Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology "Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts."
Maybe they'll buy a lot of Macs; they're used to them.
Some call this whining. "Guess what? Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley's startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn't approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site's blocked — and management suspects that "social media" is a buzzword which means "getting paid to waste time chatting with friends." Want to use some new blogging service? Fill out this three-page questionnaire about the site's security practices, please."
I know people in the Manhattan media elite. No laptops; XP; and Lotus Notes, version 6.5.
At least Obama is looking at Open Source for the government. Though having Sun's Scott McNealy prepare the report sounds like an odd choice.
2 comments:
Noone who has dealt with the FAR process would expect Macs to show up. Acquisition timelines often are measured in decades.
Now open source software has some potential, but in the end I think it comes down to the NSA opinion of the potential threat. Having code visibility and a huge pool of users picking it over could help eliminate holes; on the other hand, it could also help people exploit them. In the end, I expect the cost of qualifying and maintaining open source code would not be much different from the cost of proprietary code.
I know the NSA has made more secure versions of linux and issued reports on securing linux systems and mac systems.
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