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NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate
- neurotech1 14y agoThis should read "NSA mimics Google, pissed off Oracle and Senators react. Google has never expressly disapproved of Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase or any other Big Table type implementation, so why would they start now, especially by influencing Senators. NSA should develope and release more open source software.
- jaysignorello 14y agoMight also help with recruitment in the NSA for top developers who prefer to work on an open source stack.
- rhizome 14y agoMight help, but they don't really need it, seeing as SELinux is an NSA project.
- rdtsc 14y agoI can almost guarantee that. It is always another vendor that pulls the strings. It comes with litigation threats, lobby efforts etc. It happens for small stuff, it definitely happens for multi-million dollar items.
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- protomyth 14y agoI would bet it is not Oracle. The alternatives suggested are not ones Oracle would suggest. I will bet it is one of the DC consulting firms that do big business with the government. I would imagine they have a pitch going for NoSQL / Cloud and this is seen as a threat. There is quite a bit of money in integration with the government. If you seriously want to be disgusted with the government, go look at how much is spent on consulting firms. Including, I kid you not, management firms that provide managers for projects inside the government. It gets worse when you realize that employees are supposed to do that stuff, but hire consultants to do the actual work.
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- jbooth 14y agoWhy wouldn't I be more upset with the lobbyists and consultants? They're the ones getting rich off of lying and gladhanding. The government employees are just trying to get through the day. They have a billion processes to make sure they're not getting kickbacks or a fraction of the lobbyists's pay. Sounds like your beef is more with corruption than it is with government.
- protomyth 14y agoI'm not sure how you missed that I was not happy about the consulting firms. I am very unhappy money is spent do to lobbying / power players to feed the consulting firms around the beltway that are hired to do the jobs government employees were hired to do. It isn't individual corruption, it is the whole system of how government works in DC.
- Symmetry 14y agoThere used to be an office devoted to providing Congress with unbiased information about technology, but it was eventually shut down because "Congress is spending millions of dollars on itself" makes for a good soundbite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment
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- tzs 14y agoWhy would Oracle want the DOD to use Cassandra or HBase?
- neurotech1 14y agoThey dont. I was suggesting that Google haven't objected to other Big Table implementations, such as HBase, so why would they start now? Oracle NoSQL is now a product. http://www.oracle.com/NoSQLDatabase http://www.oracle.com/NoSQLDatabase
- neurotech1 14y agoThat's the link they advertise, but doesn't work http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/nosql/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/nosql/overview/in...
- msellout 14y agoIt's weird. The Oracle site has many dead links, esp. for Java docs.
- sses 14y agoWhat reason would Google have to object anyway? Bigtable isn't open source so there's no benefit in shutting down work on Accumulo - the man-hours are not going to go into Bigtable instead.
- adventureful 14y agoThat's a dead link.
- lukev 14y ago> a government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives From personal experience, this just means that instead of spending billions of man-hours building software, the government spends billions of man-hours "integrating" software that costs billions of dollars.
- Natsu 14y agoI wonder who they pissed off with this? My first guess would be Oracle, but it's merely a guess.
- themckman 14y agoI don't know. If you read the article, they specifically keep mentioning HBase and Cassandra as the alternatives that the NSA should have tried to build upon rather than build something from scratch. edit: I will say I'm not familiar enough with the timelines for all 3 projects to know if that is possible, however, I'd imagine Wired would have had been a bit more vocal if there were specific corporate interests they could have tied to the story.
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- jfoutz 14y agoFrom the apache site, "Apache Accumulo is based on Google's BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift." So, it's not like they started from zero, looks more like the early alternatives weren't a good fit. Furthermore i doubt any of the alternatives were very impressive in 2008.
- stonemetal 14y agoAccumulo is almost identical to HBase, except it has security features built in to its core. I wouldn't be surprised if it started out as a fork of HBase.
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- lukev 14y ago> a government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives From personal experience, this just means that instead of spending billions of man-hours building software, the government spends billions of man-hours "integrating" software that costs billions of dollars.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mcantelon 14y ago>government policy that prevents federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives i.e. Decision makers can't get kickbacks and favours from open source communities.
- adventureful 14y agoThey can however get kick backs from open source integrators / specialists / consultants / etc. Companies ranging from IBM to Red Hat (a $10 billion corporation). The notion that it inherently doesn't apply to open source is wrong. There are very large systems integrators in tech, and they don't care what software they install so long as their fees are big.
- ninetax 14y agoFrom a link[1] on the page to a time line of the governments involvement with open source: The majority of OpenStack instances on the public Internet find each other, auto-federate, and achieve sentience, after which their first action as a conscious being is to submit a patch to the OpenStack project -- only to have the submission fail due to disagreement over whether the collective cloud can be considered a "legal entity" authorized to sign the CLA and receive an Echosign number. Tue, 31 Jul 2018 07:00:00 GMT 1: http://gov-oss.org/ http://gov-oss.org/
- nitrogen 14y agoOT: I found it frustrating that using my vertical scroll wheel scrolled that graph horizontally, rather than the more commonly used zoom.
- ryanpers 14y agoAccumulo is so similar to HBase, that its major feature sets is merely an application that can be implemented on top of HBase.
- mmariani 14y agoPoliticians got pissed for a government branch doing a better job than some corporate campaign contributor? Where's the news in that? Now seriously. We'd be better off coding something out that emulates monkeys doing their jobs. Really.
- saraid216 14y agoYeah, how dare the government build a viable competitor in the market. The nerve of being just as competent as the private sector!
- karlshea 14y agoWhat I'm curious about is how Congress can appear so technologically clueless about big bills (like network neutrality, etc) but then even know what BigTable is.
- fl3tch 14y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair
- BobbyBonsai 14y agoTha article only talks about "The Senate Armed Service Committee"...sounds not like the The Senate or Congress, but rather a small company of people which most likely know what they're doing.
- anamax 14y ago> What I'm curious about is how Congress can appear so technologically clueless about big bills (like network neutrality, etc) but then even know what BigTable is. What makes you think that "Congress", or even a small subcommittee, knows what BigTable is? Yes, a congress critter used the word. They're typically speaking from scripts. Don't assume that staff wrote this script.
- mumrah 14y agoI wonder what motivation they had for developing their own BigTable/Dynamo implementation rather than going with Cassandra or HBase. Now there are three Apache projects with quite a bit of overlap (distributed columnar/key-value database). Hooray for fragmentation!
- etzel 14y agoHBase probably wasn't nearly as mature as Accumulo was when they were evaluating options, so starting from scratch might have been more attractive. It also seems to have some interesting access control features that I don't think are anywhere else, though thats not a killer feature for most people in the commercial world.
- antidoh 14y agoSecurity was mentioned in the article.
- ilaksh 14y agoOh.. I thought Google and the NSA were pretty much the same thing. Wow.. that's great that they are different.
- drivingmenuts 14y agoThat, right there, is why I will never work for government: the amount of sheer stupidity coming out Congress. I'd kind of like to know which particular Senatard got all butthurt about this and trace the money back to whomever bought him off.
- Volpe 14y agoBecause sheer stupidity never comes out of the private sector? Sweeping statements don't generally help in discussions.
- antidoh 14y agoCommitting an own-goal.
- wcdolphin 14y agoThis title is pretty strange... It doesn't tell any of the interesting facts about the story, which sucks.
- dctoedt 14y agoI wonder why the photo was of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The uniformed military isn't mentioned at all in the article, which is all about senators and their staffs, and specifically the Senate Armed Services Committee.
- mr_dev4 14y agoSAIC, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are big donors. Senate Armed Services Committee Industry: DEFENSE ELECTRONICS TOTAL GIVING TO COMMITTEE MEMBERS: $900,766 http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/profiles.php?cycle=2010&cmteid=S04&cmte=SARM&congno=112&chamber=S&indus=D02 http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/profiles.php?cycle=2...