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Midwest Fiber Networks is going to build a wifi system for the city at no cost to tax payers. Once the system is up they will rent it out to various service providers who can then charge whatever fees for access they wish. More information found here.

"So, 2 years ago an Iranian immigrant comes to this tiny rural county"
Actually, Mr. Ziari has been in the Hermiston area for at least 20 years that I'm aware of, setting up small businesses selling communications / information services to local farmers.

"just happens to have one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the US."
The chemical weapons incinerator at the Umatilla Army Depot is a major commercial reason EZ Wireless set up the network.

During the incinerator's operating lifetime, there is a regulatory requirement to have a communications network for emergency services in case of a leak.

Several counties, cities, and emergency response services are the "anchor tenants" for the service.
http://www.fcw.com/article85954

And for good reason. You could even say we won the cold war iwth the soviets largely through such hidden backdoors in software

A "Not Invented Here" syndrome for software is very good for national security, as the Soviet Union learned the hard way

Gorbachev privately referred to Reagan as "a liar."
...
Through all of this, the White House Pragmatists also remained in the dark. If Nancy Reagan, Chief of Staff Jim Baker or Assistant to the First Lady Mike Deaver had known that the U.S. government was blowing up Soviet pipelines, infiltrating Soviet computers, bollixing their software or spoofing electronic equipment -- even though done with the president's approval -- they would have had a fit.

Open source may be a "sunset" project this Silicon Valley branch of NASA because that site is to be decimated and perhaps closed.

Ames mainly performs long term R&D in space and areonautical sciences. There is an opinion in the adminstration that the federal government should not be conducting R&D internally, but outsourcing it to universities, companies, and think tanks. This is pretty much the model in the biological sciences.

Hi all,

Lynxworks can say whatever they want, but the Army isn't picking an OS until 2006. See this link: http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2005/0214/web-fcso s-02-17-05.asp

Here is one quote that may be interesting:
"Cartwright and Muilenberg downplayed rumors that they decided not to use Microsoft's Windows operating system in FCS because of security issues. The officials said they have made no such decision to date."

Don't we remember what happened when the former soviet union relied a bit too much on outsourced technology

Every silver linings got a touch of grey:
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0820/news-nix on-08-20-01.asp
http://nixon.archives.gov/index.php

Sounds like a system that could replace the MILES system.

The Weiss project targeted the Soviet military/industrial needs as set forth in the Farewell dossier. "Improved" -- that is to say, erratic -- <b>computer chips were designed to pass quality-acceptance tests before entry into Soviet service. Only later would they sporadically fail, frazzling the nerves of harried users. Pseudosoftware disrupted factory output....

The production and transportation of oil and gas was at the top of the Soviet wish list. A new trans-Siberian pipeline was to deliver natural gas from the Urengoi gas field in Siberia across Kazakhstan, Russia and Eastern Europe, into the hard currency markets of the West. To automate the operation of valves, compressors and storage facilities in such an immense undertaking, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. .... U.S. intelligence, tipped by Farewell, responded and -- in cooperation with some outraged Canadians -- "improved" the software before sending it on.

Once in the Soviet Union, computers and software, working together, ran the pipeline beautifully -- for a while. But that tranquility was deceptive. Buried in the stolen Canadian goods -- the software operating this whole new pipeline system -- was a Trojan horse. In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard-currency earnings from the West and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds.

The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was a detonation of a small nuclear

So indeed, closed source software and keeping Trojans secret is an emportant national security strategy. If all software was open source it would be much harder to do stuff like this.

But Burr said no complete implementation of the SHA-1 function has been successfully attacked. "SHA-1 is not broken," he said, "and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon." But advances in computer processing capability make it prudent to phase out SHA-1 by 2010, he said.

According to this news piece, NIST is planning on switching to -256 or -512. In a nice touch, the piece adds:

Burr said no complete implementation of the SHA-1 function has been successfully attacked. "SHA-1 is not broken," he said, "and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon."

I suspect using multiple fingerprints (MD5+SHA-something) will probably be a practical step for the even the non-government paranoids in the short-term. The time for finding a dupe rise drastically with multi-fingerprint matching, especially given the current "attacks" have been only marginally computationally possible until quantum computing with hash-sized quantities of qbits is made to work.

NIST announced on 2/7 (days before) that an upgrade from SHA-1 is being forced, but that "SHA-1 is not broken ... and there's no reason to believe it will be in the near future."

here's the article.

Federal agencies were recently told to start switching to SHA-256 or SHA-512. Here's an article detailing this that just came out a week ago.

However the term "broken" is a pretty questionable term - the paper apparently details a method of breaking SHA-1 using brute force in only 2^69 operations, versus the theoretical strength of 2^80. It's a hell of lot fewer operations, but it's still pretty high on the strength scale.

Check this article: Federal agencies have been put on notice that National Institute of Standards and Technology officials plan to phase out a widely used cryptographic hash function known as SHA-1 in favor of larger and stronger hash functions such as SHA-256 and SHA-512.

When a deputy CIO of the Dept. of Labor and than Homeland Security Department has bogus degrees and has never been officially questioned about her educational experience (or lack thereof) for years, its not hard to see how gov't IT could be atrociously run.

From other articles about her, she was notorious in promoting her cronies, many of whom were also incompetent while passing over for promotion and bonuses those who knew what they were doing. Apparently Laura Callahan had a reputation for going ballistic when the occasional techie caught on to her and questioned some of her decisions. In hindsight, its rather obvious why she was so insecure.

The whole purpose of OpenBSD is to be the most secure OS on the planet.

It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)

That's a one-way trip. Meaning that traffic only goes to the satellite and back to earth once. That's great if you've got some sort of instrumented satellite up there and you're trying to query it for data, or if you're broadcasting (one way). But because this thing's a router, that implies that traffic will be two-way.

This means you're going to have that minimum 270ms lag on the outbound leg, but you've got to take into account the return trip, which doubles the minimum latency to 540ms (that's a half-second to you and me). If there's even typical latency on the terrestrial side (at both ends), you're probably talking another 50-60ms, so a typical ping time will most likely be 600ms or more.

Of course, this assumes that the space router satellite will be placed in geosynchronous orbit., but there's nothing in TFA to indicate that's how it'll be used. It might be placed in a lower orbit, as part of a constellation of satellites, the way Teledesic had planned to do, in which case, the latency would be much lower.

CG-48 Yorktown was decomissioned December 3rd after twenty years in service, a long and interesting career in which a Smart Ship testbed failure in 1997 would rate as significant only on Slashdot. CG-48 Yorktown

CVN-77 George H.W. Bush, the last of the Nimitz-class carriers, now under construction, will incorporate W2K based technology developed by Microsoft Federal Systems. 'Son of Windows' to control carrier $5 billion dollar warships can take a decade and more to plan, fund and complete. So let's hear no complaints that the Navy wasn't looking at a commercial Linux solution in '97-'98, or earlier.

Been there done that. Caused more problems than it created. Not that my parents aren't able to do everything they need to do currently, they are quite proficient. But there are other common programs that are still IE dependent. For example, Turbo Lister.

I installed Firefox on my Mom's machine after Homeland Security's announcement recommending switching to alternative browsers from IE. She had major problems getting Turbo Lister to run correctly and apparently it was a known incompatibility. So I uninstalled Firefox and then Turbo Lister has worked fine since.

>And that would be like... maybe... three slashdot nerds?

Contrary to slashdot belief, not everyone thinks that everything Apple makes is well designed for them.

For a primary example, let's look at Apple input devices. Note that most major mouse manufacturers almost have a line of trackballs. Note the lack of trackballs made by Apple. Note that most major mouse manufacturers rarely make a single button mouse. Note that mice included with Apple computers (made by Apple) are only single button.

>Virgin aren't really into creating a high quality device like Apple are

*cough* iPod high quality? *cough*

iPods have/get:

- Easily scratched and quickly uglified
- Sealed battery packs that often die within 1 - 2 years

And let's look at the tiBook, another top of the line "quality" Apple product:

- Broken hinges in no time
- Scratched amazingly fast

Apple hardware isn't particularly *worse* than most any other company's, however, it's not particularly better than most any other company's. It has it's faults, and isn't exactly "high quality", but "consumer quality".

"High quality" would be something like this, which can be used by a military officer during war and still survive. I seriously doubt an iPod could survive a war.

>they just want any old thing to place their brand name on.

That's funny, I thought that was what Apple was about. So many OEM products with Apple logos, so little time to classify them all...

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0830/web-sipr net-08-31-04.asp tells about two viruses (virii?) discovered on the classified military network SIPRNET, specifically, at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Apparently our missile control and space defense operates on Microsoft - but how did a virus enter the network? SIPRNET computers are not connected to any other network, and are generally behind locked, limited-access doors.

LTG Peter Cuviello (Army G-6/CIO 2000-2003)

LTG Stephen Boutelle (Army G-6/CIO 2003-present)

These are a new generation of Army commander who have much more in common with today's geek than you would expect. Both are technology-centric men who are interested in the network and the applications we run on it, including games. I've had the opportunity to meet both men and I have to say that the generational issues regarding technology have been overcome with the arrival of men like this in command. Before them, perhaps the Army's senior leadership was brought up in an era before personal computing. That is no longer the case.

Yes. The Harris company has produced a WiFi network that is capable of carrying Top Secret data. You need a waiver from an appropriate authority to even get this gear, and you'd best be government.

That said, they aren't talking about deploying one here. This is commercial off the shelf equipment they are talking about in the article. Grossly insecure.

In Iraq, this might work. Good line of sight and all. In Afghanistan - listen, i've seen pictures people brought back from Afghanistan in the last 2 years. It looks like Mordor with the high black mountains surrounding you. Line of sight is a big issue. IOW, this is a half baked scheme for Afghanistan.

There are issues here that I can't discuss regarding the lack of bandwidth available to the deployed personnel except to say that the DoD is seriously delinquent in lofting more comsats for itself.

Yes. The Harris company has produced a WiFi network that is capable of carrying Top Secret data. You need a waiver from an appropriate authority to even get this gear, and you'd best be government.

That said, they aren't talking about deploying one here. This is commercial off the shelf equipment they are talking about in the article. Grossly insecure.

In Iraq, this might work. Good line of sight and all. In Afghanistan - listen, i've seen pictures people brought back from Afghanistan in the last 2 years. It looks like Mordor with the high black mountains surrounding you. Line of sight is a big issue. IOW, this is a half baked scheme for Afghanistan.

There are issues here that I can't discuss regarding the lack of bandwidth available to the deployed personnel except to say that the DoD is seriously delinquent in lofting more comsats for itself.

Well, short term bans (or a point system before a ban except for major issues), will work more evenly than fines.

As for short yellows:
2.7 seconds
Caution raised on red-light cameras

While they don't say that the yellow length was shortened, it's implied that they either did that or purposly selected lights with short yellows.

As for lowering speed limits, that's been a tradition of small towns on/by highways for generations in the USA. They usually go after out of town tags. Even write you up for one over. They pay for their police force that way.

...he's the NASA dude quoted in this article about how the fiber cable for Svalbard was funded, and what good it can possibly do. Apparently he had to ride out to the tracking station they have there on a snowmobile, escorted by folks with rifles in case of polar bears. I wish my job were that much fun.

It's quite possibly a WARLOCK anti-IED system.

Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group, "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.

Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.

Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group, "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.

Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.

AND, IIRC, the US Navy is moving to PPC/Linux.

But you recall wrong. The Navy is moving to Microsoft Windows. The NMCI is all Microsoft.

I think Bush has managed to invent a whole new direction to move in. The man has pissed away an obscene surplus projection, put rocket boosters on the deficit, instituted a recovery plan that would make a first year economist trainee weep, started two wars, failed to justify one of them, shoved a law that puts Orwell's work to shame through a pants-pissing Congress, attempted to revitalize the career of the man who defined "creepy Big Brother" with a program that can only be described as "conceived from the bowels of hell", can't do anything without Ashcroft, Cheney, or Rice holding his dick to guide him...

All this and he managed to stonewall an investigation into one of the biggest intelligence disasters in history, roll back a dozen years of progress on diplomacy, environmental issues, and civil rights, AND he took more vacation time his first year in office than any healthy president in history.

Yes... I think Bush has redefined the political spectrum.... in a very bad way. I have never cared about politics before, but I am now a registered voter and I've looked deeper into the issues in the last few months than I had in all my previous years on this planet combined. Way to go Georgey....

ITAA has "gone on the e-voting offensive" to protect the industry. If Diebold is so concerned about producing voting accuracy, why did they go and hire a lobbyist like Harris Miller to protect their image?

And the services aren't cheap...." annual dues are calculated (they range from $600-$44K, depending on a company's sales. "Deliverables" will cost up to $200,000+". Why not pour that cash into securing their systems instead of their image?

> Would you rather they use windows?

Apparently they already do -> 'Son of Windows' to control carrier

I hope to god they keep that thing patched, secured, and locked down tighter then people normally do with their machines.

Ask and ye shall receive.

I for one welcome our new space-based masters, but then I work in Air Force Space Command.

The Air Force is also looking to follow the Army's lead in giving Microsoft half a billion dollars.

Air Force mulls Microsoft license

I'm glad that's the official policy, anyway. Accountability is served when government officials can not revise history (as authoritarian governments have been wont).

Nevertheless, this FCW article says:

"Electronic files that qualify as records, particularly in the form of e-mail, and also word processing and spreadsheet documents, are not being kept at all as records in many cases," NARA reported.

The use of e-mail for official business "has increased exponentially," according to the report, but "e-mail is generally not captured" in recordkeeping systems.

The side effect, apart from saving trees and increasing efficienc, has been to allow government operations to become even more hidden, (verbal communications have provided a largely hidden channel since before the advent of electronic documentation).

And while the sluggish economy could be seen as a hindrance, Morris said it has actually helped the project.
"When you look at the vendors, their pricing has just dropped because they are hungry," he said. "We're getting incredible pricing for the equipment, the electronics, the fiber, all the things we need. Because the economy's down, interest rates are down, so that's going to help us in our financing.

And it goes on. Seems like someone did a copy, paste and remove quotes.

It is hard to believe but true.

Here is a good
article that sums up the situation.

The NMCI contract get very little press but it is a huge contract that will cripple the navy and lock out any competion or innovation.

NCMI (or EDS aka Evil Data Systems) owns the entire network (WAN/LAN). You are not allowed to plug anything into it that does not run MS. This include the wide range of IP enabled device that are becoming available.

The basic problem with the Osprey is the drivetrain. There are five gearboxes, three clutches, flexible shafts with multiple couplings, and in the Navy version, disconnect points where the wings fold. Most of this mechanical nightmare is part of the backup system through which one engine can power both rotors. The rotor/tilt wing system requires huge amounts of maintenance, enough that maintenance records have been falsified to make it look better. It's also a very expensive aircraft for its size.

Despite this, Osprey crashes occur mostly for other reasons.

• Software failure when recovering from a hydraulic failure.
• Rotor stall blamed on pilot error, but reflecting a hole in the flight envelope at low speed operation.

VTOL aircraft tend to crash even more then helicopters. The Harrier, the only VTOL produced in quantity, has many, many crashes on the record, especially with pilots in training. The flight envelope where transitions from and to vertical flight occurs is unforgiving. Helicopters are better behaved near transition.

The United States Air Force is Microsoft's largest customer. ... The Air Force is readying the system for combat

You should try working for the federal government. A diploma mill BS, MS and Ph.D will get you very far indeed.

They probably use MS to generate their forcasts.

Nope, the NOAA is smarter than that, they use Linux

Paper can easily last a hundred years (I have a number of books from the late 1800's & early 1900's); IIRC the typical MTF for CDs is on the order of 20 years, and can be as low as 5.

-- MarkusQ

Basically, a buffer overrun in a non-MS program took down the beta system. It's hardly unusual for a beta test to have a couple issues, and it's apparently not even Microsoft's fault in this case.

And then in your "evidence" link:

A badly written (apparently non-Microsoft) application caused a buffer overrun.

What exactly makes that apparent, other than the propaganda that passes for Microsoft training materials these days? Furthermore, are you telling me that it is not a major problem for the United States Navy, a force famous for its history of damage control and system redundancy on its ships to run management software whose kernel can be brought crashing down by one unhandled exception?

Speaking of evidence, it appears to me, if you can look through the propaganda, that the navy has frozen the program. What other ships are currently deployed which use the "smart ship" management system? Try to come up with real evidence this time, and don't cite yourself - the only thing more childish is arguing with someone you've marked as a foe.

Yes, Hatch is 0wn3d by special interests;

He was co author of the DMCA, and also responsible for the Copyright Term Extension Act, or CTEA.

He also was responsible for a bill that would have extended the term of the patent for Claritin, as he use Schering-Plough's corporate jet when he was running for president.

He is also a backer of the patriot act, legislation that made it easier for the FBI to use Carnivore, and other legislation that erodes our civil rights. I could go on and on.

He doesn't even bother talking out of both sides of his mouth. He knows that when election time comes the sheeple will vote for him like they do everytime because he belongs "to the right party" (republican). I live in Utah and it makes me sick watching it. Republican leaders in the state legislature have said "you can't be a mormon and vote democrat." So nobody does, and Republicans hold 95% of major public offices in Utah.

Out of all of congress, he is the one most responsible for the infinite and perpetual copyrights we have today.

The greatest thing that could be done to advance our civil and online rights is to get Senator Hatch out of office.

wonderful world, isn't it? How many years before we can't publish this kind of stuff on magzines?

In any case, I find it hard to believe that any relatively modern MS product can be reliably "certified" as fulfilling any rigorous set of security guidelines. Especially as I see at least one "critical security update" every week on my Win2k box. How much testing does every MS product go through before being deployed? How about every patch or service pack?

On the flipside, forcing OSS to jump through these hoops will result in a stronger, more competitive product. Why should you trust essentially unverifiable MS software when you have a rigorously tested and code-audited product. Sure, OSS will probably have to go through a lot more certification, but they'll benefit from it.

Official NCMI information site

The and another

Bitching from a deckhand

.. UNIX/Linux machines would connect as
legacy servers...