Author Topic: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers  (Read 11187 times)

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Offline G7PSK

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #25 on: February 21, 2016, 03:27:21 pm »
According to this guy (Stan Gibilisco) the only secure computer would be one inside a Faraday cage and without an internet connection).
Having just got a Lenovo tablet with windows 10 given to me I can say that it is very hard to be sure that the thing is secure as soon as I turn off things like the WiFi  sharing Microsoft sends another update and turns it back on,yes its the home edition but the  device was a present over which I had no choice. 
 

Offline dannyf

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #26 on: February 21, 2016, 03:37:46 pm »
Quote
the only secure computer would be one inside a Faraday cage and without an internet connection

The most secure computer is one that doesn't exist;

The 2nd most secure computer is one that has never been powered on;
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Offline BurnedResistor

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #27 on: February 21, 2016, 10:51:44 pm »
I wonder how much testing they actually did. You would think that there would be a rigorous testing procedure for running software on 4 million computers, but half of me is not quite convinced.

It also probably depends on how similar the systems are...
 

Offline rdl

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #28 on: February 22, 2016, 12:35:56 am »
It would be surprising if off-the-shelf copies of Windows 10 were used. A highly modified, custom version is more likely and Microsoft would probably do much of the work. I wonder if they will get a nice juicy support contract also.
 

Offline crispy_tofu

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #29 on: February 22, 2016, 06:12:11 am »
I wonder if they will get a nice juicy support contract also.
Judging by how the US Navy used to pay $9 million a year for Microsoft to support Windows XP, I think they will.
 

Offline BobbyK

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #30 on: February 22, 2016, 07:06:12 am »
I used to work at a large oil company about 15 years ago, and all of our PCs and laptops had a very special version of windows 2000 running on them. Many things that were possible on my home computer were simply not possible on the company machine. Everything was logged, and we even had a different update cycle than other users. I guess a company with 100K installations can ask for special favors from Microsoft.
 

Offline bitshift

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #31 on: February 22, 2016, 11:53:35 am »
I say awesome. Now the hackers can finally tell us if the moon landings were real :D











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Offline bitshift

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #32 on: February 22, 2016, 11:55:44 am »
I guess a company with 100K installations can ask for special favors from Microsoft.

From a software perspective, I would love to know how Microsoft managed these "custom" builds. Even with modern source control tools, something as complex as Windows must be a nightmare to manage across even a handful of custom versions.
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Offline isaiahA

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #33 on: February 22, 2016, 12:23:23 pm »
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The government is the organization doing the spying. So they don't really care if they are able to spy on their own computers...
:-DD
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Offline Mechanical Menace

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #34 on: February 22, 2016, 02:06:46 pm »
I guess a company with 100K installations can ask for special favors from Microsoft.

From a software perspective, I would love to know how Microsoft managed these "custom" builds. Even with modern source control tools, something as complex as Windows must be a nightmare to manage across even a handful of custom versions.

Most of those custom versions will probably be very similar and *just* use a different combination of build flags than the retail builds, enabling extra lockdowns and logging and probably disabling an awful lot of what is in retail Windows.
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Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #35 on: February 22, 2016, 05:58:04 pm »
Also, there is quite a lot that can be controlled by administrative settings and domain scripts.  If you've only ever used Windows Home, you might have no idea... :)

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Offline free_electron

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #36 on: February 22, 2016, 06:38:06 pm »
it's better than operating systems that use glibc .. apparently those all got bit in their collective asses by some really nasty bug ...
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Offline SeanB

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #37 on: February 22, 2016, 06:53:22 pm »
it's better than operating systems that use glibc .. apparently those all got bit in their collective asses by some really nasty bug ...

True, but a fix was available in a few hours for it. You do not have to wait for the second Tuesday of some month in the hopes that there would be a fix for it, and that it would actually work and not require another fix the following month, and then a fix for the fix to fix the bug but which reintroduces the first bug a month later.
 

Offline MrSlack

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #38 on: February 22, 2016, 07:08:19 pm »
it's better than operating systems that use glibc .. apparently those all got bit in their collective asses by some really nasty bug ...

Says the voice of someone who has clearly never been up to their eyes in 4 million lines of crap that had to evolve through Win32, MFC, ATL, DCOM all on VC++ with a last minute panic rewrite in C#/winforms/WPF and WCF that talks to a database that doesn't understand this like UTF-8 properly.

There is NOTHING that is good inside Windows. Not a thing. I've seen the source code under their shared source agreements (apart from the CSP implementation which is hidden away where only big defence companies can read it and exploit it). It's like reading through the diary of a crack smoking monkey that's been licking toads and has rusty heroin needles pointing out of everything. There's just hacks on top of hacks all the way to the bottom.

And when this all falls over we had to wait 7 YEARS for a fucking fix and that was a registry frig that was undocumented and we have to deploy via a GPO to 25,000 workstations in 34 countries. And they don't give a shit about you even at that scale, unless they think you're taking too much honey at which point the audit bears turn and eviscerate your corpse.

I literally have tears of joy when I type strace or drop a backtrace in gdb on those horrible glibc based operating systems which I use daily now. Oh it used mmap when I fopened! Joy to the world! Not HeapAlloc and three layers of shit before it hits the kernel Zw API which is entirely undocumented and requires voodoo meditation and SoftICE disassembly to work out what the fuck is going on. Die die die!!!!

To hell with them. 4 million turds.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 07:16:39 pm by MrSlack »
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #39 on: February 22, 2016, 07:42:18 pm »
it's better than operating systems that use glibc .. apparently those all got bit in their collective asses by some really nasty bug ...

True, but a fix was available in a few hours for it.
the bug was known for years before it got fixed .... so far for having the source ...
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Offline Mechanical Menace

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #40 on: February 24, 2016, 09:38:28 am »
it's better than operating systems that use glibc .. apparently those all got bit in their collective asses by some really nasty bug ...

True, but a fix was available in a few hours for it.
the bug was known for years before it got fixed .... so far for having the source ...

Months not years. It's existed for years but it seems no one noticed it until July last year. I just don't get why no one implemented a fix until it was "rediscovered," but given how much of our data is held on glibc based systems I guess we're lucky that you'd need to get a DNS server on the network to make use of this :-\

I can't think of any reason why such servers would use local* DNS though, but wouldn't surprise me if that's just a lack of imagination on my part.


*EDIT:Added "local"
« Last Edit: February 25, 2016, 10:58:50 pm by Mechanical Menace »
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Offline strangersoundTopic starter

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #41 on: February 25, 2016, 12:46:01 am »
It's like reading through the diary of a crack smoking monkey that's been licking toads and has rusty heroin needles pointing out of everything. There's just hacks on top of hacks all the way to the bottom.

 :-DD :-+
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Offline DimitriP

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Re: Windows 10 To Be Installed On 4 Million US Department of Defense Computers
« Reply #42 on: February 26, 2016, 12:56:47 am »
Quote
I can't think of any reason why such servers would use local* DNS though,

Something about a drunken monkey contributing to the "best practices" documentation
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