Her Task Is to Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"... she uses a 2013 Dell laptop: new by government standards, but clunky enough compared with the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her young son asked what it was."
I'm sorry, but while other forms of technology are rapidly replacing laptops, they are still the dominant mobile productivity workhorses (unless you count things like tweeting and facebook as productivity tasks). This quote implies that laptops are so out-of-date that the child of a well-off tech worker wouldn't know what they are, akin to VHS players and cassette tapes. Ridiculous.
Also, by whose standard isn't a ~1-2 year old laptop new?
This sort of phrase is not about her son at all. The statement is supposed to acquire the users agreement, as if the point is a truism, by demonstrating that even someone relatively naive to the field in question would be able to clearly see that the point is true - in this case that the laptop being used is antiquated.
2013 laptops aren't antiquated; no amount of "any fool can see" couching of that suggestion is going to convince me of that. It's just a badly judged piece of hyperbole by the writer.
Edit: here's a mediocre Dell from 2012, http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Inspiron-i15R-1633sLV-15-6-Inch-L... - could anyone who has ever seen a laptop before really be confused that it's a laptop?
My impression of government hardware purchasing is that even while newer consumer models of laptops have managed to be lighter weight, have better battery life, and so on, they haven't met the litany of requirements needed for the government. She probably has a semi-custom Dell Latitude, which while a workhorse, is big and clunky and has less than desirable battery life. Oh and the screen resolution is probably 1366x768. Compare that to any ultrabook one could acquire today with a greater than HD quality display.
My guess is that her son is confused because before then she probably did most of her work with a Macbook Air, an ultrabook (perhaps even a Dell XPS), or even a Chromebook Pixel. These are all thinner, lighter, and with greater battery life. And they probably don't check the boxes the government wanted.
On that topic ... many of the chunky plastic boxes are actually great machines. We have a choice from a few machines at work ... and almost no engineers choose an ultrabook. While ultrabooks are good for some things (watching videos, basic productivity like word, small excel workbooks, etc.), I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one. I have a gigantic brick of a 'laptop' at work (I think it's a Precision M6700), and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's nice to be able to slap it on and off a dock, to be able to connect it to four monitors without any janky USB video cards, and to be able to install tons of RAM.
The number of laptop users that actually "compile an operating system" are relatively small. This seems like a poor choice for an example.
It's not fantastic for today's standards, but it's not terrible either.
Also, but that is complete speculation, it might not even have USB for security reasons. I can see that kids seeing something that you cannot plug your mouse into wouldn't think it to be a laptop.
However if she was a given a laptop which is several years old when they could have given her something from the current options, that's already questionable. Hardware can age, but giving aged hardware to begin with is not a good idea.
If someone is delivering >$10mm of value (conservative estimate) in a position where tool quality affects productivity, I'd probably get the newest/best laptop for her. It's entirely possible this position doesn't deliver that much value, but it should.
I've never really been a fan of re-using >1y old laptops as primary machines for new employees; it is a great way to make them feel unwanted from the start, for a $300-500 savings.
And unfortunately those expensive mac laptops suck when it come to working in any group larger than a one man band.
And, yeah, laptops are in no way obsolete. Hell, the multi-billion-dollar PC gaming industry relies on desktop PCs, with towers and separate monitors, which is an even older design than laptops are (although, admittedly, not by much, depending on what you're willing to call a "laptop" as opposed to a "portable" or "luggable").
We need both. The conundrum is that improvements are done through constant iteration and ideation. Government implementation is plagued by fear of fiat and fear of failure. The implementers need to be protected by the big idea people from the skeptics.
Unless you boot the machine with the floppy in the drive. Oh, boot sector viruses!
That's a BIOS configuration issue.
And, if the attacker can control the BIOS, in the words of Bokosuka Wars, "WOW! YOU LOSE!"
There's a reasonable chance that many of these floppy drives are USB devices, so they'll have all of the disadvantages that come with USB drives.
Another approach could be to build a device that sits between a host and a USB drive and verifies that only mass storage operations take place, which should stop some of the badUSB attacks.
For certain kinds of highly sensitive information transport, a floppy disk is probably a better idea than a flash drive.
I suppose you could use CDs, but floppy disks seem easier to destroy.
Rate-limiting is appropriate for some use cases.
Floppies don't have firmware to attack your PC: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191467-badusb-returns-hac...
1. The complexity of the USB protocol enables certain kinds of attacks that aren't possible through a floppy interface.
2. The circuitry present in a USB drive is capable of being partially replaced with other kinds of circuits in a hard-to-detect way, whereas, it's pretty easy to verify that a floppy disk contains no malicious circuits.
These two vectors can be combined (along with other vulns) to do things like momentarily connect an unexpected modem to computers that are thought to be airgapped. (There are other, simpler, attacks such as having it exfiltrate data to a secret portion of the flash memory at the same time the drive is operating "as expected", by simply connecting itself as two devices.)
This isn't a problem for most people, but it's entirely possible that there are materials at the White House which need to resist this level of sophisticated, can-create-our-own-silicon-with-hidden-radios level of attack.
Remember, the NSA catalog was full of ordinary seeming devices that were meant to exfiltrate data or create radio links in to the computer.
Use secure technology, not crappy technology.
If Sony's payroll, upcoming scripts, etc had been stored on floppies, stored in a safe when not in use, they could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment.
Sure, storing it in a floppy would render it unreadable, even for them.
Please go ahead and back up your data in floppies if you think it's that good
I don't think it's such a big deal for someone in her position to have such a laptop mostly because she's not exactly going to fix the default constant of failure in government IT and software by coding. She'll probably have a docking station and she can probably afford a decent monitor from there.
Best of luck, but I really hate to see people thrown to the wolves like this politically by being the first in a position with such little political backing to support them. I'll say that she's done her job admirably well when my mother in law knows about her position and staunchly opposes it (she'd vote for a cat if it was Republican and Reagan was on a Democrat ballot, I think she literally said that).
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6541.htm...
"We would never say that about reading.”
Now this is just a hunch, but I'm guessing most highly educated people have used their reading skills on a regular basis since school as compared to, say, what they learned in Calc III.
Those folks have done some incredible work over the last few years with no sign of letting up.