Slashdot Mirror
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?
It's high time to launch the "Don't floppy that copy!" campaign aimed at White House staffers.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
For a security sensitive place, like the US govt, I think lack of networking, and using floppy disks to transfer files is a good thing. It is harder to sneak out large amounts of data undetected. Doesn't the Kremlin use typewriters now?
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.
Not really survivable.
Or more to the point, not any more.
Back in the day, floppies were amazing. Quite pricy but nuless you slid your finger across the surface (later slid the cover open and did the same), or hacked it apart with scissors, they basically worked and retained data very reliably.
They were quite expensive.
Somewhere towards the end of their reign of dominance, more when they started to be pushed out by being too small to be of any use and cheap CD-Rs (not USB back then---it worked like crap) they got super cheap and started to massively suck. Some would work only a few times before conking out.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pretty much the same as any CTO. You're expected to keep things secure and allow the CFO to install dancingPigs.exe at the same time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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).
Did you know that for $30 you can get a floppy-to-USB device?
It's the size of a floppy drive, installs in a floppy bay, plugs up to the floppy and power connectors, and provides a USB port, a couple of buttons, and a numeric display.
You plug in a USB stick, use the buttons to select which diskette image you want to use, and it presents it to the host machine like a floppy disk.
You often see them advertised for Roland keyboards, but they should work with most floppy applications.
Hopefully the CTO is aspiring to get the white house off of floppy disks for a solid reason beyond just the age of the technology. There is likely a good reason why floppies are still being used and that needs to be taken into mind when trying to replace them with newer technology. After all, we saw an article not that long ago that the nuclear missile sites in the US still use 8 inch floppies, but there is no solid reason to get them away from that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Isn't "CTO" a corporate term? Since when does our republic have corporate leadership?
Screw the floppies, I'm more concerned about the basically open announcement that our government is now fascist, in the most literal sense of the word.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I was able to read all of them, no failures.
I think he was referring to the data, not the label on the outside of the disk.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I can see how govt would hate using thumb drives (a rogue thumb drive could mimic any USB device),
The government is large. A demand that any driver be signed by the maker (with the proper key loaded into the government PKI) would eliminate 99% of such attacks. All USB storage must have a key.txt in the root with a valid key.
Problems getting manufacturers going along with it? You are the US government. "Do what I ask, or we'll eliminate your stuff from procurement for someone that does. And if you complain publicly, we'll refuse to buy from anyone who uses your stuff."
Security doesn't happen until someone demands it (and pays for it). The government should be leading the charge, not NSA-style trying to hold everyone back. Double DES is good enough for anyone.
Learn to love Alaska
Bush didn't tank a baseball team. He made millions off it. He bought in, used his "influence" (asking daddy for favors) to get the old stadium re-built at taxpayer expense, and sold off, for a massive profit. He didn't have any real duties, despite an inflated title, and was just there to grease political wheels for a new stadium.
Traditional Republican style, welfare for the rich. A millionaire made milions more off the taxpayers because he got a "free house" but God forbid we let a poor person stay in a state home for a while to get back on their feet after personal problems.
Learn to love Alaska
Think god I had a city college education! The contracting company for IBM hired to fresh out of high school students who thought they were hot stuff because they can unbox a Dell computer without looking at the unboxing diagram on the box. The job was simple: unplugged the token ring cable, plugged in the Ethernet cable, and test the high-bandwidth network video application for 300 workstations. They couldn't bother to read the instruction sheet, plugged the Ethernet cable into the token ring card, which supported both 10BASE2 and twisted pair cables, and didn't test the video application to catch their mistake. I made an extra four hours in OT pay and left the job at 3:30AM in the morning.
Life-long lesson learned: You make more money being the guy who cleans up other people's mistakes.