On the other hand, by using the internet, the powers that be wouldn't be able to rig or dumb down any tests so that they succeed. Like they did with some of the Star Wars tests. Useful when justifying budgets to Congress.

Nothing in the solicitation has a $30 billion price tag on it. No idea where that number came from. There are no dollar amounts at this stage; DARPA is soliciting bids.

What DARPA is asking for is a 10,000 node Internet simulator, and that's in the final phase. The whole system can be started, stopped, and flushed to a clean state for new tests. Users are simulated: "Replicants will simulate physical interaction with device peripherals, such as keyboard and mice. Replicants will drive all common applications on a desktop environments." Attacks on the network are supported; the vendor even has to provide a "malware library".

The simulated machines have to be simulated at a fine level of detail. "The NCR must be capable of taking a physical computer and rapidly creating a functionally equivalent, logical instance of that machine that can be replicated repeatedly and injected into a testbed. Given a never-before-seen physical computing device, create logical instantiations of the physical native machine that accurately replicates, not only the software on the machine, but hardware to the interrupt level, chipset, and peripheral cards and devices.". That's going to be hard. They may end up with real computers hooked up to peripherals that simulate human inputs. (DoD does this all the time; it's how flight control software is debugged. Serious flight simulators use the real "black boxes" of real aircraft with simulated inputs and outputs.) They need that level of fidelity because they want to observe virus and attack behavior.

This is going to be a useful asset.