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Which Government Agencies are *nix-Friendly?
payneLess asks: "I have noticed since the Sept. 11 attacks, there is renewed emphasis on beefing up the nation's military, law enforcement and intelligence-gathering capabilities. Presumably, some of the dollars to accomplish this will go to improving their information systems and recruiting quality IT people, which with the slow economy might present some rewarding opportunities. Since I know many .gov and .mil geeks read Slashdot, my question is, besides NASA, are there any agencies that doing cool things with Linux or BSD? Aside from the NSA's security-enhanced Linux project and DARPA throwing a bunch of cash at NAI Labs to develop Trusted BSD, is anybody actually using *nix on a wide scale for day-to-day tasks? One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box and everyone was perfectly content letting the vendors and contractors ram Microsoft, Solaris, and other proprietary stuff down their throats, nor was there any institutional interest in changing over to open source."
*nix OSes for a collection of people that have enough trouble keeping Windows boxen secure would be like putting a blind man in charge of watching security cameras to make sure no one is trying to get in. Or putting someone that is quadrapalegic in the position of a life guard...
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Speaking of "critical" software, I thought I once read somewhere that the two big chip makers didn't make x86 chips that were supposed to be used in critical situations such as hospital life support. Might that also hamper the adoption of the *nixes, since the hardware is harder to come by?
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
What is this question doing on Slashdot? People please, if you work for the US government you have an obligation at this point to shut the hell up. IT security is one of the things falling under increasing scrutiny during the heightened state of world events and the last thing we need are Ask Slashdot questions like "What government agencies run UNIX". What's next? "What firewall does your government site run?" or "What protocols does your government site allow through their firewall?". We don't need to be broadcasting anymore information to the bad guys than they already have.