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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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Asking Microsoft to help with security is like asking Jessica Simpson for advice on staying out of the spotlight.
Table-ized A.I.
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
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
Dear Sir or Madam,
The responsible Anti-Microsoft Troll that should have replied to this post by now is on sick leave and was unable to prepare a custom flaming reply to this particular post. In lieu of that, attached is our generic template which we use to write all our flaming responses.
1. Make a general anti-Microsoft jab
2. Blame Microsoft for it's stance against Free Software (and also for lack of network neutrality, the current state of patent laws, the Iraq war, and the extinction of the dinosaurs)
3. Accuse the poster who wrote something positive about Microsoft of being either a fanboy or a Microsoft employee. If the poster in question made a comment about Microsoft's actual support of Free Software in a particular instance, accuse the poster of being an oblivious idiot unable to see through their Embrace-Extend-Extinguish approach
4. State that the Linux revolution is inevitable
5. Finish off with another outpour of flames
We hope you will be able to infer the potential content of the post that should have been done by the respective Troll. Please accept our apologies.
Sincerely,
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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.
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.