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US CTO Tries To Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks
schnell writes: MIT grad and former Google exec Megan J. Smith is the third Chief Technical Officer of the United States and the first woman to hold the position created five years ago by President Obama. But, as a New York Times profile points out, while she fights to wean the White House off BlackBerries and floppy disks, and has introduced the President to key technical voices like Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf to weigh in on policy issues, her position is deliberately nebulous and lacking in real authority. The President's United States Digital Service initiative to improve technology government-wide is run by the Office of Management and Budget, and each cabinet department has its own CIO who mandates agency technical standards. Can a position with a direct access to the President but no real decision-making authority make a difference?
What's wrong with BlackBerries? I know they aren't in style anymore, but what do they have in mind as a replacement that is powerful and secure enough for government? iPhone? WP8? Don't make me laugh!
Well, I was using floppies well into the 90's. CD-ROMs were nice for large chunks of data but until I had broadband, sneakernet+floppies was usually a lot more efficient. Really the modern replacement is USB sticks, although they're not quite cheap enough to give away as floppies were.
There is a chance that the Whitehouse is using obsolete technologies because that's the way that things were always done. Yet there can be other reasons behind it.
Consider that floppy diskette. Assuming the OS is properly configured, a disk is a disk. Contrast that to a USB flash drive: is it behaving as a flash drive, or is the firmware causing it to behave as something else? Contrast that to a network connection: properly handled physical media has a clear chain of responsibility, while network connections (even internal ones) may be managed by many more people and have more access points. Yes, there are ways to deal with security in such situations. No, they are not foolproof. That's particularly true with high-stakes institutions like the Whitehouse.
Another consideration is the providence of the technology. It is bad enough when you have to go through a single vendor (e.g. Blackberry or Microsoft) or are dealing with contractors. Many modern technologies make things worse by being a service. Products become property of the government when purchased. Contractors can be replaced when contracts come up for renewal, or in the intervening period if terms are violated or appropriate clauses are added. Services are a different issue though, and that's exactly what a lot of modern "technologies" are. Does the Whitehouse want to create a situation where another party has control over their data. Even if they could guarantee the security and portability of the data, it could be difficult to find or create a replacement. Businesses take advantage of this difficulty all of the time, and literally milk the government because of it. In most cases it is because of the cost of complying with government regulations. In the case of services, it could simply be because there is no alternative.
Exactly that and the article is full of bullshit. It mentions floppy disks, nowhere it is explained where they are still using them and for what purpose. It may be a marginal usage and for good reasons as well or it may be wide spread and completely idiotic. Nobody can judge from the article, the floppy disk is mentioned in the beginning and the end of the article. For the BlackBerries, there is currently new models and I don't see why they should switch to something else given the security required. Perhaps being a former exec from Google she is a little bit in conflit with the interests of her former employer.
What's the point about a 2013 laptop? I am very sorry, but as a CTO she doesn't need the latest technology for herself to enjoy, left this to the staff that really need it.
Last thing, a CTO with background in mechanical engineering and no real experience in IT, since she was heading a research division at Google, not the IT department. I am not sure this nomination was a good one. There is many other women better qualified for the job out there. With her background, if I was a CIO or CTO of another government division, I am not sure I would embrace everything in her vision.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I have a Z10 running 10.2.X. It's a very nice phone and a good replacement for the piece of garbage my iPhone 4S turned into when I made the mistake of switching to iOS 7. Cost me $200 for a well-designed handset that has user-replaceable batteries, a mini-SD card slot that cheerfully takes a $25 64GB card and runs plenty of Android apps. Personally, I even find the OS to behave much like how I WISE iOS would behave (hint: UI is very similar, but has some nice Androidish features like a file manager that is very well designed).
What's the argument? Not a lot of apps? That's an argument in its favor with the federal government. Enterprise management is very easy and straight forward for the federal government too. BYOP has absolutely no place in the federal government.
Back in the day, floppies were amazing [...] they basically worked and retained data very reliably.
Not by today's standards they didn't. Anything remotely important, I would put on at least two floppies. I still need to experience the first USB stick failure.
(Okay, okay, USB sticks may fail too, I know, but not nearly as often as floppies).