4 ms·

If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications. How hard is it to wr

If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications. How hard is it to write an email client? With some calendar? Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible? Wasn't gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don't think it took years or billions to get up and running. I think you could have a tidy and secure webmail built by half a dozen people randomly chosen from Hacker News in six months. Sure it might not be as all singing and dancing as the oh-so-wonderful Microsoft Outlook but then again it might actually be better for the task in hand - facilitating communication for a government. Sometimes people have got to try rather than be all helpless. I am all for software re-use, open source and everything else deemed good software engineering, but, for a government wanting to keep their communications private some consideration has to be given to 'how hard can it be to write an email client?'

InclinedPlane 13y ago
You'd think so. But we're still in an age of software wizardry. It's easy to write great software if you exist within an organization where software dev. is already a core competency. But if that's not the case and you need to procure high quality software without already having the expertise in house then things get hairy really fast. Not that it's the best example, but look at healthcare.gov, it's a buggy mess at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. I suspect that Brazil's home grown mail system is also going to be a buggy, low-quality mess at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.
alipang 13y ago
Well, one problem is when the client is a government. Healthcare.gov can not exactly be described as rocket science either (even less so I'd imagine), but ended up costing a nice little sum of money, while also not even working.
- vkou 13y ago
  No, interfacing with half of the stone-age machinery that Healthcare.gov has to is not rocket science. The closer analogy would be pulling teeth. I'd also daresay that GMail is only possible thanks to Google infrastructure - which was not built over 20% time.
vacri 13y ago
Calendaring is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve. It sounds trivial, but the devil is in the details.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  The main problem is that humans will be the one using the calendar system ;)
mseebach 13y ago
> How hard is it to write an email client? > With some calendar? > Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible? Oh dearie. Thus began every single failed multi-million-dollar software project in the history of software. > Wasn't gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don't think it took years or billions to get up and running. A: The feature-set of GMail as is released in 2004 is unlikely to impress someone used to Outlook/Exchange B: What a correctly motivated Google-quality engineer can cook up in a few years (which is apparently how long GMail was in development before release) has little to no correlation to what a government can procure from a systems integrator. Also, I don't recall the calendar being worth much back them. Maybe, maybe, maybe if they hired Google-grade engineers, paid them Google salaries and gave them Google-freedom to work on this, they might be able to pull it off. But that's a lot harder than it sounds. EDIT: > do something on its own about securing government communications It's not hard to secure an email installation - its interface to the internet at large is super small and well understood (SMTP). Most likely NSA grabs the mail they want from outside the installation by sniffing unencrypted network traffic. A worthwhile effort, and one quite suitable for a government even, is to get people to encrypt their emails.
- guiambros 13y ago
  Oh c'mon. The Gmail of 2013 is not that different from the Gmail of 2004 (unless you count Priority Inbox as an advancement). There's really nothing complex or fancy in developing a bare bones secure email system. And keep in mind these poor souls are using Lotus Notes (!), so it can't get much worse than that. Also, it's not that it has to be built entirely from scratch. They will likely re-use existing ideas from other systems, and even (licenses permitting) other open source solutions as a starting point. All in all, I wish we had more governments stepping up against this whole US spying mess. The real long term solution is not to have each government developing their own proprietary email systems, but for the US to be more transparent and stop the illegal spying. Sadly, this will have to get worse before it gets better. We'll probably watch a few years of increasing distrust and strained relationships, before governments start to come to terms with the US again.
mpyne 13y ago
> If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications. If that was really the case then the U.S. government (which has effectively 2 separate air forces which are each 10x bigger than any other nation's) should be kicking ass at delivering IT projects of all sorts.
walshemj 13y ago
Quite hard to reinvent an entire infrastructure (which I doubt is what they are doing) If they are writing a brand new clean room new mail standard (plus all the ancillary bits directory non repudiation key handling the whole nine yards) - it will be amusing to watch the CF that results.
rbanffy 13y ago
> How hard is it to write an email client? Not much, but unnecessary. There are open-source solutions that can be security audited, fortified and improved. > With some calendar? Devilishly hard.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

You'd think so. But we're still in an age of software wizardry. It's easy to write great software if you exist within an organization where software dev. is already a core competency. But if that's not the case and you need to procure high quality software without already having the expertise in house then things get hairy really fast. Not that it's the best example, but look at healthcare.gov, it's a buggy mess at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. I suspect that Brazil's home grown mail system is also going to be a buggy, low-quality mess at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

alipang 13y ago

Well, one problem is when the client is a government. Healthcare.gov can not exactly be described as rocket science either (even less so I'd imagine), but ended up costing a nice little sum of money, while also not even working.

vkou 13y ago
No, interfacing with half of the stone-age machinery that Healthcare.gov has to is not rocket science. The closer analogy would be pulling teeth. I'd also daresay that GMail is only possible thanks to Google infrastructure - which was not built over 20% time.

vacri 13y ago

Calendaring is actually a pretty difficult problem to solve. It sounds trivial, but the devil is in the details.

dwaltrip 13y ago
The main problem is that humans will be the one using the calendar system ;)

mseebach 13y ago

> How hard is it to write an email client? > With some calendar? > Is it complete rocket surgery or something in the realms of feasibly possible? Oh dearie. Thus began every single failed multi-million-dollar software project in the history of software. > Wasn't gmail some 20%-er time by a couple of guys at Google? I don't think it took years or billions to get up and running. A: The feature-set of GMail as is released in 2004 is unlikely to impress someone used to Outlook/Exchange B: What a correctly motivated Google-quality engineer can cook up in a few years (which is apparently how long GMail was in development before release) has little to no correlation to what a government can procure from a systems integrator. Also, I don't recall the calendar being worth much back them. Maybe, maybe, maybe if they hired Google-grade engineers, paid them Google salaries and gave them Google-freedom to work on this, they might be able to pull it off. But that's a lot harder than it sounds. EDIT: > do something on its own about securing government communications It's not hard to secure an email installation - its interface to the internet at large is super small and well understood (SMTP). Most likely NSA grabs the mail they want from outside the installation by sniffing unencrypted network traffic. A worthwhile effort, and one quite suitable for a government even, is to get people to encrypt their emails.

guiambros 13y ago
Oh c'mon. The Gmail of 2013 is not that different from the Gmail of 2004 (unless you count Priority Inbox as an advancement). There's really nothing complex or fancy in developing a bare bones secure email system. And keep in mind these poor souls are using Lotus Notes (!), so it can't get much worse than that. Also, it's not that it has to be built entirely from scratch. They will likely re-use existing ideas from other systems, and even (licenses permitting) other open source solutions as a starting point. All in all, I wish we had more governments stepping up against this whole US spying mess. The real long term solution is not to have each government developing their own proprietary email systems, but for the US to be more transparent and stop the illegal spying. Sadly, this will have to get worse before it gets better. We'll probably watch a few years of increasing distrust and strained relationships, before governments start to come to terms with the US again.

mpyne 13y ago

> If a country is big enough to have an air force then it is big enough to do something on its own about securing government communications. If that was really the case then the U.S. government (which has effectively 2 separate air forces which are each 10x bigger than any other nation's) should be kicking ass at delivering IT projects of all sorts.

walshemj 13y ago

Quite hard to reinvent an entire infrastructure (which I doubt is what they are doing) If they are writing a brand new clean room new mail standard (plus all the ancillary bits directory non repudiation key handling the whole nine yards) - it will be amusing to watch the CF that results.

rbanffy 13y ago

> How hard is it to write an email client? Not much, but unnecessary. There are open-source solutions that can be security audited, fortified and improved. > With some calendar? Devilishly hard.