U.S. Government Prepares For Vista

IO ERROR writes "Patrick Svenburg, program manager for Windows Client Solutions in Microsoft Federal, answered questions from government IT managers today about the upcoming Windows Vista release. Many of the questions were about BitLocker, Microsoft's new drive encryption technology, as well as other security questions, upgrading from Windows XP, IPv6 deployment and more. Svenburg is a member of the Windows Vista Launch Team and is leading early adoption efforts for Windows Vista within the Federal community, according to Government Computer News."

Comments

As much as I despise windows

[pair-a-noyd]

I signed up to be a beta tester for Vista.
I make money by helping people with THEIR windows problems.
I wanted to beat the learning curve.
When Vista hits the streets I'm ready to go make money helping people.
I'm 6 months ahead of the game.

But personally, I'll stick with my Linux.

DITSCAP

[supe]

I found response to the DITSCAP question a friging joke. BTW, DITSCAP has been phased out for http://iase.disa.mil/ditscap/index.html DIACAP, the microsoft guy should have know that! Without going into the details... The DoD should demand microsoft do the DIACAP for their OS. If you've ever gone throught the DITSCAP process you would know why... It is a major pain in the ass and was/is crap. Contractors that provide other softwares are or should be required to go through this process, why on earth can the DoD not demand the same from the maker of the primary OS used by them. If the DoD follows their own rules/regs/instructions Vista shouldn't hit the desktop till at least LATE 2008. Bunk I Tell ya!

[OT] Threadwatch - 7 hours and counting

[LiquidCoooled]

Still got no threading and its been over 7 hours.

You don't know how much you miss something until its gone do you?

re: [OT] Threadwatch - 7 hours and counting

[QuantumG]

Yeah, it must be hard to rename the table and create it with a bigger field.

Early Adoption?

[WannabeAnonymous]

"Svenburg is a member of the Windows Vista Launch Team and is leading early adoption efforts for Windows Vista within the Federal community" The USG should adopt a policy of never being an early adopter. Recently-released software generally has too many bugs to be used safely.

Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate- the OS of

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Child pornographers. I notice none of these people asked the obvious question about the destructive potential of BitLocker on the science of computer forensics.

Re: Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate- the OS of

[SEMW]

>Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate- the OS of child pornographers. I notice none of these people asked the obvious question about the destructive potential of BitLocker on the science of computer forensics.

Sorry, but that's a load of scaremongering bull. Encryption is not a new thing. Anyone who wants to has been able to encrypt files has been able to do so quickly, easily, with minimum effort, and for free for quite a long time now, using something like Truecypt. Having full drive encryption on enterprise versions of Windows is not going to change a thing; the people who are going to pay for more a more expensive version of Windows in order to use full drive encryption are not going to be those who would not have otherwise used encryption.

>Windows Vista will be an enormous disruption in how people use their computers. They will have to learn the new environment and the new software that goes with it, and it will be some time before they get used to it and become comfortable with it. Well. If you're already planning on disrupting your computing experience that much in the vague hope that, "Maybe this time will be better," then you are obliged to try out Linux.

Sorry, but please, please shut up and go away. There are certainly a large number of truly excellent arguments in favour of using Linux instead of Windows. But condescendingly informing people that they are somehow 'obliged' to try Linux instead of Windows, whilst ignoring or dismissing the real and existing - but emphatically not unsurmountable - barriers that exist to switching, is unhelpful, patronising, and arrogant.

Tag please!

[GFree]

"early adoption efforts for Windows Vista within the Federal community"

Hmm... OK, I'll allow the "itsatrap" just this once; it makes sense here.

That's just great...

[__aaclcg7560]

Now we have to wait until Windows Vista SP1 is out before the government can be fixed.

U.S. Government Audit Vista Source Code

[lotusleaf]

Does the U.S. Government (or any government in the world) get to audit the source code of Vista for themselves? If not, why not?

Re:U.S. Government Audit Vista Source Code

[leenks]

If they choose to licence the source code, then yeah, sure. They've done it with previous releases.

Coming soon, cheap used computers!

[LibertineR]

You just know that some fool is going to issue some kind of mandate that all Government computers maintain a Vista evaluation of 5 or better.

That means that any computer running with less than 2G of RAM and without a 7900GTX GPU is going to be tossed out as obsolete.

Bet on it! Cheap PCs are-a-comin.......

Why Do They Care?

[Watson Ladd]

Why does the government, esp. the DoD even use windows in the first place? I see 3 kinds of users of goverment computers:

1. The secretary level(basic Word, Excel,..). Something else would work fine.
2. The Critical Service Level. Windows should be driven far away
3. The Scientific User. They mostly use Linux anyway. The one exception is CAD.

So only the CAD'ers might need Vista, but they probably don't. So why does the gov care? And did I make a mistake in the list?

Re:Why Do They Care?

[ediron2]

If someone had modded you up as funny, I'd let this pass. Hopefully, you were at least a bit tongue in cheek with your remark. If not...

From what I've seen over the years, research/scientific use sticks with whatever platform they need (unix flavors, linux flavors, windows or even a couple VMS'y critters). They've got good technical and legal reasons for keeping things unchanged. Most of these users either use a windows box for reporting, or generate their reports their own way and more or less ignore that they're causing other people any friction.

Everyone else is a supply chain feeding documentation to the secretary level, or interacting with the rest of the world for acquisitions. An army's only as strong as it's supply chain, or whatever cliche goes here. Further, it is staffed by people that came from jobs where they used windows. SO... all the way up the chain of command or out on the supply chain, win and office keep things simple. Shifting to OpenOffice or another mechanism occasionally doesn't work. And even a tiny amount of friction costs more than buying windows and MSOffice.

Three-letter acronyms and government employment don't change things a lickspittle: windows is ubiquitous because of inertia (both in what file formats people expect to receive and in what applications they know from non-governmental jobs).

As for Vista vs. XP, new machines will come with Vista, which will start the inertial build-up all over again.

Let me put this into a personal role. I have worked in small government groups that have tried to shift away from Windows and MSOffice. We'd have been happy accomplishing either part of that separation (OS or office suite). The OS part became a problem because I kept getting os-specific work. If I'm adding a few features to a windows app, I have to do it in Visual Studio. There's just no money or time in the allocation to unwind the app (whose documentation is stored in some vast Washington WRITE-ONLY facility, I'm told) and convert it to something platform-agnostic. Luckily, there's a lot of java coding going on. I dislike java for other reasons, but at least it is not created on windows by windows for windows... so that part gives me hope.

Next, on noncode: my other work tended to be infosec (Cybersecurity) documentation and user guides and the likes. I'll get handed a word doc, and have to revise it, edit it, or whatever. Most times, it is rife with clever formatting that improves some aspect of readability at the expense of portability. Inset textboxes of text that summarize whole pages for people too busy to read the whole document. Formatting and layout done six different ways when six other people made revisions. Dynamically-linked content. Contradictory mechanisms for indexing or page numbering or creating a TOC. Frankly, the more important documents that bring together material from multiple sources or writers or editors are as brittle as a house of cards. When we'd make the attempt to do even trivial editing in Open Office 1.x (haven't had opportunity since 2.0), stuff'd break. So, we were forced back to MSOffice. And attempts to generate the stuff we originated in Open Office hit the 'what the heck is this filetype' questions from our recipients.

We made inroads. And I install open office 2.0 on each machine I use. I use it. And so far, I'm ok... but I'm not using it in circumstances that test the limits like I mentioned above, so YMMV.

There are some efforts being made to push the federal government into high-level mandates that push the market where they need, rather than enduring what the vendors want. Out of the box security has a high priority. I'm sure there are other priorities above crushing the windows lock-in, but this idea is at least getting attention. This will help immensely. And I really believe it is inevitable.

Oh, I can see it now......

[LibertineR]

"Look lady, I know your ISA Client no longer works under Vista, but I am only a GS11. I am only allowed by law to turn off your transparencies, or tweak your ClearType settings. When I am promoted, they will let me defrag you, but only on Tuesdays unless it is raining, which means I can defrag only on Fridays. You need a GS13 to fix network shit, sorry."

Bitlocker

[Fonce]

You know, Microsoft usually has either extremely dull or extremely stupid names for their products or features, but Bitlocker strikes me as actually being pretty cool. And it's not every day that they do something nifty, so write this one down.

As for the asshats asking about why threading is disabled, GO READ ABOUT IT ON THE FRONT PAGE. A little research won't kill you.

is bitlocker still nerfed?

[v1]

I recall a comment some months ago that bitlocker was this impenetrable wall of security, unless you're the admin, in which case you own it. (sort of like the master password feature in OS X's filevault, but manditory) Did they do away with this yet?

Re: Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate- the OS

[0racle]

Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate- the OS of Child pornographers. I notice none of these people asked the obvious question about the destructive potential of BitLocker on the science of computer forensics.

Maybe there are people in the world that are not so stupid as to believe that only people doing illegal things encrypt their files.

BitLocker for decommissioning!?

[wvitXpert]

I think it's a joke that Microsoft thinks that BitLocker will allow us to more easily decommission computers. Right now we have to write the entire drive with zeros twice, then verify it. Or we can send them to be destroyed magnetically. There is no way that encryption will be considered good enough.

rules will have to change

[bzipitidoo]

Unless you get permission, you aren't allowed to have encrypted data on any govt owned hard drive you may be using. BitLocker won't be allowed under current rules. Anyway, the government has shown they're incompetent, schizo, and paranoid about security. They want to use a secure OS, as long as it's Windows. They want COTS, to save money, but they can't get it through their heads that the commercial world does not share their views on security. The commercial world has in effect decided that the costs of the extreme measures the govt wants are not justifiable. Businesses are not interested in spending billions to formally verify everything. It would entail a massive redesign (for instance to a microkernel architecture) so that more formal verification is even possible. That's why there's almost nothing that has met EAL 5 or higher standards. And if that's not enough, govt doesn't want just security, they want the power to give out or take away security as they please, and don't seem to get that that's often not possible-- can't put the genie back in the bottle for one, and for another any form of security that can be "taken away" isn't security. They're all hung up over "made in the USA" or rather "coded in the USA" because foreigners can't be trusted not to put backdoors and traps and so forth in the code, so that's why Linux isn't acceptable, but it's ok to have Mexicans or Nicaraguans illegally in the US build the buildings and roads for the government. Military commanders risk their troops lives sending them on patrols in Iraq or Afghanistan, but they won't dare use some unapproved system such as Windows XP (has to be Windows 2000), because the punishments are so severe. If something goes wrong and it's discovered they used unapproved software, no matter how widely used and known and trusted, not only could they be kicked out of the service, they could be jailed.

The feds aren't early adopters of anything

[briancnorton]

It'll be three years before a single agency goes vista. The testing and approval process is long and painful. DOD is just starting now to roll out XP five years after launch. There aren't compelling reasons to upgrade yet, and the third party support isn't there. Most importantly, the crappy administrators they get from learncomputersfast.com don't know how to work it yet.

Wow

[ZoneGray]

"U.S. Government Prepares For Vista"

I didn't realize Vista would include an upgrade path from Windows 3.x.