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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Thats an interesting website and its good that people are keeping an eye on the Military Spending.. with the size of their budgets, you would hope that someone would, and I suspect that sites very existence supports the suspicion that a lot of military money *does* go in directions that it shouldnt
I dont quite see too much on the site that conclusively *disproves* my admittedly unsupported-by-hard-evidence assertion though..
Under Procurement, there is a section about seller influence - where choice of seller is based upon factors that are considered irrelevant to the "model answer". I note the US scores just 2 out of 5 for that one, and Australia only scores 3 out 5.
Its human nature after all.. if you have the choice of spending money with your local friends vs sending it to some "others" who might be on the other side in a scuffle, the instinct is to support your locals.. and by doing so you keep the balance of trade on the good side, provided that the local product is not demonstrably significantly inferior to the competition of course.
The Samsung vs Apple thing was just me showing the disparity between US judges that supported Apple vs Judges elsewhere around the world.
The availability of realistic alternatives to MS and Apples products has only been around for 10 or so years, it takes most beauracracies, especially military ones, longer than that to decide to even think about the issue, so the lack of military open source users at this point isnt particularly suprising to me.
Interestingly however, the US agency that does focus significantly on computer power - the NSA - has taken the trouble to release a tweaked version of Linux - "SE Linux" (Security Enhanced) based on kernel and module modifications - made possible by open source software - to create an OS that demonstrates the requirements they supposedly want to see in a secure OS, (hmm)..
whilst on the other hand there seems to be a reasonable amount of evidence around that all versions of Windows have had keys in them that allow NSAKEY (google it for researcher evidence) signed cryptographic routines to be easily inserted into the low level windows drivers without the end users awareness.
This is the sort of antics that cause the inherent distrust between users of OS's and Suppliers of same, and why other countries will likely be doing their best to move towards more demonstrably open os's as soon as they can do so.
If I had hard evidence to support my suspicions, then I would likely be being called as a witness in a corruption case. I admit my suspicions are just that. Suspicions based on my knowledge of human nature.. not bashing of any particular country. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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Thu Mar 28, 2013 10:13 pm |
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