[Freedombox-discuss] The Department of Defense has released a unique Linux distribution

[William Gardella]

Marc Manthey <marc at let.de> writes:

> hello all
>
> just found this in the news and i think some of you might be
> interested...;)
>
>
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/231002431
>
>
> http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
>

This is quite interesting.  As some of you probably know, the NSA was a
major sponsor of SELinux development, but most DOD employees still use
Windows on a daily basis--sometimes with epic fail results.  It's
interesting to see governments investing in Linux to save their own
hides, whether it's the US or, say, Turkey (PARDUS
http://www.pardus.org.tr/ was developed under the aegis of the Turkish
government crypto agency).  Notably, the White House also made the
transition to Linux servers recently.

>From the specifications, it looks like this was designed as a pure
network services client, a paranoid livecd/liveusb dumb terminal rather
than a distributed services node.  The really interesting stuff is of
course the servers this thing is meant to talk to. ;-)