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Whitehouse Emails Were Lost Due to "Upgrade"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We now know how the Whitehouse managed to lose about five million emails. It seems that they 'upgraded' their Lotus Notes system, which had an automatic retention and backup system, for Microsoft Exchange, which did not support the automatic system. So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a 'journaling' archive system. They're still building a replacement for the retention system. Right when they had one finished, the White House CIO complained that it made Microsoft Exchange too slow, so they hired yet another contractor to build another one, causing a senior IT official to quit in protest. So they still haven't completed the project after almost eight years, and rely on humans to sort millions of emails."
"Strategic Incompetence"
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
read the summary and understood the Whitehouse is blaming Microsoft? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
There is nothing that will happen for the rest of the week that can make me more light hearted than this. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between subterfuge and sheer incompetence.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
What was that quote about never ascribing to malice?
It's a well put-together story (plausible enough) but I'm still skeptic though.
Maybe we've just seen too many lies :)
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying "Never blame on malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence."
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Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This shouldn't be taken as a Micr$oft bash as much as an example of poor planning. After having administered both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange I can say that ditching Notes for Exchange isn't a bad move. But doing so without planning out the migration path is. Any large scale project should involve a considerable outside contracting firm that would have automated measures in place. You could even plug in a server appliance before your front end Exchange servers that would automatically archive off mail messages being sent to/from the White House staffers. Another example of US government being inept. Just look to how the US air traffic control centers still operate with equipment that is so outdated that some units are out of commission because they can't order vacuum tubes to service them...
The White House's failure to follow records retention laws was due to deficiencies in Microsoft software?
I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.
I recommend fire.
Not to defend microsoft, but COME ON! Who do they have doing their tech support? Is Bush doing it himself?
I find this frankly impossible to believe, and insulting on top of that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Computation and Turing machines and all of that science stuff are just theories. The so called "experts" tell us that these things can sort email, but it's better to trust the people to get about the business of the government. I wonder if Bush looked into the eyes of Bill Gates and saw his soul? Maybe if we allow enhanced interrogation methods, we can recover the email? Ahh, too easy, I could go on for hours but I'll stop now.
Basically this comes down to either:
The Government was Incompetent.
or...
The Government is lying and covering up.
Hmmm.... Mr Rock, meet Mr Hardplace.
Seriously, this is the least bullshit excuse the could come up with? If ANY corporation in the US tried this kind of thing, the wrath of SARBOX would rain down on them like you wouldn't believe.
Even given the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration in nearly all aspects, this just doesn't pass the laugh test.
1) To bad the Whitehouse isn't using an e-mail system like millions of other people. Wait they are. Like it or not MS Exchange is everywhere.
2) To bad the requirement for e-mail archiving and retention is unique to government. Wait, most publicly traded companies have legal and compliance requirements to do so.
3) To bad there is no market for software to archive and retain e-mail on one of the most common e-mail platforms. Wait, there is, and its huge.
4) To bad nobody has nobody has developed technology for this market. Wait, there are dozens of solutions.
To bad no one is getting fired, imprisoned or impeached over this one.
Because "works" in this case is a means by which they can get caught?
If I was going to be as corrupt/incompetent as this administration, I'd try to limit how much that criminality/idiocy could be directly documented for criminal proceedings/historical study.
rely on humans to sort millions of emails
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Are the people involved in this process, from conception to the current state, being held liable for criminal negligence?
They're being heavily fined and potentially imprisoned for a blatant disregard for government policy?
Is there anybody in a position to make in-depth enquiries regarding the processes involved in this fiasco, who has the wherewithal and political clout to actually do something about it?
I didn't think so. Now bend over and get ready for another "Oops, we did it again!" situation.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
and rely on humans to sort millions of emails.
No problem. They had the job outsourced to India.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
the missing e-mails have nothing to do with nefarious scheming
By itself, that might be a sane assumption...but when you consider their other email problem, specifically, that they conducted government business over the RNC's computer to avoid leaving tracks, well, no. It's pretty clearly an obvious plan to avoid any record of what they do.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
utter bollocks. just unbe-fucking-lievable.
*every* backup system should result in a set a of data offsite or in a storage area never to be touched again.
even if you use incremental backup every nth backup should be a complete archival read only copy re the previous sentence.
the *very* worst case should be the last major backup is in a format that is not readable with the current system and some red faced admins need help to read read the data.
5 million emails? jesus wept.
add the conspiracy theory factor into the mix and you have something that, on the face of it, sounds unbelievable.
as one of our politicians in the UK said to another a short while ago "you cannot have it both ways, you were either ignorant or incompetent - and neither is acceptable".
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Oh, for the love of fucking god. I'm getting awfully tired of this public spat about twitter, his sock puppets, and the people who want us to know about them.
Since most of us don't have a friggin clue what this is all about, make it go away. It really isn't better than the rest of the trolls and ACs spewing crap into Slashdot nowdays.
And, for the record, I am not twitter, one of his sock puppets, or whatever. But this whole on-going thing is getting pretty tedious.
Twitter, if you have nothing better to do than post under a few pseudonyms so you can get mod points and generally be an ass
So, assuming for a moment their story is true and it *is* just negligence, incompetence, and stupidity; it is still FEDERALLY CRIMINAL negligence, incompetence, and stupidity, Right? Books will be thrown at those responsible, yes?
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
One of my first projects after moving to Vancouver was a couple of test installations of pre-release Exchange server back in 1996. Since then I've worked constantly with every version of Exchange in all kinds of backup situations. Early versions of Exchange were a bitch to restore but it's gotten better.
However, there has *always* been a way to retain and archive emails automatically from Exchange and no shortage of migration utilities from notes to Exchange. The reasons stated in the article just don't wash. No one, not even the newest tech school grad could come up with a system like that currently in use.
However, it may in fact not be intentional malice from the start but more likely an existing state of incompetence that was taken advantage of to hide traces or misdeeds or at least to make finding any evidence difficult.
This still doesn't address the use of non-government email systems for official business by Rove and other Republican members. According to the laws of the United States this is all highly illegal. Don't you care at all about what your government is doing or do you think whatever you do won't make any difference?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
a: saved to tape and sent to a vault on a daily basis
b: recorded by the NSA, who also saves and backs up data
So, it's all a load of bullshit - they're thinking that the public is stupid enough to buy it, or, simply kick it down the road another month or two until the ADHD press finds something shiny to get distracted by like Miley Cyrus Boobs or another blast from Trainwreck Spears.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
How is incompetence an excuse for violating the Presidential Records Act?
I call FUD. Exchange supports POP3, IMAP, etc. Enabling/disabling it is trivial.
.PST. This would have saved everything except your rules.
With versions of Exchange prior to 2007, it was trivial to export an entire mailbox directly from the Exchange store (and reimport it later). I don't know why it would be necessary to delete an Exchange mailbox like that to fix a problem, but at the very least you could have copied everything from within Outlook to a local
There are, and have always been, many good ways to backup an Exchange server. (Restoring was a bit tricky in the past, but is simple now.) The built in windows backup program MSBackup will backup/restore an entire Exchange store. Probably 10 clicks total from sitting at the desktop, or can be done from the command line. If you're using a real backup program, these will typically let you restore individual emails back into the Exchange store.
Exchange has issues, but they aren't anything you list.
The industry is full of stories like this, for years. Exchange by default can't handle it - it's still a workgroup server at heart, and subject to many OS and filesystem limits. Does Hotmail.com even rely 100% on Exchange, or is it still UNIX at the core?
De-centralized email storage and PST files?? COME ON!
It is almost CERTAIN to expect that they knew this would cause emails to be lost and take the system from bad to worse. Even a junior IT person fresh off the boat would say this was CRAZY to attempt, with FEWER benefits and increased risk. In the corporate world, this would be met by massive civil lawsuits and possibly criminal charges. Any "contractor" the WH employed would know this for a fact.
So given that such warnings had to have been given and they went ahead anyways, you have to wonder if strategic "loss" of emails was perfect cover for an email purge. Given the shady nature of these characters, I'm sure this was a calculated "feature".
I have hard time believing it is not intentional incompetence or malice. But at this point it doesn't matter. They have been committing crimes by not keeping a record of government email, and by using GOP computers to handle whitehouse email, and by not supplying the records to Congress after being subpoenaed, and by ordering the Justice Department not to enforce the subpoena. This is a massive cover up on a huge scale, and they have managed to block every attempt by Congress to investigate it. Whether they are covering up malice or negligence doesn't make the cover up legal.
However, the reason it must be malice (aka intentional incompetence), is that for these purposes it doesn't matter whether the files were correctly converted from one format to another. They could have given over all the records to Congress in whatever disordered form it was in, and let Congress figure out how to sort through it. There are very easy ways to pull information out of a complete morass of files. For example, just text index the whole mess, and search for any text containing interesting phrases, and then follow the references in those text blocks to related text blocks. You could probably get 90% of the meaning of a collection of email in random formats just by doing things like that. But obviously the whole point is to block that from happening, not enable it.
"Upgrading our Lotus Notes with Microsoft Exchange allowed White House staff to cut jail time by more than 83%."
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
If your TCO without Microsoft products losing your data includes jail time then I think that's pretty compelling evidence that Microsoft does lower your TCO...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, he suggested that Microsoft patriotically gained access to electronic communications in an effort to prevent terrorism. If the subjects have nothing to hide, what do they fear from Microsoft's oversight?
Nothing wrong with Lotus Notes, the constant crashing, extremely unintuitive UI, bloat and countless other problems generate jobs by the tens of thousands at IT helpdesks.
Thank you IBM for bringing me a pretty darn good income with the monstrosity known as Lotus Notes.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
You too can be a CIO! Just learn how to play golf, join the right country club, and let one of Microsoft's sales representatives nibble on your sweet, sweet braaiinnnsss!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You have to prove criminal intent. Incompetence is not a crime.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Wait, does that mean a Microsoft product is actually better?
A friend of mine used to work for IBM. They (his department, at least) used Outlook.
If that doesn't say it I'm not sure what does. I've heard some probably justified horror stories about being the person who needs to admin the Exchange server, but from the perspective of a normal user who just wants to read their e-mail, schedule meetings, etc... Outlook is ridiculously better. (Or was. I haven't used the latest major version of Notes.)
Indeed I do mean that a MS product is better. From a end user perspective it can a nightmare to configure LN with a UI that have next to no consistency. High crash rate, caused by extremely poor/bloated coding. Ridicously inefficient slow search function in large mailboxes (often) leading to crashes/freezes. Parts of the UI dissapearing mysteriously, something that often can require quite some extensive trouble shooting to resolve. Regular failure of backing up mails and being able to retrive them from the backup. And this is just a fraction of the issues I can list that I was faced with on a daily basis. Granted the more frequent problems were relatively quick and easy to resolve, however that do not apply to your average computer user.
In short, the only person I would recommend LN to is my ex who out of spite put down my dog without consulting me.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
And no amount of lying will change that basic fact, nor the fact that every mail server recipient host also has a copy of the intentional fraudulent emails from the White House.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's so true!
1. Nerdy content that average people can't fathom
2. Anti MS
3. Anti Bush
My wife works for USDA. On several occasions, she has gone a week or more without email due to botched Lotus Notes upgrades. Mostly, I think it was due to incompetent contractors, but, considering the times I've had a gun put to my head and forced to use Notes (over a slow WAN connection - the very definition of torture) I am sure some of that is intrinsic to the application. I'm not sure what they use now, she does 90% of her email on her blackberry, but I think they have gone to Exchange/Outlook.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"