Comment An AMAZING number of flaws (Score 4, Insightful) 61
Submission + - How Microsoft's "Little Workaround" Created a Major Pentagon Threat (propublica.org)
The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.
Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.
National security and cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.
Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.
“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.
In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.
It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.
Comment Re:Let's re-write that headline, shall we? (Score 1) 28
*ensure*
Comment Re:Why do you hate yourself? (Score 1) 103
I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.
Comment Re:For Insiders on the Experimental channel (Score 1) 103
I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.
Comment Re:Ticket prices are insane. (Score 1) 30
Simple solution: don't buy tickets
Oh right, that's too simple. It will never be done.
Comment I wonder (Score 2) 103
At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.
I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.
I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.
Comment Re:The reason I got it (Score 1) 96
Renewables are always going to be a front loaded expense - it's entirely infrastructure and zero fuel costs. That was the entire point of the IRA 30% tax credit.
I'm with you on getting China to flood our market with cheap panels. A resource with a solid 20 year lifespan isn't going to become a natsec issue tomorrow. It will eventually, so we'd need to heavily push home grown stuff during that time. Call it a 'Sun Shot' development program to figure out our own manufacturing for the future. But now? Trump is absolutely hamstringing us for the next few decades.
It's hilarious because if someone had told him China was subsidizing the panels and so we were getting great 'deal' on them, he'd probably have gone for it.
Comment Re:It's bots and ragebait, thats why (Score 1) 107
It's funny how everyone is a "bot" when they post something. Generally, when that is said, the person responding has nothing useful to counter the post so goes with some generic nonsense to make themselves sound like they know something.
Comment Re: Wait...? (Score 2) 101
I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.
Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 120
It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.
Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.
If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.
Comment Here's a different take (Score 3, Interesting) 19
In short, she was so excited to have hit her dream job at the age of 40, that work-life balance never entered the picture. Now she's a multi-milionaire who will, probably, spend the rest of her life struggling to have something approaching a normal life.
Comment Quid Pro Quo (Score 1) 115
In fairness, while America may lose a Nobel prize winning chemist, they'll pick up several South African Nazis.