I wonder how much dirt Microsoft did on the dl to get that contract. Backdooring ElectionGuard?
Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
181–190 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#182I wonder how azure employees feel about this.
Former Microsoftie here. I imagine there will be a lot of unrest inside the company about this, and I think things are about to get tricky for Nadella. Up until now he's been largely able to be above a lot of the labor disputes that have been roiling the other FAANGs recently, but that's mostly out of luck: Microsoft's business doesn't involve arbitrating culture war disputes on social media or search reuslts, nor em…
Maybe.. Microsoft is providing the infrastructure here and the DevOps I guess.. the rest of it is, the applications will be written by contractors etc... Maybe some of the AI technologies developed by MSFT will be used but maybe other providers will port to the Azure platform. At the moment US ships run Windows. Lots of dual use infrastructure so I can't see a major dilemma. Certain AI technologies and applications of them.. maybe.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#183Somewhat related to the ancillary debates around DoD contracting. A very well written longread "In Defense of the War on Terror" I'm certainly in no position to validate its truth claims. But in the current climate. With Google withdrawing its bid at behest of its employees. Protests at AWS conferences over involvement with ICE. Peter Thiel arguing Silicon Valley companies should "do more" in the form of defense part…
SV companies should do more if they want a seat at the table. Otherwise defense contractors will pick up the slack.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#184Partly explains why Bill Gates characterizes Edward Snowden the way he does (though he might not have the same judgment for someone like James Clapper who lied to congress)
https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/14/bill-gates-says-snowden-is...
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-Texan, I would like to ask more about point B. I myself am increasingly of the opinion that while government, national and State (I’m a Californian) has a role, it has unfortunately carved out too big of a chunk and allocated itself too many roles, often on the most specious of arguments. The idea of a legislature that meets infrequently, and where politician is a hat, not a job title, actually looks pretty…
Given our respective points of origin, I don't know if I'll be able to give you an explanation that will be satisfactory, but I'll try. First, the Texas government was designed, post-Reconstruction, to give as little authority as possible to the state government and to move government as close to the citizens as possible. That's all well and good. Had we stuck with that model, I would have few complaints, but we didn…
I'm very much on the left, but I can see a benefit to the sunset bill, as a heartbeat to ensure liveness of the legislature. Congress has been profoundly gridlocked this decade, but they absolutely must keep reauthorizing the budget, or the nation grinds to a halt. Although we've had a few short government shutdowns caused by this, passing a budget has been effective at forcing all parties to sit down and vote together. It guarantees at least one bill passes.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#186> ...unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard way that lots of their power comes from Canada. Interesting that this myth is still alive. It started with Bush falsely claiming the 2003 blackout was Canada's fault before an investigation had even been done. Here is the actual postmortem report. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...
Nowhere does that say that Bush blamed Canada at any time, nor can I find examples through 3 pages of search. (I found "Schumer blames Bush" but nothing the other direction.)
Perhaps you confuse Petaki with Bush? He blamed Ontario at one point.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#187Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA. The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay f…
The electrical grid is one of the more subtle, but critically important points I hadn't considered. I think the DoD's decades long reliance on AD and Windows in general gave MSFT a pretty huge advantage as well. Imagine trying to shift away from that Windows only world in any meaningful way in an organization and bureaucracy of that size. What a nightmare.
Amazon does provide seamless AD integration into the cloud though. It's just that Microsoft has the advantage of being the creator of AD and thus the automatic name association.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prepare to be disappointed at a season ending cliffhanger... all over again.
This show felt like so many other shows on American TV in the last decade: somebody had the core of a good idea, but the writers had no idea how to turn that into a show. The first couple episodes of Jericho were tantalizing. The interesting part was the world and the geopolitical situation, but then so little about that actually changed over the course of the following episodes, it was just a bunch of small town pol…
> I'll catch hell for this, but Battlestar Galactica was the same way.
I just rewatched the mini-series and first few episodes of Season 1 of BSG. While, I remember thinking the same thing at the time, it was very obvious the second time around that for large arcs, the writers didn't have much of a plan. If I remember correctly though, there was always a lot of uncertainty about how many seasons they show would have, so it was difficult to plan more than a season at a time. It was also SciFi's most expensive show at the time, IIRC. They had a similar problem with Farscape... it was a big (and expensive) show, which stressed the network financially.
BSG is a great premise, but hard to come up with an overarching story arc that makes sense or offers closure. But sometimes you just have to let the writers go with things to see where they end up. There were some really good episodes later in the series, even with the filler.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#189Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#190I wonder how azure employees feel about this.
This is an important question and also an example of how Satya Nadella played his job really well. By clearly stating that Microsoft will not deny democratic governments access to the latest technology, he deftly put stop to any potential discussions about tech mis-use (e.g. like the employee outburst at Google).
Not saying decision is good or bad but in terms of setting clarity this was really critical.