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Lockheed Snags $31 Million To Reinvent the Internet, Microsoft To Help
DARPA has awarded a $31 million contract to megacorp Lockheed Martin which will, with some assistance from Microsoft, attempt to reinvent the Internet and make it more military-friendly. "The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer 'improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.' Lockheed will be partnered with Anagran, Juniper Networks, LGS Innovations, Stanford University and — of course — Microsoft in developing the MNP. Apart from that, Lockheed's own Information Systems & Global Services-Defense tentacle will work on amazing new hardware."
Well, we have to have at least one post referencing Skynet. And someone needs to post something about our new overlords...
LMCO and Microsoft: here's your protocol (hands them a copy of the ipv6 std doc).
US: thanks, that's great work! Here's your check.
How does this affect pr0n?
...that it will be TCP/IP with a pinch of pixie dust. Probably just changing a few extensions and reusing old code.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
hehe did someone mention microsoft and security in the same sentence?
"And now for tonight's top story, another 31 Microsoft security flaws fixed in an emergency off-cycle patch"...
... and used to interconnect medical devices, it'd give a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death"
Microsoft, from all people? ignore all the jokes about his consumer OS. His server software is horrible bad!!. Maybe Visual Studio is a nice tool, his compiler is average, but good. Other than that, why o why? I sould not be tecnical merits, has to be something else.
-Woof woof woof!
This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.
I like the bit about "self configuration capabilities to ... reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management". While the current state of the art keeps us well employed, things could be easier. Heck, the more the systems I maintain for my parent self-configure, the happier I am.
And Al Gore could not be reached for comment.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
Why the f*** would anybody go to Microsoft? It took them over a decade to implement TCP/IP properly. Whatever you think of their software development, they're not exactly overwhelming developers of protocols.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The next step from DARPA is asking Lada to reinvent the wheel to make it more military friendly, adding automatic braking and better resilience against bullets.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Yes. Also, how did they decide the effort should cost exactly $31 million of taxpayer money?
In another news, China buys 60% of Microsoft shares.
How the hell can you trust a corporation to handle the military security? No really, who the fuck had this brilliant idea?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
... and I can tell you that this sounds like a disaster in the making. LM is so top-heavy with bureaucracy and process-bloat that the company might as well be a mini-Pentagon itself (not so mini, either, now that I think about it). Nothing happens quickly at Lock-Mart, and the things that do happen cost a bloody blue fortune.
If nothing else, they'd better hire in some outside IT guys. If this work gets anywhere near the corporate IT bozos, the military can look forward to a future of XP Pro with daily forced updates, and new hardware every five years or so (which again, is not terribly far away from the way the armed forces IT already works)...
Does anyone else think that 31 million might be kind of a small sum of money to "reinvent the Internet"?
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
The military may be looking for a smaller packet size then IPv6 can offer. Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out. They might be able to get away with an even smaller address size then IPv4 since they have a finite number of things they want to connect. Ports seem to be a waste of bits, since you only ever use a few of those at a time. Shaving 10 bits off of the address and 10 bits off of the port would allow them to add security, prioritization, etc.
Some of these military data streams will be unreliable and every bit helps.
These guys never know to keep it simple.
I've seen it happen with functional protocols that get revised in large defense organizations.
Because they are an Enterprise Ready Solution Partner(tm).
It's not like you could trust a bunch of hippy academics to design a viable internetworking protocol....
You an also improve the throughput of your attached USB device by plugging it into a USB2 port, which is what you would have done if this computer actually had USB2 ports on it, but it doesn't, and I'm not going to tell you how to shut these annoying messages off.
From reading the actual BAA, it sounds like this is not an effort to replace IP networks but to supplement them with additional protocols. In fact, the requirements explicitly state that MNP must carry legacy IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
Hey.. MS has a good track record when it comes to implementing a new ubiquitous network right ?
Remember MSN (the thing that was suppose to kill the internet.. So much better than TCP/IP that Win 95 didn't have a TCP/IP stack to start with) ?
I'm wondering (ok.. not *really* wondering) why they went to those guys to do that..
--Ivan
if only! I sense XML based packets.
Or does $31 million sound like petty cash for Lockheed Martin and Microsoft to invent a superior, military grade communications protocol?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
> Lockheed will be partnered with [snip]
> and - of course - Microsoft
> in developing the MNP
What's "of course" about this?
Really, this is no different from managers, company directors etc. who achieve nothing, or even drive companies bankrupt, yet still manage to obtain the next job to fuck up.
What the hell is up with these people?
Oh btw, any story on slashdot that somehow mentions Microsoft should automatically be assigned a non-removable tag: f*ckmicrosoft.
And finally: What's with the (extremely annoying) capitalisation of each word in a headline on Slashdot and many other places? That's bad practice and makes sentences (headlines too) less readable.
While browsing the M$ Internet, I received a STOP Error, that was when the helpful paper clip told me to reboot my routers.
I wonder if any of the brass that signed off on this are having second thoughts after the Danger incident earlier this week. Or will "Oh shit, we lost all the data" be a good excuse the next time they can't find incriminating emails?
Also, apparently institutional memory only lasts for about 10 years in the military, because they've clearly forgotten about the USS Yorktown in 1998...
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987
It was fun while it lasted. This is the end ...
"It took them over a decade to implement TCP/IP properly." What??? MS has made continually less and less useful implmentations of the IP stack with each build!
Asking Microsoft to help with security is like asking Jessica Simpson for advice on staying out of the spotlight.
Table-ized A.I.
Considering the rates that companies like Lockheed charge, it'll burn through the $31M in no time. My guess is that what they'll do is take IPv6 and see if they can make it cooler for the military instead of reinventing the wheel.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/newstradamus-reports-navy-nailed-virus Nuff said really
its bound to end up being one big cluster fornication.
Our cyberspace enemies should be rejoicing at this news.
My thoughts too. What has Microsoft ever done "right", other than seperating suckers from their money? Oh - wait - this means Microsoft is in charge of marketing?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The military may be looking for a smaller packet size then IPv6 can offer. Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out. They might be able to get away with an even smaller address size then IPv4 since they have a finite number of things they want to connect. Ports seem to be a waste of bits, since you only ever use a few of those at a time. Shaving 10 bits off of the address and 10 bits off of the port would allow them to add security, prioritization, etc.
Some of these military data streams will be unreliable and every bit helps.
I believe the actual article indicates that it still has to be able to carry traditional IPv4 and IPv6 data... So I doubt if they're going to completely re-invent the wheel.
Sounds more like they want a new protocol to sit on top of IP... Maybe something to replace TCP and/or UDP? Maybe just bolting on some QoS and IPSEC in some documented, standardized way? Maybe a new multipurpose communication protocol to roll SMTP/HTTP/FTP/VOIP/whatever into one?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Of course, all that they shave off will likely be replaced with Microsoft bloat...
The taxpayer will pay for it, it will look great on paper but be overly complicated ($31m buys a lot of unnecessary engineering), Microsoft and Lockheed will patent it, they'll market the hell out of it, and they'll create a slow and buggy Windows implementation with Microsoft-proprietary "enhancements" that make it non-interoperable.
Then industry is going to settle on something different because the standard is patent-encumbered, too complicated, and doesn't work right anyway.
Microsoft didn't implement TCP/IP. They took the BSD stack and tried to stick into Windows. When it didn't fit right, they tried again. And again. And again.
They were bound to get it right sooner or later.
My blog
This is the WORST thing to EVERY happen.
Dear Sir or Madam,
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I'm sorry, the devil is at work here, Microsoft to implement an international "secure" networking protocol? We are indeed doomed. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, burn in hell. In God we trust.
With Microsoft's help?
ROTFLMAO!
I guess it'll be based on their new protocol code-named "Oxymoron".
You can bet they can't resist the urge to patent everything they touch -- both Microsoft and Lockheed. And while they may or may not be allowable at the moment, there's nothing to say they couldn't renegotiate to enable charging patent rights in lieu of direct payment. You know, sort of how George Lucas did with Star Wars and marketing rights?
Nope thats "military" - think Hummer, only bigger. Maybe IPv256k?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
My tax dollars are going to Microsoft? Oh god, I feel I am going to be ill.
'improved security,'
Like IPSec? Don't fix the network layer, that's pointless. Fix the application layer - run it through TLS or similar if you must.
'dynamic bandwidth allocation,'
Like RSVP on an MPLS circuit? Or like DiffServ?
'policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.'"
Like CoS?
Seriously, all this has been thought of before - and we ended up with CLNA, IS-IS and networks so complicated it never took off - instead, IP took off because it was easy to use and easy to route.
If we're going to change IPv4 for anything, it should be IPv6 - it's easy to understand, easy to read, easy to process and best of all - ready to use *now*. Many ISPs already have it, and there's a crapload of Usenet traffic/BitTorrent that already goes via v6.
"...which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer 'improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level."
So, in other words, someone will spend over $30 million to finally implement IPv6?
Bravo, gentlemen, bravo.
Who in their right mind would put Microsoft on the same project as anything even remotely adjacent to the security realm? Congrats to American enemies who now will have a swell time if it ever comes to cyber warfare. Americans, not so lucky.
HTTP/1.1 400
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will not use it until at least SP1 is released.
And all the tech support will be handled by someone in Bangalore who has never seen the system and who just scraped 5.0 on IELTS.
Not that I want to defend some of the obvious Anti-Microsoft idiots out there. But. Do we really want Microsoft to have input on the design of the next internet protocol? They are not that great at these things. They really are much better at lock in and marketing. Solid, Secure, Failsafe and "Fully implementable by everyone" are not exactly what you think of when you think of Microsoft. It is what I think of when I think of what the next version of the internet needs to be though.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
...the Military has determined in it's infinite wisdom that the dedicated and encrypted NIPRnet and SIPRnet networks already in place have been instantly deemed "mil-crap"(tech jargon), and since the taxpayers are paying for it, justification came down swiftly and thus summarized(layman's terms) as "what the hell, why not, it's only money, right?"
Their job process really blows though. Unless you know someone or are part of some contract changeover (from SAIC to Lockheed-Martin for example), I don't see how you could get a job.
I've had my resume in their HR database for 10 years now, making updates as I change duties and jobs. I've worked in IT at Johns Hopkins APL, NASA, IBM, and now at a smaller but very interesting telecom type company and never had a single query from Lockheed-Martin.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
The second thing Microsoft did right was samba. In fact, it has became such a standard that even on UNIX boxes, it has edged out NFS. Main reason is that it just doesn't authenticate a host, but users, and does it over a secure channel so passwords are not sniffed.
NFS transfers files quicker than samba in my working environment, and the only reason samba exists on Xnix boxes is because thy must exist in environments with mainly MS Windows.
The Max speed I can get out of Samba is ~6MB/s(~50mbit), where with NFS I get ~12MB/s (~96mbit)
IMHO, the more big projects that go to MS the sooner the rest of the world will realize the MS stack is not appropriate for production use beyond some relatively small scale.
Microsoft, from all people?
Microsoft and Lockheed Martin been partners on high-profile military projects for at least the last ten years:
The alliance builds on existing relationships between Lockheed Martin and Microsoft on projects including the U.S. Air Force Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2) program, a comprehensive upgrade of the North American Air Defense (NORAD) Cheyenne Mountain Complex; the integrated warfare system for the U.S. Navy's next nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, CVN 77; the Global Command Support System-Air Force; and the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Messaging System. The companies also are members of the Blue Team, which is competing for the Navy's next-generation land attack destroyer, DD 21 Lockheed Martin, Microsoft Form Alliance Focused on U.S. Government Market [May 24, 2001]
The Blue Team lost on what would become the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class - Multimission Destroyer.
CVN-77 is the tenth and last of the Nimitz class super-carriers, the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77)
Microsoft has announced two more partnering agreements with large training and simulation companies for its recently unveiled Microsoft ESP visual simulation platform.
Lockheed Martin and FlightSafety International both will use ESP as part of their efforts to lower costs in their simulation on aircrew training. Those companies join Northrop Grumman and SAIC as large integrators who have joined with Microsoft on use of ESP, which was announced in November and became available Jan. 1. Lockheed Martin, FlightSafety to use Microsoft ESP platform [February 21, 2008]
His server software is horrible bad!
Lockheed would seem to disagree: Microsoft Case Studies: Lockheed Martin gains Enterprise-class capabilities with SAP on Windows, SQL Server [July 20, 2009]
This will end well
Ahh....LMCO does outsource there IT department...to a company called CSC (Computer Science Corp)...there really is only a small percent of employee's that work for LMCO IT EIO services...I used to work for them and most likely know the guys that will be working on this project.
because of the Business Re-appropriation Initiative Benefit Exchanges
Wow.
I am guessing you are going for a funny mod. I just don't see the humor however.
You don't by chance believe what you just typed do you?
The DHCP RFC was written and published in 1997, by a guy at bucknell university (bucknell.edu ?) in Pennsylvania. Windows JUST got a built in IP stack in 1995, and even then it was only a copy of the BSD IP stack. They didn't rewrite their own for a couple years later, long after DHCP was rolled out. Microsoft had nothing to do with it, other than again copying the BSD dhcp code and adding it to their IP stack.
Microsoft also never wrote samba. They attempted to sue samba to make them stop releasing software, but thankfully they didn't get away with it. Now if you mean the file sharing protocol itself of SMB, then yes Microsoft made that. However Microsoft never wanted anyone else to use it. So even if they 'did it right', you still can't thank them for that if you use it on a non-windows system today. Samba was created in response to Microsoft not sharing their protocol, which is how it ended up on unix systems to replace NFS.
It is also worth pointing out that the samba project was started long before SMB or even windows 95 existed, back in 1992, and provided the same type of service for DEC file sharing, that it provides for SMB windows sharing today and LAN Manager support previously. And before you ask, Microsoft had nothing to do with DEC (aside from possibly aiding their going out of business)
Basically you are giving credit to Microsoft for inventing something they didn't, and for giving something to unix that they fought tooth and nail to keep from being on unix.
>It's not like you could trust a bunch of hippy academics to design a viable internetworking protocol....
Yeah, like that one MS "borrowed" from BSD to implement TCP/IP when they finally gave up trying to force everyone to use their proprietary network junk. Hmm
Bah
Samba was created in response to Microsoft not sharing their protocol, which is how it ended up on unix systems to replace NFS.
I meant to say, _that feature_ of samba was created in response to microsoft not sharing.
The simplest thing they could do is use IPv6 extended headers to carry a security label, and/or a short digital signature or other indicator that would permit packets to be more tamper-resistant, and/or a Kerberos token, and/or enough additional markings that IPSec could operate per-connection.
In fact, if you had one extended header for each of those, you could mix-and-match security extensions according to needs. And because IPv6 only defines a handful of extended headers at present, there's virtually no risk of creating an incompatible protocol. Everything will still "just work", it'd "just work" in a much more secure fashion.
Ok, Internet reinvented in a secure fashion. Can I have my $31 million now, please? No personal checks.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Will they hire Al Gore to help (re)invent the internet?
...is that this is something the US was planning to smuggle INTO China and Russia...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Lockheed Martin has failed miserably in the past at completing any sort of IT projects. There are so many IT project carcasses laying around now with losses in the billions that it is sad. But somehow they keep winning contracts. Can't be because of their performance! Don't forget they are throwing Microsoft in there also!
It wasn't until Windows 7 that I saw anything approaching the 11-12MB/s I saw on NFS. I got the same as you, Vista to vista smb transfers ran around 5-6 MB/s while NFS would get 11-12. Now that I have 7 on my PCs, I can get 10-12MB/s on 7 to 7 transfers, not sure what changed, but it's noticeably faster and no longer much slower than NFS.
Microsoft is a fungus, and therefore is technically alive.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The simplest thing they could do is use IPv6 extended headers to carry a security label, and/or a short digital signature or other indicator that would permit packets to be more tamper-resistant, and/or a Kerberos token, and/or enough additional markings that IPSec could operate per-connection.
In fact, if you had one extended header for each of those, you could mix-and-match security extensions according to needs. And because IPv6 only defines a handful of extended headers at present, there's virtually no risk of creating an incompatible protocol. Everything will still "just work", it'd "just work" in a much more secure fashion.
Ok, Internet reinvented in a secure fashion. Can I have my $31 million now, please? No personal checks.
Ok, I've said it before in a related story, for the military, there can be strategic reasons NOT to use IPv6.
My suggestion would be ATM - it provides many if not all of the features they want, without having to reinvent the wheel. It is (or was) very popular in Europe, but never seemed to catch on the the US.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
God help us all.
Yes, and in fact the first thing that came to my mind was "oh geez, if this technology gets in the hands of [insert big tier-1 ISP here], its "bye bye net neutrality".
weinersmith
Arg. I'm going to have to make my sarcasm more blatant in the future. I was hoping that the "..." at the end would give it away.
What? DHCP is just an evolution of BOOTP, and it was certainly not invented by Microsoft.
Moving away from that brain fart of a title for a moment, would it be possible that it is not Micro$oft per say, but Microsoft Research, the research branch, that will be involved in this? If that were the case (considering the caliber of researchers that they have there), then I could see good things coming.
But if it is Micro$oft, the products division, then, hmmmm, we'll be seeing data packets with executable vbscript in them (yikes!)
Any sufficiently complicated network will contain an buggy, slow, incomplete implementation of TCP/IP.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
In other words, 'we are going to stamp out p2p once and for all... ya damned pirates'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So what's up with all the holes that still exists in XP, Vista and now Win7?
Alien Atlantis Nazis in Antarctica did 9/11.
Or at least tagged appropriately?
Idiotic plan that is doomed to fail, and take 30 million with it (if not more).
Firstly, there are countless programs in use which are hard coded to use TCP. You don't have the source code for all of them. They make calls to the socket API, with hard-coded values to use IPv4 TCP. Even if you swizzle these at the shared library or kernel level to use a TCP replacement, it better have identical semantics in all of the calls, or the programs will break.
Like, first prove that a network of significant size can be fully converted to IPv6, which exists already! Then talk about grand visions about a whole new kind of network.
The users will hate this incompatible network and just probably just tunnel TCP and IP through it, which will basically turn it into a glorified VPN.
Users don't want a new kind of internet that doesn't work with their existing operating systems and applications. (Even if they are in the military). You can order the military men to use whatever you want, but you can't order productivity out of them.
We already have secure sockets, VPNs and all that stuff.
About dynamic bandwidth allocation: it's naive to think that you need a whole new kind of internet for that. This can be handled in the backbone by intelligent routing devices over the existing protocols.
Deep packet inspection can associate traffic to a subscriber and apply the appropriate quality of service policy to allocate bandwidth. Individual virtual circuits can be similarly identified, associated to a subscriber and subject to prioritization, in real time, as they come up and down.
The company I work for is in this business.
www.zeugmasystems.com
Invest 30 million in us, not these jokers!
It wasn't until Windows 7 that I saw anything approaching the 11-12MB/s I saw on NFS. I got the same as you, Vista to vista smb transfers ran around 5-6 MB/s while NFS would get 11-12. Now that I have 7 on my PCs, I can get 10-12MB/s on 7 to 7 transfers, not sure what changed, but it's noticeably faster and no longer much slower than NFS.
So you're saying that an open protocol, NFS, doesn't work as fast on Microsoft Operating Systems as Microsoft's proprietary system?
Do you have any Linux or BSD benchmarks for comparison?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Trumpet Winsock?
SMB over NetBIOS?
Why should implementing TCP/IP be a qualification for designing a new protocol? Were TCP/IP designers implementers of other network stacks?
Microsoft can't get the internet clients to work right. so they may have better luck rewriting the internet to work with their clients.
'Nuff said.
Sopssa, you have no point to make but you waste a lot of words making it.
Microsoft have a really bad history of implementing open protocols and are therefore not the right people to design a new one.
I also work for Lockheed. Interesting fact: my team's standard IDE just got upgraded from vi to vim last week. No Joke.
Having your resume in the HR database is the bottom of the recruiting barrel. You want a job? Apply for something specific. Just maybe not now, last I heard there was a hiring freeze over most units.
This quote also applies to TCP/IP. 31 million is not enough money for someone like Lockheed to do anything notable except maybe come up with some router policies and require SSL on every link or something. They probably wouldn't even be able to properly tackle the interminable key distribution problems with a system like that.
I read the internet for the articles.
Microsoft [1] was the one that helped invent and standardize DHCP.
Eh? RFC2131 says Bucknell University on it. There is no mention of 'microsoft' or 'windows' in it.
What makes you think Microsoft had anything to do with the invention of DHCP?
Easy: big button labeled "start"
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
The second thing Microsoft did right was samba.
Microsoft did not create Samba, since Samba is an implementation of the SMB protocol for *nix systems. And SMB was not created by Microsoft either, but by IBM. But Microsoft did use the SMB protocol for the Windows File Sharing services. Other people had to reverse-engineer the protocol to be able to create Samba, which was expressly created to allow Unix systems to interoperate with Windows systems, which hardly was in Microsoft's interest.
it has became such a standard that even on UNIX boxes, it has edged out NFS.
It has? That's news to me. But still, if I understand correctly, the Samba team has created an overlay protocol on top of SMB to support such things as Unix file ownership and access rights, so that Samba could be usable even for *nix to *nix file access. This protocol is only used if both systems are *nix systems though. Without this support, Samba wouldn't be less useful for this scenario.
And really, "did right"? Then why have I always gotten such lousy performances from SMB transfers? Compared to FTP (even in Windows), I've never gotten above some 60% of the corresponding FTP transfer rate.
Microsoft's history on protocol implementations sucks, and that's not even talking about where they've intentionally busted an implementation for lock-in purposes (Kerberos anyone).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's actually quite a good system, and I really don't think they're going to want to replace all that any time in the next few years.
I would worry a bit about transitioning to anything more complex than what exists already.
Currently, the training for enlisted soldiers who will be the operator/maintainers of the JNN & SSSv3 is 39 weeks long (up from 25). Even with this length of training, there is a lot to be desired. The General Dynamics trainers at the signal school at Ft. Gordon are retired senior NCO's (>E6), but not one has actually used the JNN in the Army. Their experience is all with the old circuit switched comms gear. Knowledge of basic computer networking is seriously lacking for many. So, the end result is that soldiers spend more time learning the maximum length of a CX-11230 cable, memorizing the location of each jack on the signal entry panels, and mopping the floors of the school than actually using the equipment. When soldiers do actually use the gear, it's 100% scripted. The soldiers read the commands off a "cut sheet" and enter them verbatim into the command prompt.
With this level of training, anything more complex than TCP/IP is going to be a no-go unless it's implemented in a very transparent way to the operators.
We're a bunch of literally minded geeks here. Many of us don't get sarcasm unless it's pointed out to us. Going to lunch a while back with some other hard-core geeks at work, a lady was backing out of her space and had to slam on her brakes to avoid running us over. We hadn't even been looking. The lady said, sarcastically, "Next time you guys get out of the way or I'll run you over!" My co-worker didn't get the joke, and angrily tore into the poor lady with, "No madam. It is you who must be on the lookout, and you who are responsible for not running us over!" The rest of us slinked away, hoping to get away from the embarrassment.
Geeks... Sheeze.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out
What cruft? There may be features you don't yet understand[1], and features you don't need for this purpose[2], but IPv4 is a pretty lean already: 20 bytes for IP + 20 bytes for TCP 3% of a 1500 byte packet; For the cost of having to reimplement all your network hardware and applications to use a proprietary protocol, you're better off buying 3% more bandwidth, even if that means launching more satellites to link up some lonely jungle.
[1] Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
[2] You need addresses to be 32 bits for more than having enough addresses - there are processing advantages to having them be sizeof(int). Look at a diagram for TCP and IP headers sometime. No field crosses a mod-32 barrier; small fields are cleverly tetrised into chunks that align on mod-16 barriers. See [1].
ATM is hugely popular in the US. Lots of DSL providers are running it in their network.
It caught on very briefly with the backbone providers, but had a huge amount of overhead compared to packet-over-SONET or more recently, Ethernet.
well.. you don't work for Lockheed anymore... ; P
Hope is the currency of fools
Seriously, it's been around for some time now, and it wouldn't require much to change in the application side.
"Microsoft had nothing to do with DEC"
It lured some key engineers from DEC to make Windows NT.
You haven't answered my questions but as far as Kerberos is concerned, my understanding is that Microsoft's implementation complies with the standard.
Hmmmm...Lockheed Martin.....hmmmm...aren't they the guys that did that Raptor jet, the multi-billion model that shuts down everytime they try to fly past the International Dateline?
Hmmm.....Lockheed Martin....hmmmm....aren't they the guys responsible for those incredible automated stamp vending machines that used to be in the Post Offices, but had to be replaced with another type as they were always breaking down?
Hmmm...Lockheed Martin...hmmmm...don't they own Pacific Architects and Engineers; that private military company responsible for so much havoc in Africa??
Thank you, Lord Greywolf. McSoftware doesn't do networks, never have, never could.....anyone who has ever worked tech support for them knows that......(I will never admit to such a thing, nor will I ever admit to begging for "it" --- except for that one time with Kimberley)
Because when they begin charging $2,000 per replacement wrench, it's going to appear might fishy.......
As soon as I heard Microsoft, I could only imagine this thing going downhill.
Well, there goes the Internet. With Microsx behind it nobody will be allowed to use it for free, no standards will be followed, protocols will change daily.
"New network threats and attacks require revolutionary protection concepts," said Lockheed cyber-arsenal chieftain John Mengucci. "Through this project, as well as our cyber Mission Maker initiatives, we are working to enhance cyber security and ensure that warfighters can fight on despite cyber attacks."
John Mengucci (the cyber-arsenal chieftain! rofl) obviously has no clue what he is talking about given the phrasing he chose to use (omgz! cyber attacks are stopping our warfighters! deploy the cyber defense!) . My guess is MS fed him, the rest of LM, and the US gov this marketese, they fell for it, and now the Internet will become Microsoft's subservient bitch. This is a for-profit move, not a for-security, for-consumer, or for-technology move. We, as tax payers, are paying for Microsoft and LM's research and development under the premise of war. Why is this acceptable to the US people? Are we a war-mongering society? Yes, but should we be? No! When will the US start innovating in the name of peace, instead of war? Can we please just GROW THE FUCK UP and stop thinking that war is a normal, unavoidable part of society?
And to end my tirade: Lockeed-Martin are the merchants of Death. No company should profit solely on war. Think about it: its in their best interest that there is always war... You think lobbyists in Washington are bad, what about the lobbyists in Iraq? Why has there always been some conflict somewhere in the world post WWII? Because its profitable and completely legal. People are making money off of death. This is not okay.
Maybe a new multipurpose communication protocol to roll SMTP/HTTP/FTP/VOIP/whatever into one?
Why? What purpose would be served by doing this?
I can imagine an easy way of doing it: the first message from the client is the name of the protocol the client and server will be speaking for the remainder of the session. The rest will be protocol messages from that protocol. Implement this using an array of function pointers (or a big switch). ... but why? What do these applications have in common? What's the advantage of rolling the protocols into one? Delivering mail is vastly different from serving web pages. Why should every web server also contain the dirty business logic of pushing out mail?
I'll grant that serving web pages contains as a sub-task that of serving files, so maybe we can do away with ftp (haven't we already?), but what else can realistically be merged?
Sure, but a whole Internet for just $31M? BARGAIN!
Microsoft did not invent SMB, either. Some reading material from the usual suspect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
uh... were you -looking- for something to bitch about? because the above poster said -nothing- like that.
s/he simply pointed out that windows 7's implementation of -their own protocol- is now considerably more capable than earlier implementations (vista, xp, etc) and is no longer quite so sub-par to NFS.
I've worked for defense department contractors in the past 12 years and $31 million is not enough money to produce anything useful. Most Defense Contractors including LM have so much bureaucracy and process, therefore average about 10 managers and none technical persons for every 2 Software engineers. This seems to be the beginning of another Future Combat Systems (FCS) program.
Microsoft is not well known for making things that customers want. They're much better at telling customers what they want.
Microsoft is not well known for making things that customers want. They're much better at telling customers what they want.
ROFL: you forgot the old, yet still true:
At Microsoft, Quality is Job 1.1
At Apple, Quality is what we tell you it is, bitch.
When I read this my first thought was what does lockheed know about networks. In most government projects you put together a team based on different needs of the project, one of which I'm sure is just company capita. ie implimentation and support.
Fuck the military-industrial complex and give the money back to the people!
From the freaking article: "Lockheed Martin's team will develop router technologies that include strong authentication and self configuration capabilities to improve security, reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management."
I doubt they are trying to reinvent tcpip at all, but rather working at the router level to secure router-router communications and simplify configuration and management. In all likelyhood, they will simply implement existing protocols in a consistent manner. The bulk of the security issues in the military is due to poor configuration management and lack of properly skilled guys setting up and managing networks. It's no wonder the Chinese have a nearly free run of the DOD networks right now. Step number one should be to unplug the DOD networks from the Internet.
If this project works like any other defense contract, the goal is always to bid low and sell high and always ask for more money for "research".
They have 6 well-fed pigs at the trough (LHM, Microsoft and co.) . They have $31 million to spend. There's going to be a slew of engineers and managers from each company working on the project. Each company will believe their solution is better which will require more money to research. They get more money but can't settle on differences, more money to settle on that. I'll stop. I don't want to feed them more ideas. You can hire me though. I've no idea what I'm doing, so I'll do a great job of increasing your budgets.
And when its all settled and settled :) I reckon the final tally will be many times the $31 mil.
No, I knew it was sarcastic :) I was just adding to it.
If I was the US military realizing I had no control over the internet and freaking out, the next best way I can think of to dominate global communication again is to create my own, slightly different internet, where the differences are mostly to do with the level of control I have over it.
Then all I need to do is get everyone else to start using my network, and a good way to start is with the big corporations whose interests already somewhat align with my own.
whoops, forgot I had that foil hat on, never mind
Yes, and that's why Windows users still can't connect to the Internet.
"Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Yes, because TCP/IP is the best protocol in the universe for now and forever. I don't get young geeks infatuation with 70s/80s technologies. If my generation had the same infatuation with the 50s/60s there wouldn't have been a TCP/IP to argue about.
"Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Yes, because TCP/IP is the best protocol in the universe for now and forever.
That is not what I said or meant. TCP and IP have had many problems over the years; many of them have been fixed; some will eventually require new protocols (which occasionally happens; we're seeing that now with IPv6 and SCTP).
Those who DO understand TCP/IP, and why it does all the esoteric things it does, have a chance at implementing a better protocol. However, when the GGP was talking about trimming the "cruft", it raised a red flag with a "hasn't read enough RFCs" caption.
Should I laugh now, or later. Hehe I made my login on Slashdot just to say that; After I have been watching it for years. DARPA, DARPA, offend thy maker.
First Obama's UN speech and now the military using Microsoft.. this country truly is in serious trouble.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Reinventing the internet. New tubes! NetBeui 2.0, now with DRM! Oh boy, I can't wait!
Huh? In what world did Samba ever replace NFS?
Not all DARPA projects are equal. And MS has a very long history of never ever doing anything that is open or usuable or on time or bug free.
Just because X got a good result, doesn't mean Y isn't a pork project.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ahhhhh..... Now I get it. It's the *military* internet. Of course, there the *main objective* is locking other people in or out.
Then they couldn't have teamed up with a better partner than Microsoft. Good choice, dudes.
(At least, until they find out that they are locked out themselves because of some bug, and the terrorist can easily hack into their nuclear missiles with a instructional video posted on YouTube by a script kiddie)
The military basically says, I need a plane that can go at least mach 2, can carry X number of pounds of air to ground or air to air weapons, has X% stealth capability, has a range of X miles, can land on a aircraft carrier, etc., etc... and costs about X dollars.
Wow, I'd like to see the value of X that can fit all of those parameters!
Simple. Let X = 0. Compute. Result = 0.
TCP/IP may have issues but any format will. You cant send data across networks and not have the chance of it being read unless the network is closed. That is like saying you are going to build a new pigeon who is more secure who will deliver your message. Also any criminal who gets there hands on a government laptop and password can just login and bypass all that security anyway (I think that has happened a few times over the last few years). Security comes down to training the humans to use computers securly, no technology will replace that.
Exactly, they should ask Al Gore since he invented the first one.
I had a much longer comment but it disappeared in the slashdot servers. Basically its the users not tcpip that make things unsecure.
Huh? In what world did Samba ever replace NFS?
Well OK, "replace" was a bad choice of words. But in a mixed environment, it definitely seems more popular.
Maybe it just seems that way to me when it isn't true. I can admit that. But if nothing else, that is part of the reason for my poor choice of words, and where I was coming from.
But you are totally right. Two unix systems, or unix and nas/san, would work great under NFS and much easier.
I can even think of a few remote booting processes I've used that pretty much required NFS, and samba wouldn't have been an option there to work. So it is not dead by far or anything, which I didn't mean to imply.
It just seems when you go windows to windows, or windows to unix, samba seems to be the easier option to get windows to play with.
The idea of having to buy a 3rd party NFS client (and maybe server) for windows, while an option, is usually not the one chosen for personal or small business use, mainly based on price.
While I don't conciser that a fault with NFS at all, it was the reality for me.
A home user probably wouldn't even bother pirating a NFS client for windows, and just setup samba sharing, as long as a windows machine is in the equation somewhere.
Samba hardy "ended up on unix systems to replace NFS". Samba is useful for serving files to MS-OS clients in part because it's often easier and more effective to implement compatible software on *ix systems than to try to hack actual standards into MS-OS. Ever suffer through PC-NFS?
Samba *in my experience* is useful, but abjectly slow. NFS is still substantially faster, again in my experience.
This Internet reinvention will be hot in communist China
Kimberley likes it when I beg...but anyway, I should point out that their network stack works "well enough" ... that is, it isn't particularly well performing, nor is it particularly well secure. It's the epitome of mediocrity. But it does work. Mostly.
My blog
"..but how can you expect to win the Internet war if you have no idea how it works and all the security and protocols are outsourced."
Sadly, you have asked a serious-sounding question so I shall respond in kind. This may be difficult for you - and I'm not criticizing your intelligence level here - but the question indicates you are still residing in the matrix, which in America, one would place you as paying serious attention to either Fox, NPR or the like, all Bernays-engineered engines of propaganda.
It has never been about winning the Internet war, that is all the usual smokescreen to keep various types, outfits and organizations occupied with the nebulous. It is about control of the Internet, which has been subtly taking place over the past few years. Whether it is the privatization of all those telecoms (just check into the private equity firms which own ALL of those privatized telecoms, i.e., Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, KKR, Citadel, etc., etc.) as well as the slowing down of certain types of traffic lately, and the implementation of those Narus boxes, which has happened throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East, etc.
Politically, they are reframing and confusing this situation they way they handle all others, such as pitting people in the Anti-abortion against those in the Pro-choice, while always keeping it a constant battle (hence all those single-issue types); and keeping Gays and Lesbians occupied by always promising the granting of normal citizen's rights (marriage, military service to support the American Empire, etc.).
Perhaps I'm just not clueful enough. I'd find jobs on Dice.com that Lockheed-Martin posted, click to apply and it sends me to the HR site where I have to upload or update my resume in the database. There isn't anything on the site to identify which job I'm applying for and no other contact information in the Dice job description.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
isn't MS SMB basically a bastardised version of IBM's SMB
I've read plenty of RFCs and I've also bent networking protocols to do things they were never intended to do. If IPv4 doesn't have cruft, then maybe you can explain how IPv6 gets by with fewer fields? They didn't even implement the evil bit, but that's not cruft right, just a cool in joke.
My point was that the military is one of a few organizations that could define their own network standard to actually improve performance for everyone that uses it. As opposed to IPv6 which actually does the opposite. Many bases are still on dial up and units deployed to the field are never going to have broadband. It should be possible to define a header that does both the IP and TCP headers in 128 bits.
If they go with IPv6, they will only ever be able to use it to connect fat cat generals to gay pron faster.