<story><title>Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House cyber policy director</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/21/microsoft_national_security_risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nobodyandproud</author><text>Partly this is due to the concentration of wealth, inaccessible to taxing.&lt;p&gt;Naturally government pay would lag behind even the more mediocre H1Bs.</text></item><item><author>qaq</author><text>Well you can&amp;#x27;t not outsource your security because gov payscale limits do not match market reality. You have to realise that a ton of people who should be directly employed by NSA etc. are actually working for their contracts for this reason.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not a fan of Microsoft, but this is some amazing blame shifting. The root cause of the problem is the government single-sourcing a vendor and being incapable of negotiating with said vendor. The US government is 10% of Microsoft&amp;#x27;s annual revenue just on security services (if I read the article correctly) but is failing to negotiate. The right answer here is if the situation is that bad, make a very public long-term commitment to shift to something else &amp;amp; up-level your IT department to be able to execute multi-year projects competently. Instead of meeting Microsoft on the business playing field, it&amp;#x27;s trying to use scary &amp;quot;national security threat&amp;quot; verbiage to try to bully them in the court of public opinion.&lt;p&gt;Regarding security, at the end of the day, the US government is a huge target for adversaries. You can&amp;#x27;t outsource your security practices &amp;amp; if MS software is really that much worse they should be fixing their purchasing requirements. The reality though is that whatever software the US government would switch to would become the focus of adversarial research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>&amp;gt; Partly this is due to the concentration of wealth, inaccessible to taxing.&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with it. Contractors cost notably more, so if the goal was economizing it’d be an obvious step to cut out the middlemen by hiring staff directly.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that there’s an entire political ideology holding that government is inherently wasteful and its adherents will oppose any attempt to track market salaries because that allows them both to say they’re saving money at the time and later to cite the struggling&amp;#x2F;failed project as proof that they were right.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House cyber policy director</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/21/microsoft_national_security_risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nobodyandproud</author><text>Partly this is due to the concentration of wealth, inaccessible to taxing.&lt;p&gt;Naturally government pay would lag behind even the more mediocre H1Bs.</text></item><item><author>qaq</author><text>Well you can&amp;#x27;t not outsource your security because gov payscale limits do not match market reality. You have to realise that a ton of people who should be directly employed by NSA etc. are actually working for their contracts for this reason.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not a fan of Microsoft, but this is some amazing blame shifting. The root cause of the problem is the government single-sourcing a vendor and being incapable of negotiating with said vendor. The US government is 10% of Microsoft&amp;#x27;s annual revenue just on security services (if I read the article correctly) but is failing to negotiate. The right answer here is if the situation is that bad, make a very public long-term commitment to shift to something else &amp;amp; up-level your IT department to be able to execute multi-year projects competently. Instead of meeting Microsoft on the business playing field, it&amp;#x27;s trying to use scary &amp;quot;national security threat&amp;quot; verbiage to try to bully them in the court of public opinion.&lt;p&gt;Regarding security, at the end of the day, the US government is a huge target for adversaries. You can&amp;#x27;t outsource your security practices &amp;amp; if MS software is really that much worse they should be fixing their purchasing requirements. The reality though is that whatever software the US government would switch to would become the focus of adversarial research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ripjaygn</author><text>&amp;gt; Naturally government pay would lag behind even the more mediocre H1Bs.&lt;p&gt;Those &amp;quot;mediocre H1Bs&amp;quot; work their ass off compared to non-H1Bs because they get laid off&amp;#x2F;fired and deported on short notice with barely enough or sometimes no time to sell their belongings if they don&amp;#x27;t perform [1]. Meanwhile it&amp;#x27;s next to impossible to fire a govt employee for bad performance.&lt;p&gt;Maybe the solution is to fill the govt with mediocre H1B employees, not pay govt employees even more without accountability if they don&amp;#x27;t perform.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesnownews.com&amp;#x2F;technology-science&amp;#x2F;techie-on-h1b-visa-gets-fired-when-on-vacation-visa-revoked-unable-to-return-to-us-asks-friend-to-sell-his-car-and-belongings-article-97442201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.timesnownews.com&amp;#x2F;technology-science&amp;#x2F;techie-on-h1...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>