Security and legal implications of the data bandwidth wall, part 0

Had a link sent in (hat tip to Alastair) with a story that perfectly illustrates the data bandwidth wall, our ability to act in a legal manner with respect to it. There are broader implications, and … to us … something of a surprising connection to the company. And a serious indictment of the current US government procurement process. This story has EPIC FAILURE (for the US government) written all over it, for multiple reasons. In a nutshell, there are real costs to making poor storage and computing choices, and some of those costs can be profound to … not just content holders … but law enforcement, and by extension … national security. The connection to the company deals with an opportunity we were working on with a reseller about 1.5 years ago. Reseller didn’t like the margins we could offer, and offered the agency (mentioned in this article, and the same labs doing the specific operations we were bidding for) a far more expensive and therefore profitable to the reseller, system. Too bad it was also (obviously) more than an order of magnitude slower. Imagine if US federal government got to buy what they actually needed without intermediaries to sell them things that made the intermediaries rich, with a budget guideline (yeah, I know, fantasy at many levels, and it requires that we have a budget passed by congress and signed by the president among other things … which hasn’t been the case since Mr. Obama was elected). This would require a serious rethinking of the GSA among other things … which … after the recent GSA scandal, is probably a really good idea. I’ll have to post up later. Off to enjoy my fathers day morning/afternoon with the family, and then I’ll get this up.