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Feds Kill Check Point's Sourcefire Bid
Caffeinated Geek writes to tell us The Register is reporting that Check Point Software has removed their bid to buyout rival software company Sourcefire following objections from the FBI and the Pentagon to the Treasury's Committee on Foreign Investments. From the article: "Federal agency objections to the security software tie-up center on the implementation of Sourcefire's anti-intrusion software 'Snort' by the Bureau and Department of Defense, AP reports. In private meetings between the panel and Check Point, FBI and Pentagon officials took exception to letting foreigners acquire the sensitive technology."
http://www.snort.org/
It is about support contracts and how much information about DoD infrastructure they want a foreign firm to have. This is far more of a serious and legitimate issue than the sale of the operation of a few cargo cranes to a Dubai firm.
The issue is that the DoD is very serious about controlling the amount of access foreigners have to their infrastructure and information on that infrastructure. I have it on very good authority that some DoD divisions are moving away (at a cautious rate) from Microsoft technologies precisely due to their difficulty in avoiding having their tech support calls routed outside the US. However, this is probably all I can say on this board.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Check Point firewalls are prohibited in a lot of government departments, including the Pentagon and most of the DoD. There are exceptions, of course.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
To clarify snort is to sourcefire what fedora is to redhat enterprise linux. (I forget what I got on my SAT.) So the developers of snort are trying to make some money by marketing a pre built platform "SourceFire". Also I have heard that even though Check Point is used by many fortune 500 companies it is not used by the U.S. Government because it is developed in another country.
I have read more BS in these threads than anywhere else in recent memory.
So, I'll in you on the truth.
Foreign nations are actively seeking to get their hands into US classified govt sites, to get the underlying information which they want DESPERATELY. Israel, France, China, Russia - they are the most aggressive.
A few years back I was working for DOD. Someone was trying to make a sales pitch for equipment they wanted to sell us, for use in classified environments. They claimed to be a US company.
My boss asked me to look into the company and get back to him. It took a few hours, but I found exactly what I think he already suspected.
The company was a US company in name only. The entire company was infested at the upper levels by former intelligence personnel from one of the above countries already mentioned. Most of their company also, was in this foreign country too. Only a small amount of sales ppl actually were in the US for the company.
They made a huge amount of factual misrepresentations, trying to trick us.
When the US govt says no, there is normally a reason behind it, or active intelligence efforts supporting their rationale. Don't believe some moronic reporter with shit for brains that is labelling something as "protectionism".
All these foreigners collect dollars by selling products/services, and when they try to use these dollars - with the Dubai ports deal or this case - they are rejected by the US Government.
So essentially foreigners are stuck with 'funny money' which they cannot use as true currency. Sooner or later they will wake up, sell dollars en masse and opt for another currency after they realize they have been had. They've been giving us commodities and services while we give them monopoly money.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.