Why military should use Linux

“Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT.” … and … “Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT,” Redman said. “If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application. If we used Unix, we would have a system that has less of a tendency to go down.”

http://blog.eracc.com/2011/10/08/open-source-why-military-forces-should-use-linux/

 

It's difficult to believe that even national defence is not beyond being pressured into doing things that shouldn't be done.

 

National defense is the biggest place for lobbying, weapons, software, hardware all are up for grabs and political patronage plays big there.

 

Yup they do, linuxforall sums it up above nicely. Involved in hardware and software re for clients of this nature, you'll also see a lot of grouping for example 'someone' may use a lot of Unix based, a lot of BSD or Linux, someone else NT or Linux legacy, embedded systems - all of it counts. UK military intelligence use a lot of VMWare and Linux.

 

The movie Pentagon Wars aptly demonstrates the lobbying in Defense.

 

Politics infect everything within the defense sector, which is why we're at war in two countries we could have obliterated, why there are viruses affecting drone fleets and why many things don't get done that could get done very easily, if not for meddling politicians and other non-security/military departments. There are places NT/Windows does not belong, yet I've seen it time and time again. What makes it equally worse is that applications are woefully out of date or no longer supported at all. If there is any silver lining, it's that agencies like the CIA/NSA and their foreign equivalents avoid these systems like the plague. However, even they are not immune to the meddling and destructive nature of politics.

 

hi,

Already done by the military division of the french police since quite four years:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/...aves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars

A special study here:
http://www.osor.eu/studies/docs/IDABC.OSOR.casestudy.Gendarmerie.10.pdf

Rgds

 

I'm pretty sure the French Navy changed to Ubuntu after Conficker sank it at one point.

 

Navy and Airforce if this is to be believed:

Guess some don't like to switch voluntarily and before a bitter experience.

Plus there are presumably pro bono self-appointed lobbyists all over the place who repeatedly caution against switching unless one is absolutely sure that everything will work absolutely perfectly with the new system even though the old one is not exactly near-perfect either, a point conveniently ignored.

 

Ultimate example of lobbying, Philippines dept of edu declares open source costiler than MS.

http://techrights.org/2011/10/07/edgi-suspicions/

 

That article smells BS IMO.
How can they really say moving from XP to Ubuntu was very EASY?
I'm not defending either side here but that is BS.

You're really going to tell me adapting XP to Vista requires lots of training while it's basically all the same and XP to Ubuntu is easy when everything is different!

 

IDK why they don't just develop their own OS.

 

I guess it's not that easy but they could do it if they really wanted to

 

on a related note:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Russia-issues-order-to-switch-government-IT-to-Linux/

 

Which article are you referring to? I couldn't find what you claim in the link provided by the OP.

 

While talking about being on or off topic, I'm not sure that the issue is about ease of use. The issue is security, isn't it? So let's not digress or get diverted ...

 

Then again security through obfuscation rarely seems to be the best idea. It might be better for them to simply adopt another project and branch off from it. IDK about BSD licensing but if it's security they're after I'd go with that.

 

ot posts removed. stay on subject please. Thank you

 

This one

 

I don't think that's BS then if there was someone to handhold them during the migration. I did it myself by just reading up first... and seeing how I liked the live CD. But that's all OT!

 

Lets face some facts here.
The job of the ICT administrators is to ensure the system is safe and in this case the administrators failed. if the administrators didn't secure the windows system what makes you think they can secure a linux /unix based system?
microsoft provides plenty of tools to block removable media and prevent unauthorised installations.

if the keylogger was meant to be on the system for legitimate reasons of the US goverment they would of found out and would know not to remove it. if its not meant to be there then how did it get there? usb stick /other removable media is likely since the computer is meant to be connected to a secure network.

 

Yes, but switching to Linux is their scape goat from being fired for doing such a terrible job at keeping their Windows installs locked down. I mean c'mon, if we make the assumption that it wasn't connected to the internet (let's hope it wasn't as it shouldn't have been) that means it must have become infected via autorun/USB. Which means they are either still using Windows XP... or turned it on in Windows 7. Both are just as guilty of bad admin work as each other. Or if they can't move off XP, disable autorun in it? It's not hard. If the average Wilders user can lock down their PC I'm sure they can manage it.

At least when they move to Linux they can disguise that shoddy work, as the default settings in Linux are far more locked down than Windows, aimed at ease-of-use.

 

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/07/1828220/us-drone-fleet-hit-by-computer-virus

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=309352

wondering if its linux

 

There are barely any ITW malware targeting Linux, maybe it is possible if it's a targeted attack.

 

Military using linux - well, they did unix and arpanet and whatnot in the 70s, so it's ok.

As to virus infecting cockpits, I wonder how you infect cockpits? You sneeze? You cough? Is it the plastic that is infected? Keystrokes in a cockpit? Cockpit of a unmanned drone? Does this sound logical to you? Whose keystrokes? That of the non-existent pilot? His sms over facebook as he inputs the coordinates into the mil16-standard bus? Oh, wait, the pilot is not there, so this kind of creates the divide by zero problem.

Populistic titles - and they work, slashdotted, fact - seem to draw crowds, but if I were an editor in chief and one of my bitc ... journalists wrote something like that, I would force him to write all his future articles on commodore.

Virus - undesired piece of code. So ... Boring.

Cheers,
Mrk