At least as of five years ago, most State Department computers had a single monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into a switch that in turn ran to two different CPUs. One CPU, with big red stickers on it, was the classified ("class") machine; the other, with big green stickers on it, was the unclassified ("unclass") machine. The class machine had an ethernet hookup to the State Department intranet, to handle Lotus Notes and access to Cable Express, the computerized version of State's old Telex cable system. That intranet was completely disconnected from the internet. The unclass machine had a connection to the internet.
The hard disk in the class machine had a barrel lock on it. At the end of the working day, you powered down your machine, unlocked and removed the hard drive, and locked the drive in your safe. (The safe is less fancy than it sounds: a standard four-drawer file cabinet with two u-flanges welded onto it; you slid a long steel bar through both flanges and padlocked it into place. Cheap, but pretty effective.) The unclass machine's hard disk remained in place, and those machines were rarely turned off.
As the story mentioned, most of the hacks target unclass machines, for the simple reason that they can't reach class machines. Give State some credit; on the hardware side at least, they did the right thing by building two networks.
The problem with this setup is this: say you're writing a report that will include some classified information but that will also have background research perhaps from the internet. In theory, you should write the report on the class machine. You should do the internet research on the unclass machine, write up whatever you want to add to the report, copy it to a floppy or flash drive, and copy it onto the class machine. The document from the class machine should never appear on the floppy or the flash drive, much less the unclass machine. In practice, as you can imagine, people often put the file on the portable medium so that they can avoid wrangling with version control (most foreign-service officers don't know what version control is, but they know they don't like to wrangle with it). Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before classified information ends up on an unclassified machine.
Just for the record, a lot of classified information is, frankly, uninteresting. If an embassy staffer covers a rally in the foreign capital and writes a cable that has six paragraphs of description of the rally and one paragraph of commentary on the rally, he'll often mark his comments confidential; this in turn makes the cable classified. This tendency to classify TOO MANY THINGS only adds to the report-writing problem I mentioned above, since often the necessary reference material is unclassified description within a classified cable.
Frankly, if you can come up with a way to sort out this state of affairs, I think the State Department would be pretty willing to listen to it. At least, based on watching diplomatic security officers tear their hair out at the potential security breaches that their own employees commit, I think they would be.
Nonsense. If fuel prices keep rising, then we'll steam crude oil out of tar sands and shale. Canada has about as much oil as Saudi Arabia, it's just more expensive to extract.
It's nothing more than an engineering problem. When the cost of energy from oil exceeds the cost of other sources over time, we'll start using those other sources.
You're right that, if the final price of gasoline were to increase, then it would be possible still to make a profit extracting oil via more expensive methods. That part may be "nothing more than an engineering problem." But you're forgetting a few other economic principles--most importantly, that as the price of gasoline increases, lots of other goods and services that use gasoline as an input will see their costs of production rise. Not all of them will be able to pass those price increases on to their customers, and we could and should expect that they will either see shrinking profits and/or look for substitute inputs.
Now, if there are no feasible substitutes around, then things could get really interesting...
There's also a dynamic problem here. It's not like all "other sources" are equally developed. If we spend our time and money developing new and slightly more expensive ways to extract oil from places like the Canadian tar sands rather than trying to find more economical ways to use other sources of energy, then oil may STILL be cheaper than those other sources, even as its price increases. The effects of that for the industries (most of them, really) that use oil and oil products as inputs could be nasty.
This isn't protectionism right now, but--largely because of situations like this--the United States and several other countries are trying to make it protectionism. It's no coincidence that liberalization of government procurement has become a major item on the WTO's agenda.
Google "government procurement" (liberalization OR liberalize) WTO and read up.
So whats to stop US companies from opening 'chinese' companies?
The Chinese government, for one.
For quite some time in the early to mid-1990s, most foreign operations, in a variety of industries (textiles/apparel, electronics, automotive parts), that were established in China had to be a joint-venture with a national partner, often though not exclusively a branch of an erstwhile state-owned enterprise. Such JVs are not universally required today, and many foreign firms--disenchanted with the performance of their national partners in the earlier round of investment--have chosen to forego them. Note, though, that if the Chinese government has the capacity to favor JVs, it also has the capacity to disfavor them. The same goes for wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries.
My point is that the Chinese government is neither stupid nor incompetent, at least when it comes to determining and policing corporate ownership. I would be astonished if any policy that favors Chinese software firms left open a loophole for foreign-owned subsidiaries.
The paperwork for setting up an enterprise in China is impressive--remember, it's still a police state. Foreign ownership is one of those things that you have to declare when getting licenses, facing inspections and the like. It would not be difficult for the Chinese government both to sniff such companies out and to avoid procuring from them.
Does it ever nag at anyone else that, on the one hand, the primary criticism of Microsoft is that it is a vile monopolist that tramples any free market in software, and on the other hand, many of us look to changing government regulations about file formats to ensure the survival of FOSS? I don't think that's an easy contradiction to resolve.
"If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing."
--isn't really the funny one. The funny one came earlier:
When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.
Um, except for using Macs, apparently. Didn't see those spreading over the rest of the world in the mid- to late-1980s.
He's arguing that the mac's going to be big because what hackers do, we all do. This in spite of hackers having adopted the mac once before, and its market share plummeting.
Slashdot Mirror
At least as of five years ago, most State Department computers had a single monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into a switch that in turn ran to two different CPUs. One CPU, with big red stickers on it, was the classified ("class") machine; the other, with big green stickers on it, was the unclassified ("unclass") machine. The class machine had an ethernet hookup to the State Department intranet, to handle Lotus Notes and access to Cable Express, the computerized version of State's old Telex cable system. That intranet was completely disconnected from the internet. The unclass machine had a connection to the internet.
The hard disk in the class machine had a barrel lock on it. At the end of the working day, you powered down your machine, unlocked and removed the hard drive, and locked the drive in your safe. (The safe is less fancy than it sounds: a standard four-drawer file cabinet with two u-flanges welded onto it; you slid a long steel bar through both flanges and padlocked it into place. Cheap, but pretty effective.) The unclass machine's hard disk remained in place, and those machines were rarely turned off.
As the story mentioned, most of the hacks target unclass machines, for the simple reason that they can't reach class machines. Give State some credit; on the hardware side at least, they did the right thing by building two networks.
The problem with this setup is this: say you're writing a report that will include some classified information but that will also have background research perhaps from the internet. In theory, you should write the report on the class machine. You should do the internet research on the unclass machine, write up whatever you want to add to the report, copy it to a floppy or flash drive, and copy it onto the class machine. The document from the class machine should never appear on the floppy or the flash drive, much less the unclass machine. In practice, as you can imagine, people often put the file on the portable medium so that they can avoid wrangling with version control (most foreign-service officers don't know what version control is, but they know they don't like to wrangle with it). Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before classified information ends up on an unclassified machine.
Just for the record, a lot of classified information is, frankly, uninteresting. If an embassy staffer covers a rally in the foreign capital and writes a cable that has six paragraphs of description of the rally and one paragraph of commentary on the rally, he'll often mark his comments confidential; this in turn makes the cable classified. This tendency to classify TOO MANY THINGS only adds to the report-writing problem I mentioned above, since often the necessary reference material is unclassified description within a classified cable.
Frankly, if you can come up with a way to sort out this state of affairs, I think the State Department would be pretty willing to listen to it. At least, based on watching diplomatic security officers tear their hair out at the potential security breaches that their own employees commit, I think they would be.
Nonsense. If fuel prices keep rising, then we'll steam crude oil out of tar sands and shale. Canada has about as much oil as Saudi Arabia, it's just more expensive to extract.
It's nothing more than an engineering problem. When the cost of energy from oil exceeds the cost of other sources over time, we'll start using those other sources.
You're right that, if the final price of gasoline were to increase, then it would be possible still to make a profit extracting oil via more expensive methods. That part may be "nothing more than an engineering problem." But you're forgetting a few other economic principles--most importantly, that as the price of gasoline increases, lots of other goods and services that use gasoline as an input will see their costs of production rise. Not all of them will be able to pass those price increases on to their customers, and we could and should expect that they will either see shrinking profits and/or look for substitute inputs.
Now, if there are no feasible substitutes around, then things could get really interesting...
There's also a dynamic problem here. It's not like all "other sources" are equally developed. If we spend our time and money developing new and slightly more expensive ways to extract oil from places like the Canadian tar sands rather than trying to find more economical ways to use other sources of energy, then oil may STILL be cheaper than those other sources, even as its price increases. The effects of that for the industries (most of them, really) that use oil and oil products as inputs could be nasty.
One pictures Castro saying over and over, "No, that's 'free' as in 'beer'..."
Google "government procurement" (liberalization OR liberalize) WTO and read up.
The Chinese government, for one.
For quite some time in the early to mid-1990s, most foreign operations, in a variety of industries (textiles/apparel, electronics, automotive parts), that were established in China had to be a joint-venture with a national partner, often though not exclusively a branch of an erstwhile state-owned enterprise. Such JVs are not universally required today, and many foreign firms--disenchanted with the performance of their national partners in the earlier round of investment--have chosen to forego them. Note, though, that if the Chinese government has the capacity to favor JVs, it also has the capacity to disfavor them. The same goes for wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries.
My point is that the Chinese government is neither stupid nor incompetent, at least when it comes to determining and policing corporate ownership. I would be astonished if any policy that favors Chinese software firms left open a loophole for foreign-owned subsidiaries.
The paperwork for setting up an enterprise in China is impressive--remember, it's still a police state. Foreign ownership is one of those things that you have to declare when getting licenses, facing inspections and the like. It would not be difficult for the Chinese government both to sniff such companies out and to avoid procuring from them.
Does it ever nag at anyone else that, on the one hand, the primary criticism of Microsoft is that it is a vile monopolist that tramples any free market in software, and on the other hand, many of us look to changing government regulations about file formats to ensure the survival of FOSS? I don't think that's an easy contradiction to resolve.
See, this quote--
"If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing."
--isn't really the funny one. The funny one came earlier:
When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.
Um, except for using Macs, apparently. Didn't see those spreading over the rest of the world in the mid- to late-1980s.
He's arguing that the mac's going to be big because what hackers do, we all do. This in spite of hackers having adopted the mac once before, and its market share plummeting.