Common Paradox Tech Blog

Major Tom (not his real name) is a ground controller at a United States Air Force Base. He wrote to us because he and his military colleagues are extremely frustrated with Windows Vista. Here’s his hated BSOD and his story.

I’m so tired of this. I can’t believe that I’m part of the most advanced and expensive military organization in the world, but I can’t keep my computer from crashing all the time. All because of a faulty ATI driver. I’m not the only one at the base with the same problem. Or outside the base: 90% of the Department of Defense uses Windows machines for high priority work on a day-to-day basis.

I am a ground controller at the [EDITED] Air Force Base, currently using a Excel spreadsheet to control critical information on our fighter jets. Through the day I have to fill and report on many things, which have to be available in real time, at any time. When I got this new computer I was happy until, all of a sudden, crash. Blue Screen of Death. Information lost, time wasted, you know the drill.

It turns out that we have a fault with the ATI driver. Unfortunately, we no longer have any way to fix this ourselves, since all administration duties are handled through an IT desk in a different country, where they create a work order that can take weeks, depending on its priority.

So there you have it. We Fight for Freedom, but Windows Vista salutes us one way or another in the downward direction every other day. Sad, but true.

Honestly, I don’t know what surprises me more about this story. The fact that he is having such problems, that the USAF uses Excel for any task, or that their technical problems haves to go through a help desk in another country.

Do you have other computing or tech support horror stories? Write to us.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit group dedicated to defending the freedoms of individuals in the digital age, thinks the U.S. government may be violating the privacy of individuals who post content to Facebook and Twitter.

The organization has filed suit in San Francisco’s U.S. District Court, Northern District, against the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in order to get “information concerning the government’s use of social-networking websites for investigative and data gathering purposes to help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens’ privacy rights and associated legal protections.”

According to the complaint, EFF is aware that the government is using content posted to social media sites in their investigations. After their initial requests for more information and documentation on the specific policies around these activities went unanswered, the EFF began seeking a court order to force the government’s hand in full disclosure.

One of the incidents cited in the complaint was the widely publicized FBI search of an activist’s home, which came after the man in question used radio scanners to post the movements of police on Twitter during the G-20 Summit.

From the complaint:

“Although the Federal Government clearly uses social-networking websites to collect information, often for laudable reasons, it has not clarified the scope of its use of social-networking websites or disclosed what restrictions and oversight is in place to prevent abuse.”

While it should come as no surprise that the government would be monitoring  social media sites for information (earlier in the year the White House sought to hire a social media archivist, while the CIA invested in a social media monitoring firm), it does seem that the EFF has a valid complaint, and that the public should know the scope of the government’s monitoring activities.

The full 8-page complaint is embedded below. We’re curious to see how this all plays out, so we’ll keep you posted on new developments.

Social Networking FOIA Complaint Final

[via Bloomberg]

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: EFF, lawsuit, social media monitoring, trending, Trending Stories, US Government

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense, is hosting a contest to find red balloons. The balloons, numbering ten, will be scattered across the continental United States on one day: December 5. And the contest, which pays $40,000 to the person or team that finds all ten, is intended to study the Internet is used for social cooperation.

This contest is the fourth sponsored by DARPA; the first three intended to advance the technology for autonomous vehicles. Dr. Peter Lee, a computer scientist for DARPA, says he’s not quite sure how people will respond to the hunt for the balloons, which will be visible from public roadways. He anticipates both cooperation among teammates, as well as subterfuge among competitors to gain advantage.

The question here is not so much why DARPA is hosting a contest to see how teams use the web for social cooperation, but what they plan to do with the data they collect from the venture. It could be a means of sharpening data mining techniques introduced post-September 11 to ferret out potential terrorists. Or, possibly, to identify models of optimal social interaction that can be used to better prepare U.S. defensive capability.

Whatever the purpose, the choice of red for the balloons seems a bit awkward, dredging up memories of the Cold War and Nena’s “99 Luftballons.”

Image Credit: Moules Frites/Flickr

Apparently the Department of Defense believes that PS3s are a better value when it comes to supercomputers than IBM products specifically designed for the purpose. Granted recent price drops probably didn’t hurt in justifying a 2,200 console order either.

This isn’t the first time that the DoD is using PS3 consoles for supercomputing. In fact, these 2,200 units are going to be added to an existing Linux cluster of 336 PS3s used by the United States Air Force. According to Justification Review Documents, the purchase is all about getting the best value out the DoD’s budget:

With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

I’m all for balancing cost and features, but isn’t it just a bit curious that someone thought to save on upgrading the supercomputer just after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released? [Ars Technica via Boing Boing]

coondoggie writes “A radiation-proof Cisco router was sent into space today aboard an Intelsat satellite with the goal of setting up military communications from space. The router/satellite combo is a key part of the US Department of Defense’s Internet Routing In Space (IRIS) project, which aims to route IP voice, video and data traffic between satellites in space in much the same way packets are moved on the ground, reducing delays, saving on capacity and offering greater network flexibility, Cisco stated.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes “Cyber attacks on the US Department of Defense — many of them coming from China — have jumped sharply in 2009, a US congressional committee has reported. Citing data provided by the US Strategic Command, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that there were 43,785 malicious cyber incidents targeting Defense systems in the first half of the year. That’s a big jump. In all of 2008, there were 54,640 such incidents. If cyber attacks maintain this pace, the yearly increase will be around 60 percent. The full report (PDF) is available online.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is exactly what the world needs: Another taser. This one can be fired using a standard 40-millimeter grenade launcher, which gives it a 197-foot range—three times the range of the XREP. Supposedly, it’s non-lethal. Some disagree:

There is a known risk of severe injury from impact projectiles, either from blunt force at short ranges or from hitting a sensitive part of the body.

That’s what security researcher Neil Davison says. Given the strength of the grenade launcher, it sounds logical. On the other side, Wes Burgei—an engineer at the US Department of Defense’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate—says that the device is designed to “reduce the projectile’s mass and mitigate the impact forces on the target through innovative projectile-nose design.” Whatever. I bet the target would prefer this to a bullet round.

The development cost for the military taser is $2.5 million, but it’ll be totally free for soon-to-be-incapacitated victims worldwide. [New Scientist]

sean_nestor writes with this excerpt from The Register: “Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. ‘That’s the day,’ Kleinrock tells The Reg, ‘the internet uttered its first words.’ …A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word ‘log’ — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the ‘log’ and SRI would respond with ‘in.’ But after UCLA typed the ‘l’ and the ‘o,’ the ‘g’ caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. … ‘So the first message was “Lo,” as in “Lo and Behold,”‘ Kleinrock says. ‘We couldn’t have asked for a better message — and we didn’t plan it.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dwheeler writes “The US Department of Defense has just released a new official memo on open source software: ‘Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS).’ (The memo should be up shortly on this DoD site.) This memo is important for anyone who works with the DoD, including contractors, on software and systems that include software; it may influence many other organizations as well. The DoD had released a memo back in 2003, but ‘misconceptions and misinterpretations… have hampered effective DoD use and development of OSS.’ The new memo tries to counter those misconceptions and misinterpretations, and is very positive about OSS. In particular, it lists a number of potential advantages of OSS, and recommends that in certain cases the DoD release software as OSS.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.