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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.
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)...
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
sure, in comparison to the piles of money previously given to large contractors to flail around pretending to solve the unique mission critical requirements of the military, its nothing!
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
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
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no they wouldn't as you say, 'stuff it up'.
They'd patent the sh1t out of it so it is 'stuffed up' for the rest of us.
Remember that the US Military are exempt from patents awarded for work funded by them.
Then all Microsoft need to do is make 'The Internet V2' standard in Windows 8 and watch pretty well every company fall over backwards to implement it.
They would control who the licensed 'Internet V2' to thus kille FOSS, ORacle and probably Apple in one stroke of the pen from the US Patent Office.
Embrace - Done
Extend - Take IPv6, add a few bells & Whistles, patent it
Extinguish - Message from Steve B to Bill G, 'Looks Good'
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
'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.
Will not use it until at least SP1 is released.
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?
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.
Protocols and other intellectual property made under contract to the military cannot be patented, the implementation can, but the standard cannot, courtesy of the US Constitution
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
Most tactical systems use UDP so you could argue TCP has already been replaced ;)
The trouble with policy based management at unit / sub-unit level is not with traffic within the unit's AOR but with traffic which crosses multiple unit's networks. Not only that but you have two conflicting isssues: ;) )
Traffic prioritisation based on the traffic type (E.g voip - low jitter requirement) and priotiy based on user needs (E.g Flash, Priority, Immediate, Routine etc... Or to get really stupid flash override override
How to square those two issues is a large part of any problem they will need to address.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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.
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.