Slashdot Mirror
Air Force To Rewrite the Rules of the Internet
meridiangod writes "The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the 'laws of cyberspace.'" I'm sure that'll work out really well for them.
""[M]ost threats should be made irrelevant by eliminating vulnerabilities beforehand by either moving them 'out of band' (i.e., making them technically or physically inaccessible to the adversary), or 'designing them out' completely," the request for proposals adds."
Luckily for the Air Force, they don't actually have to do any work at all to make this happen, since it's been not only possible, but actually implemented since at least 1998, when RFC 2341 was written all about Virtual Private Networks.
Helpful Hint for the Air Force: Pay your private sector computer engineers more and you'll get the innovation you're looking for.
They actually are smart, and any computers accessing Secret information and above are NOT allowed to be hooked up to the internet or a network with access to the internet, EVER.
Here's a hint for future postings.
Enclosing your URL in parentheses prevents Slashdot from creating an automatic hyperlink. This is annoying, as it means that I have to copy and paste rather than just clicking. It's the difference between:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/
and
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/)
on the screen.
In general, it's a bad idea anyway because parentheses are valid in a URL. Parsers which try to automatically hyperlink URLs may get confused by the trailing ')'. For this same reason, despite the rules of English suggesting it, you should avoid punctuation immediately following a URL.
"hey, this memo implies the F35 can climb at over 330 meters/second."
Actually, there's plenty of that stuff around, and it's actually not necessarily classified, even if it's true. In the bad old days of the cold war, I asked the security officer in my Army unit why all this crap we were working with was classified SECRET and TOP SECRET when the same exact information was available to anyone purchasing a Jane's book by mail order. It was explained to me that it was not the raw information that was secret, but rather the positive verification that it was true that was being controlled. Most classified information falls into that category, really. Very little of it is truly secret, in that nobody without clearance knows it. I've seen quite a few pictures of "people and stuff at locations in Certain Southwest Asian Countries" that I know from personal experience would be classified SECRET or higher if they were government photos rather than casual snapshots taken by a yokel or journalist with a pocket camera. What the classification of the subject matter does is bar me (under penalty of waterboarding or whatever) from pointing out which pictures those are.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Right. Why leak sensitive information now, when you can just misplace some laptops later?
Negative on that full of shit, compadre. Happened in Albuquerque, NM. First responders came from Kirtland AFB - home to Sandia National Labs (where ALL of the country's nukes were managed), (at the time) the Air Force Weapons Lab and the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center, as well (at the time) of the Air Force's contract management office.
Home to the cradle-to-grave, or inception to deployment to retirement, of our strategic nuke delivery systems. At the time, Albuquerque was a higher priority Soviet nuclear first strike target than Washington, D.C.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are scarier things in this world than the donut eaters you describe working for the purple-suiters. So, no apologies, not full of shit - not even a little.
And the guy in my story was a spy. And I'm not going to elaborate on what made the van different, as I said in my post.
Believe what you want. If you choose not to, it's just another horse-water-drink situation to me.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
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