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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."
How does this affect pr0n?
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.
... 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)...
It'll never be finished anyway. They'll repeatedly extend the deadlines and the budget unsuccessfully before the project's stinking remains will be swept quietly under the rug. Then some other bunch of corporations with paid shills in congress will get a similar contract years later.
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.
Why are you talking about Microsoft like it's alive?
Is there something I should know?
Hello, windows.
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.
How the hell can you trust a corporation to handle the military security? No really, who the fuck had this brilliant idea?
Do you have any idea of how the US military works at all? The military itself makes very few products. Just about everything from the bullets fired, the guns that fire them, the planes that carry the guns, the engines that power the planes, the radar that guides aims the guns, etc., etc., etc., was all designed and built by a "corporation", which simply met a spec that the military asked for. 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. Multiple designs are submitted by different companies that think they can meet or exceed spec, and the military then selects one or two to build a prototype and then selects one of those prototypes and then it has another contract bid to actually manufacturer the winning design.
ALL those things are being designed and built by a corporation that handles the military security. Even services for network design, and standard security policy and practices are usually designed and maintained by a corporation! Get a clue man.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
Skynet went online on August 4th 1997. Human decisions were removed from strategic defense. Skynet began to learn at a geometric rate. It originally became self-aware on August 29th 1997 2:14 am Eastern Time. On August 29th 1997 3:22 am Eastern Time, Skynet crashed.
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.