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Dept. Of Homeland Security Chooses Groove, P2P
Ryan Barrett writes "Groove Networks has
announced that their P2P infrastructure will power the
Homeland Security Information Network, an initiative to increase
information sharing between federal, state, and local intelligence agencies.
(The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies
better share the information they already have.) Groove
Workspace has also been certified with two govt. security standards,
FIPS 140-2
level 1 and NIAP CCITSE. In related news,
Groove's developers have been diagnosed with acronym whiplash."
Many of you may know the founder of Groove (Ray Ozzie) as the guy who created Lotus Notes.
Just showing that he's been in the spotlight before, it's not some random Joe who's suddenly found his product approved for Government use.
Yeah, well, FIPS 140-2 level 1 and NIAP CCITSE is nothing to sneeze at. Sensitive but not classified information. Standards-based encryption (of course), but no physical security measures like smartcards.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
Oh, come on, you mean you haven't seen the TV show where the Gummint tries use the evil, forbidden power to fight evil???? You must not receive the Fox network. :)
In all seriousness, it is pretty impressive that Groove got their FIPS certification. My old company gave up once they saw all the hoops they would have had to jump though.
I hear ya brother. The stuff is just plain _bad_. Try printing with Groove sometime, it makes ESR's rant about printing in Linux look like a fairy tale.
Holy CRAP! There are healthy *human* *beings* in the government? With the same urges and activities as in every other field? Call the news media!
Seriously, working at a courthouse versus a finance company, I saw pretty much the same amount of people surfing porn from work. It's called being human. Not a big deal unless you happen to get called on it. That only happened once when the idiot started showing it to coworkers and HR got involved. Otherwise, anyone sitting on a router or proxy knows that there's a good deal of... err... personal internet use in every office.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Actually, Mitch Kapor resigned in March of 2003.
Microsoft made a $51 million investment in Groove. See: Groove's FAQ and Microsoft's press release
Until this "strategic partnership" I was following groove, hoping they would take a multiplatform aproach.
I don't know how succesful they are, but being Microsoft only and having close ties to US "Homeland security" is not a very good way to expand their worldwide marketshare.
Anyway, there's still waste (I just noticed it has resurfaced)
To cut a long story short, it was completely and utterly unusable. After a few weeks we ditched Groove and went back to using email and IRC.
I doubt Groove will be used for large scale inter-agency sharing - inter-agency politics have probably gotten *more* intense rather than less in recent years, and if they want to do large scale sharing, isn't that what web services and XML are for?
Plus, Groove is really meant for smallish work groups, so I imagine it will mostly be used for task-based sharing within an inter-disciplinary team , agency liasons, etc., and thus doesn't really provide anything new in that respect - sort of a glorified email/chat/whiteboard app.
But Groove *does* have a rather interesting, in-built security infra-structure, IIRC, a sort of mini-PKI, where each group and individual has its own key-ring, and people can belong to different groups while their docs are visible only to the correct ones, etc.
In the Dept. of Hapless Suckurity context, for example, a group on the road could check into their rooms at an internet-friendly hotel, go to their rooms and quietly have quite the online meeting/worksession together, *and* simultaneously be getting input from their respective head offices without other team members being clued in to the fact, all fairly securely, without a single point of failure or messy inter-agency server permissions.
People in the security field may recognize the principle of 'compartmentalization' at work here.
Not a bad choice, but personally the less anything billg has a material interest in has to do with my govt. the happier I'll be.
Where have I seen this before... a groupware platform built on required client software that costs money, and proprietary protocols? Ah yes, it was Mr. Ozzie's last invention, Lotus Notes. But this time, we also get to share our identities with the rest of the Groove network.
Notes is a case study in how proprietary groupware is doomed to lose out to standards. The same will happen with Groove.
As a recent piece opined, "the only thing harder than using Notes is getting rid of it"
And it seems to be true. InfoWorld's own CEO gave up his attmpt to get rid of Notes. Won't that make it difficult to migrate to Groove?
Here's a glimmer of hope for anyone still roped to Notes. At my company we have 200 of 450 desktops converted from Notes mail to Thunderbird/Sendmail/OpenLDAP and most of the rest will be done this week. Mainly, all it took was perseverance.
It's too bad Ozzie couldn't find a way to make Groove open and still make money.