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US Government Sets Up Online "App Store"
krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."
federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress
Maybe this means Joe Wilson can troll 4chan instead.
I wonder how this is related to a recent announcement of Wave System, OpenID, Google, PayPal, etc into an initiative to have a single sign-on for e-government?
...they'll be too important to fail?
Since when did the term 'App Store' come to describe any server offering applications for download? I swear, once the marketers get their hands on a new tech term, what comes out the other end is pure and unadulterated bullshit. Soon the term 'App Store' will have about as much meaning as 'The Cloud' and the marketers will have moved on to their next buzzword kill.
..With transparency? Hell the federal government can't account for the money it's spending (by knowing where it's being spent), much less keep track of many of its records. I'm curious to see how spewing them all over the Internet is going to help us track on everything.
haha.. can you say - security breach?
i trust google more than i trust the lowest bidder for a government contract.
There's an app for that.
#DeleteChrome
The first link is about Obama staffer's former colleague being investigated for crime. I don't even know what or whose fault are you trying to imply with that.
The second link is about the said staffer having committed a crime before. He shoplifted as a lot younger man, over a decade (13 years, to be exact) ago. He pleaded guilty and paid the fine... The "once a thief, always a thief" doesn't really apply to stuff like that. I myself shoplifted a few times when I was a teenager. I can understand a young man getting the small rush of doing something wrong there, with immediate risk of getting caught... It doesn't even imply that 13 years later one would have tendency to become corrupted or something.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
I think this is a great idea, as long as the programs the government will use will encrypt the data properly before storing it outside their servers. (though even that won't be necessary. I'm sure they won't use gmail for "top secret documents ;) )
Fantastic. An App Store puts democracy back into the hands of the ordinary citizen.
In fact, I think open an account right now, and buy myself a congressman.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I don't know. I thought keeping data on old clunky servers is kind of necessary for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act and this whole "transparency" idea. They are going to start storing data in gmail and youtube accounts? Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't feel right.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
How about completely opening the entire authentication systems up? All the methods being proposed are closed systems. There are systematic refusal to accept new corporation/sites/etc as a form of authentication without being celebrity, monopolist or payment for certificates, etc. Recently, I created a browser-based trust initiative here: JRep project Although I initially came up by means of browser-based trust transfer but I believe this can be tweaked for authentication transfer. Bonus: It's completely open and free because I want it that way.
However, it is possible to lose the rights to your trademark if it falls into common use. That's why so many companies defend their marks so vigorously.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Huh.
So - do you think Canada, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Australia, and Britian, to name a few, are the equivalent to or worse than Hitler's Nazi Germany?
Personally, I think you're just ignorant of both recent and long-term history. Fortunatly, that can be cured by education, if you're willing to make the effort. You seem ignorant of both Nazi history, as well as the histories of nations in general, especially those called 'socialist' by those who don't know what the word means.
I understand that you believe the ideals you hold, but I don't think you've ever examined them. I hope you're willing to educate yourself, someday - you seem like an intelligent person, but you're missing quite a few (objective, verifiable) facts as to the reality of the world you life in.
My economics textbook reads: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a societyâ(TM)s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the âoenational interestââ"that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace."
This actually does sound a lot like what the Obama administration is doing with healthcare reform, the economy, and the auto industry to a limited extent.
How about completely opening the entire authentication systems up?
It's exceptionally difficult to build an entire end-to-end authentication system, and it's massively more complex if you have more than one vendor. This is stupid - there are plenty of open specifications in this area - but nonetheless true. Part of the problem is that there's so many different ways to put the bits together in a manner that will work, and there's no easy way to either bridge between them or understand which is best for a particular situation. Add in the fact that irritatingly much of the security parts of a system tend to end up in the other layers of applications (it seems to be nearly impossible to stop that) and you get horrendous levels of lock-in to particular solutions.
It's a crappy situation, and I don't blame anyone for going with a single vendor. At least then they get their security exposure down (which is definitely the most important part).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
I watched the presentation at NASA TV, it was given at NASA Ames Research Center.
They have archive of it at Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=eND7hT8JdwA&user=NASAtelevision
That is the guy presenting the idea himself. It was interesting enough to watch it at 4 AM my local time. The numbers guy gives, like the 20% of capacity used, everyone having their own data center, it may take $600.000 (yes, 600K) to setup a weblog in certain circumstances while it is free on blogger.com like services are amazing.
As listeners are full of govt. guys, guy repeated 4-5 times that secret/critical things won't be on cloud, outside USA etc. What matters is, they will be forcing very strict privacy and security rules to vendors.
Please, Vivek, explain away:
Okay, that took 30 seconds with Google. Om Malik (a respected journalist not a notorious and admitted troll like Dvorak) looked into Dvorak's claims:
http://www.examiner.com/x-10080-DC-Technology-Examiner~y2009m8d12-Dvorak-alleges-US-CIO-and-exDC-chief-is-a-fake
In short, for all the points he had an opportunity to verify it turned out Dvorak was wrong and it was clear Dvorak had not tried very hard to look into the matter since random bloggers were able to quickly find proof using public internet resources for several items Dvorak claimed Kundra was lying about.
People who are shaking at the knees about google and the federal government obviously are not aware that the government has been outsourcing data processing to offsite contractors for decades.
Sheesh. Google is no different than ANY other contractor when it comes to the Federal government and has to abide by the same contracting rules as everybody else.
Does this mean that it's any SAFER than at EDS, Booze Allen, Perot Systems, HP, IBM, etc? No. But it's not any less either.
The Aconynm Elimination Mandate (AEM) was signed by the President's APP, and will be over seen by the OMB. The PTG is the TLA category to be followed by the FLA groups. The GOP oppoosition to the AEM headed by the OMB states that if the AEM is successful, millions of OGD (Official Government Documents) will be rendered unreadable.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
They want someone to ensure that the WH's use of Youtube and Facebook complies with the Presidential Records act.
Good luck with all of that.
Who's the troll?
Dvorak.
There are legitimate questions about the man...
Yup, questions and not answers. Questions like are you, Coolhand2120, a murderer. Asking that question without actually doing any research, when you're already a notorious troll, that's called trolling.
Legitimate journalists looked, and so far have decided there is no story. Maybe at some point in the future someone will decide Kundra's background actually is suspicious, but not finding info with a quick Google search is not evidence that he's lying. Just as quickly googling "Coolhand2020 innocent of murder" is not in any way evidence you are a murderer or sufficient for me to start making Web posts for any reason other than trolling.