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USDA Services Moving To the Microsoft Cloud
JoltinJoe77 writes "Not to be outdone by Google, who recently announced an e-mail deal with the GSA, Microsoft is pressing forward with a migration of its own. 'The US Department of Agriculture is ready to go live with Microsoft's cloud services. In the next four weeks, the agency will move 120,000 users to Microsoft Online services, including e-mail, Web conferencing, document collaboration, and instant messaging.'"
Farm services server farm?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
The cloud will solve all of our problems.
Microsoft cloud services will be just as awesome as Sharepoint!
egads.
blah blah blah
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Wikileaks Targets USDA
New York Times Staff Writer
Fresh off the release of thousands of private State Department diplomatic cables, Wikileaks has announced that it has obtained over 35,000 confidential records from the US Department of Agriculture. According to spokesman Julian Assange, Wikileaks has been reviewing the documents for the past several months, and intends to release them on Sunday, following the Superbowl halftime commercial break. Assange, who has recently battled charges of sexual assault in Sweden, pedophilia in Britain, adultery in Saudi Arabia, male prostitution in Sri Lanka, public masturbation in Mozambique, and felony jaywalking in Turkmenistan, claims that these new leaks are "among the most important we've ever released."
The New York Times received advance copies of the leaked documents from a third party. From a preliminary review of the documents, here are some highlights:
* In November of 2009, a USDA investigator discovered that despite advertising claims, the ingredients of Snapple's chilled tea beverages were not, in fact, "the best stuff on Earth." The USDA pressured Snapple to improve the quality of its ingredients,
* Investigators discovered in June 2010 that a cattle ranch in Chugwater, Wyoming did not have any signs of mad cow disease, despite neighbors' claims that, "Ol' Bill cows make crazy, crazy good barbeque."
* In the minutes from private discussions, Secretary of Agricultre Tom Vilsack is on the record as saying, "Man, that Lindsay Lohan is too skinny. Way too skinny. She's drinking slim milk, she should be dirnking 2%." Key officials alleged that the white "mustache" below Ms. Lohan's nose was not, in fact, milk.
Although the source for the leak is not known, analysts suspect that Wikileaks obtained the documents when a team of hackers, operating out of a suburban basement filled with toy miniatures and Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, was able to break into the USDA's cloud hosting service. The service, which is maintained by Microsoft, is reported to have suffered from a fatal security vulnerability when all of its servers simultaneously crashed with a "blue screen of death."
The government has already issued a release to all federal employees stating that, "these documents are not to be read during work hours" and that they remain confidential, despite the fact that they are no longer confidential.
The Justice Department would not make any official statements on the new leak, claiming that it is "part of an ongoing federal investigation that we're serious about, no, really, we're not kidding around, we're actually serious, please stop laughing." However, a source from within the Justice Department, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said that, "We will [expletive] murder Julian Assange. We will slice his [expletive] neck open and drink his blood to give us power over our enemies. Then we're gonna drag his corpse into the office, and beat it with out [expletives] like a pinata, and [expletive] on it. Whoever [expletives] last has to buy a round of drinks for the rest of the guys."
Said Assange, "With this release, we come ever closer to overthrowing the despotic American government and its unjust, tyrannical, wicked form of mixed capitalism and representative democracy. The people shall rise up against the machine, and at last seize the means of production! The revolution is nigh, dear comrades, for victory will come to those who spread Truth to the masses! Death to America! Death to Smoochy! AI-YEEE!!!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.