Displaying items by tag: Pentagon

It's highly unusual for any American website to write about the downsides posed by using Microsoft's innumerable products. One could extend that to tech sites in toto (iTWire is an exception: 1,2.).

The United States Department of Defence has issued a contract for cloud services to all four of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle, with a shared ceiling of $US 9 billion, or $AUD 13.38 billion, following its previous challenges with the JEDI project.

A Jewish employee of Google has said she intends to resign by the weekend due to what she claims are "retaliation, a hostile environment, and illegal actions by the company" after she protested against a US$1.2 billion (A$1.74 billion) cloud deal which Google signed with Amazon, the Israeli Government and military.

The man nominated to be the Operational Testing and Evaluation director at the US Department of Defence has expressed frustration at the fact that contracts with commercial cloud providers — like those sold by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google — do not provide room for independent cyber assessments.

Microsoft has won a contract which could be worth US$21.88 billion (A$28.58 billion) with the US Army to supply 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented reality headsets that will help soldiers who are at war.

A federal judge in the US has prevented a ban on the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, put in place in January, from being enforced, calling the decision "deeply flawed".

Despite protests from its staff in the past leading to its pulling out from controversial US Government projects, Google has now made a deal for its artificial technology to be used by the Trump administration to fortify the US-Mexico border, The Intercept reports, based on documents obtained under a FOIA request.

Why would security firms be keen to stop the advance of a brand of malware that is a major cash cow for them? Only a fool would want to stop that malware from making bigger and bigger inroads into the world of Windows users and that should be obvious to anyone with the IQ of the common cockroach.

Swedish telecommunications equipment vendor Ericsson claims that its products meet relevant requirements set by the Australian Government. The company was responding to a query as to why its partner in China, Panda Electronics, has been placed on a list drawn up by the US Department of Defence and said to contain firms that are either owned or controlled by the Chinese military.

Australian telecommunications companies will have to limit their 5G purchases to one company — Finland's Nokia — if the government accepts US advice about Chinese military connections to a number of companies, including Huawei.

The US Government claims that a number of top Chinese companies, including telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and video surveillance firm Hikvision, are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, Reuters reports.

The US Government has asked the Court of Federal Claims to give the Department of Defence 120 days "to reconsider certain aspects of the challenged agency decision" that awarded a US$10 billion Pentagon cloud deal to Microsoft in October 2019.

The program office for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has made little progress in fixing hundreds of design flaws in the fighter jet, according to a report obtained by the non-partisan independent watchdog Project On Government Oversight.

A court in the US has agreed to a request from Amazon to stop Microsoft and the Department of Defence from continuing to work on implementing a US$10 billion cloud deal that was awarded to the Redmond software giant in October last year, Reuters reported.

The US Department of Defence has awarded a US$10 billion 10-year cloud deal to Microsoft ahead of Amazon, with the latter firm having been favoured to get the contract. The contract runs until 24 October 2029.

Former US defence secretary Jim Mattis met Amazon chief Jeff Bezos in August 2017 emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal show, raising questions over the company's bid for a massive Defence contract worth US$10 billion.

Microsoft has justified its bidding for a massive Department of Defence cloud contract, despite a number of its employees objecting to the company's participating in the effort to win the contract which is said to be worth US$10 billion over a decade.

Software engineers in Google's cloud business flouted orders from their managers to build air-gapping into technology that would help the company win military contracts, a report claims.

Google has told its staff that it will not renew its deal with the Pentagon to work on Project Maven, a project which provides the military with AI technology to better identify images on the battlefield.

Officials at the US Department of Defence have moved to stop the sales of phones made by Chinese telecommunications equipment companies Huawei and ZTE in retail outlets on US military bases, claiming the devices may be a security risk.