Schwartz Comments On NSA/Sun OpenSolaris Collaboration

sean_nestor writes to mention that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz took a bit of time recently to comment on last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems would be partnering closely with the NSA for security research surrounding OpenSolaris. Rather than the typical loads of legalese and confidentiality agreements Sun and the NSA are claiming that this move is more about the NSA joining the OpenSolaris community than anything else. I guess only time will tell.

Government spooks helped Microsoft build Vista

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Helping a Vole out of a hole
By Nick Farrell: Tuesday, 09 January 2007, 2:26 PM

THE USA GOVERNMENT'S cryptologic organisation, the National Security Agency, has admitted that it is behind some of the security changes to Microsoft's operating system Vista.
According to the Washington Post, the agency which was once so secret that it was jokingly referred to as 'No such Agency' has admitted making 'unspecified contributions' to Vista.

Tony Sager, the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group, told the Post that it was the agency's intention to help everyone these days.

The NSA used a red and a blue team to pull apart the software. The red team posed as "the determined, technically competent adversary" to disrupt, corrupt or steal information. The Blue team helped Defense Department system administrators with Vista's configuration.

Vole said that it has sought help from the NSA over the last four years. Apparently its skills can be seen in the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.

The assistance is at the US taxpayers' expense, although the NSA says it all makes perfect sense. Not only is the NSA protecting United States business, its own Defense Department uses VoleWare so it is in the government's interest to make sure it is as secure as possible.

Microsoft is not the only one to tap the spooks. Apple, with its Mac OSX operating system, and Novell with its SUSE Linux also asked the NSA what it thought of their products. The NSA is quite good at finding weapons of mass destruction that are not there.

SEOpenSolaris

[krlynch]

If you read between the lines, and know anything about SELinux (also orginating inside the NSA), you come away with the impression that this is SELinux ported to OpenSolaris. Since the code will be as open as the rest of the OpenSolaris code, it doesn't sound like that big a deal to me ...

Re:Great! I liked Solaris.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it's Slashdot's reason, but here's my reason: underlined text isn't a typeface. Underlining is a historical artifact of the days when manuscripts were typed or handwritten before being sent off to be typeset. Typesetters traditionally had two faces at a given size: a standard one and one with emphasis (for naming titles of books and so on). The emphasis face was typically italic or bold, and the way the author of the manuscript indicated he wanted said face was by manually underlining the appropriate text with a pen. Underlined text never appeared in the final product.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underline [wikipedia.org]

Re:Government spooks helped Microsoft build Vista

[failedlogic]

I guess the most obvious question: If help was provided with XP and Vista in security, why so many security patches?