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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."
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.
...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.
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!
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.
There's lots of non-military uses for wireless or satellite links. If you need to carry both operational and personal traffic, you establish multiple links and keep the networks separated.
The military's requirement for security is most certainly not unique, either.
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.
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.
if only! I sense XML based packets.
> 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.
I'm just surprised, no astounded, that a large military contractor (and microsoft) will do it for such a teeny tiny amount considering how much they usually charge.
Perhaps it is just for the IPv6 spec with the 6 crossed out and 7 in its place after all.
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 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!
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
Like they did for Windows.
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?
What? DHCP is just an evolution of BOOTP, and it was certainly not invented by Microsoft.
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.