"US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.”
The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played."
Two takeaways from this. First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't see how it's remotely justifiable. Second, this is yet another reason why Real Player sucks.
> First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't see how it's remotely justifiable.
If you deploy civilian personnel into an active war zone, you gotta pay them huge amounts of extra money as a risk reward. Even soldiers get up to 110€ a day extra (http://www.focus.de/politik/videos/gefahrenzulagen-fuer-ausl...), so you're looking at least 40k/year/FTE in extras, plus normal salary. I'd say it's safe to assume 100-300k/year/FTE in salary, plus accomodation costs, travel allowances, ...
Therefore, I guess payroll was the biggest block on expenses.
The headline is slightly misleading, I too thought they paid for news fed to Western media at home. According to the article the fake news was used to gather intelligence and for local propaganda, not to mislead the people at home. To me it seems like a legitimate project.
Yeah, they will never figure out that the same might happen with USB sticks. Because whenever you learn something you limit it to the concrete object, people cannot generalize.
The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played."