPA Network Challenge to explore how “broad-scope problems can be solved using Internet-based technologies.

“To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.”

According to the rules, the balloons will be on display from 10:00AM to 4:00PM on Saturday, 5 December 2009. A prize of $40,000 will be awarded to the first participant to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten weather balloons within the contest period, which ends on 14 December 2009.

This month’s Vanity Fair has a feature article that lays out “an oral history of the Internet” in How the Web Was Won, part of a series of oral histories.

“This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet. … To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it.”

There are lots of people missing or mentioned only in passing. I suppose this is an unavoidable result of people’s willingness or availability to be interviewed and the need to have a diverse set of subjects for a general article. Still, I don’t see how an oral history titled “How the Web Was Won” can not have Tim Berners-Lee as a central player or mention the W3C.

I also missed a look, however brief, at where we are headed with the internet. While this is offered as a history, not mentioning the future suggests its done, which is far from the case.