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Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Just getting a well-known Python package authorized for install on a single machine can take multiple years. People are used to corporations engaging in security theater, but in the DoD world it's much the opposite: the security apparatus is so paranoid and strict that nobody can get anything done.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/government
Some other examples:
- AWS GovCloud https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
- Google Workspace for Government https://workspace.google.com/industries/government/
- GovSlack https://slack.com/solutions/govslack
- Atlassian Government Cloud https://www.atlassian.com/government
The unwarranted confidence is stunning in a post that is so fundamentally incorrect. I don't like Teams, but your take is deeply unaligned with reality.
Or maybe that Microsoft pays more than Meta.
This is the sticking point, because WhatsApp has now integrated Meta AI into the app, but (obviously) do not provide an on-prem data store. This is why Deepseek AI (the Deepseek app) and ChatGPT (the OpenAI app) are barred as well.
Data Stewardship and Zero Trust has been an internal initiative in the House for a couple years now.
The fact that almost no one on this thead knows these (imo overused) terms and design patterns highlights one of the various major gaps in Software Dev I've been observing for several years now - especially the North American market (given the hours that this was posted). The inability to incorporate or understand some basic security architectures is a major gap.
Edit: Keep pushing the downvotes. The truth hurts, and plays a role in jobs leaving, and funds like my employer funding cybersecurity startups in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe because the ecosystem doesn't exist in the US anymore. A similar trend happened in data layer related work.
We don't need more SKLearn plumbers calling themselves "ML Engineers" or Angular monkeys calling themselves "Fullstack Engineers" - we need people who truly understand fundamentals (or - shudders - first principles), be they mathematical (optimization), systems (virtualization), or algorithms (efficient data structures)
[0] - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/deepseek-ai-assistant/id673759...
Its not that they aren't known, but rather we just came off a long trend of thin-clients and cloud storage. Some companies merely stay in that ethereal space, while others had concerns about their data. Criticizing people for doing what experts were pushing for the past 20 years doesn't need to devolve into calling their expertise into question.
The downvotes are for that, not because "you're wrong".
My original comment is mostly saying that it is too critical of staff saying "how did they not know" when we're now starting to return to in-house solutions. The prior solution was "Go Cloud", now its "Stay Home". In a decade, once enough people learn the struggles of having everything in-house, the next solution will be "Go Cloud" again, or whatever the future equivalent is.
The overall purpose of my comment was more akin to "calm down, we're just in a new tech cycle, no one's an idiot for following the last cycle's solution".
Maybe a significant portion of the HN base simply never worked with companies that either sold to or were a part of regulated industries, but I do not buy that.
Furthermore, all of the design patterns I am describing can and have be implemented within cloud environments as well.
Can you explain why the thinking is wrong?
Teams is more secure in my opinion.
I as an admin can control who you can/can't talk to, what you can share with them, when you can share it. Correctly configured MS Teams is a pretty secure setup.
On the flipside im not sure i can make someone else's Whatsapp not auto download anything sent to it.... The two apps aren't really comparable unless I've missed an entire 'Whatapps for government/enterprise' business arm.
Microsoft maintains specific secure government versions of Teams that use their own special secure data centers. It's a full parallel extra secure set of infrastructure.
MS Teams allow for offline/local storage of its video/chat conferencing.
Which is an anti-feature given this application: you want a certain level of oversight and control over what staffers communicate.
> The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use
(Of course that statement seems to be highly confused overall. What "stored data encryption"?)
I was of the impression that Whatsapp’s messages (and its backups, photos, etc) kind of just hung around in plaintext once they reached the device.
Which would seem to be a problem should the device be stolen, or observed by other applications on the phone or a tethered device, or twiddled with sneaky hardware (e.g. [0]) that might use physical means to access the device’s file system.
Although as I understand it, the privacy claims are kind of window dressing anyway, and Meta has been more than willing to share plenty of WhatsApp’s data with all and sundry… even before AI-in-the-same-search-bar came along [1]
[0] https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p...
The operating system (Android/iOS) encrypts everything anyway. Why would you double that? More to the point, do any of the other "safe" apps, like iMessage, do that?
Personally, I'd be embarrassed to let people know I thought that way, but to each their own.
The situation is entirely different when you are managing very large organizations.
In those situation, you don't necessarily need the need the data to be invisible to the intermediary servers, because you might either just be able to control them yourself, secure them with NDAs, etc. And if the server is controlled by you, then you might not even want the data to be invisible to yourself. But, your primary risks may be the compromise of endpoint devices, mistakes or leaks by your users, or a lack of controls over data exchange. Also, many organizations may need to provide records of their internal communications in order to comply with legal requirements.
You might be surprised to know that enterprise offerings of many apps that otherwise support E2EE, often have a way for administrators to intentionally turn those features off.
For you, you trust yourself the most, followed by your device, and the intermediate servers are a threat. For an organisation, the servers are the most trusted entity, followed by the org-provided device, and a certain percentage of users are an active threat.