Untrustworthy Army Computing

[andysocial]

Originally published at BunkBlog. You can comment here or there.

The Army is mandating Trusted Computing for their new machine purchases. Of course, Trusted Computing only works with Microsoft Vista, which is vapor at this time. And, doesn’t having to trust Microsoft instead of you users imply that you believe the soldiers you have trained are less responsible than a large faceless blameless corporation?

I watch the military system administrators and their contract counterparts struggle with Windows 2000 and XP on a daily basis. Our unclassified computers currently have at least two errors popping up every time we log into them. They also reset the internet homepage and proxy settings seemingly at random. The standard response to almost any error on Windows is, “we don’t know why it’s doing that.  Reboot it.” I can just imagine when the SysAds are no longer even capable of doing anything on the machines that Microsoft hasn’t previously approved…We’re doomed.