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Microsoft Wins Homeland Security Contract
syzme writes "According to The Register (as well as Reuters and News.com), 'The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has signed a deal for Microsoft software worth something in the region of $100 million, covering servers and over 140,000 desktops. This does not however mean that Microsoft and its hench-OEM Dell are poised to hoover up all of the Department's lovely IT budget, nor indeed that this is all new money for them; largely, it seems to be more a case of Microsoft holding onto business it's already got.'" This shouldn't be much of a surprise -- remember the Federal government is already Microsoft's biggest customer.
Since MS did a bid, can we get a list of competing bids as well as criteria? It would be interesting to review...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
That they'd make use of SE Linux, since they helped develop it.
Also, you'd think they'd want a variety of O/S's, ect, for security purposes.
It shall be very funny/ironic when "Homeland Security" gets hacked due to some newfound MS flaw. Actually, i'm frightened, as they will probably have ever detail they can glean from every person they can, opened up to some arsehole
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has signed a deal for MandrakeSoft Linux software worth something in the region of $0 (free), covering servers and over 140,000 desktops."
Instead they paid $100 million of our tax dollars to a company who is breaking antitrust laws. Maybe Microsoft isn't the bad guy here.
If you think about the reliability, uptime, and random reboot problems with many MS products then this could be great for us citizens.
We know all of the attempts to restrict our personal freedoms with wire taps, internet/email monitoring, and the ideology to put all of the collected info into a massive database for those who have the clearance to peruse. The best thing is, although, they might have your most personal info it will probably be collected and stored by a MS product.
What does that mean? It means it will either disapear or just spontaneously fragment and corrupt itself! Why our goverment chooses bloatware over dependablity and functionality is beyond me but they were never known for being frugal or making the best decisions in terms of bang for the buck. I'm sure MS is practically giving it away just to keep the business anyway.
It makes you wonder how many fuckups happen just out of using MS software. I'm not saying it's the worst or best because it does have it's use but since this story is about our goverment using it I'd prefer a more stable and dependable os/desktop. When I think of mixing MS software with our goverment all I see is the movie "Wargames" and that's not a nice thought.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
The single largest company ever to warn people not to use their software for life-and-death situations, is now going to have an exclusive with the government to help prevent the next 9/11 attack.
Considering that the only (repeat: only ) effective Microsoft security measures to date are the ones that prevent people who've already stolen Windows-XP from upgrading it, it's pretty safe to say that we can all prepare to live with having any enemy who wants to know something knowing it while substantial numbers of us sit around glowing in the dark.
Today's bonus question: 'will the government's relationship with Microsoft include a EULA that precludes the government's suing them when they screw up?'
It's amazing what you can do to a society with enough money.
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"Yeah. It smells, too..."
I did some short term consulting work with a company recently to help them prepare some bids on the last BAA (Broad Agency Announcement) sent out by the DHS. The scope and scale of the projects that were in the request were quite interesting, with some that were tailor made for linux (wearable computing initiatives, anyone?).
We haven't heard any updates on the bid selection, but after looking at a good portion of those potential projects I can truthfully say that Microsoft is going to have a really tough time filling the required roles for many of them, let alone doing it securely.