lockheed martin – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Air Force, Lockheed Martin Combine Forces To 'Lose' 100,000 Inspector General Investigations

from the Up-in-the-air!-Into-the-wi34dz.eea.3rdek))we$#21....-[A]BORT,-[R]ETRY,-[F]AIL dept

In an era where storage is insanely cheap and the warning to schedule regular backups has been ringing in the ears of computer users for more than four decades, there’s seemingly no explanation for the following:

The U.S. Air Force has lost records concerning 100,000 investigations into everything from workplace disputes to fraud.

A database that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted last month, destroying data created between 2004 and now, service officials said. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin, the defense firm that runs the database, could say why it became corrupted or whether they’ll be able to recover the information.

The Air Force didn’t lose investigations dating back to the mid-60s and stored on archaic, oddball-sized “floppies.” It lost more than a decade’s-worth of investigatory work — from 2004 going forward, right up to the point that Lockheed discovered the “corruption” and spent two weeks trying to fix before informing its employer. At which point, the USAF kicked it up the ladder to its bosses, leaving them less than impressed.

In a letter to Secretary James on Monday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said the lost database “was intended to help the Air Force efficiently process and make decisions about serious issues like violations of law and policy, allegations or reprisal against whistleblowers, Freedom of Information Act requests, and Congressional inquiries.”

“My personal interest in the [Inspector General’s] ability to make good decisions about the outcomes of cases, and to do so in a timely manner, stems from a case involving a Virginia constituent that took more than two years to be completed, flagrantly violating the 180-day statutory requirement for case disposition,” Warner wrote.

Some notification is better than no notification, even if the “some” notification is extremely minimal and arrives well after the fact. Senator Warner remains underwhelmed.

“The five-sentence notification to Congress did not contain information that appeared to have the benefit of five days of working the issue,” Warner wrote.

The Air Force says there’s no evidence of malicious intent, as far as it can tell. But there’s also no evidence of competence. Why is it that files related to oversight of a government agency have no apparent redundancy? It’s small details like these that show the government generally isn’t much interested in policing itself.

If anything’s going to be recovered, it’s going to be Lockheed’s job, and it’s already spent a few weeks trying with little success. There may be some files stored locally at bases where investigations originated, but they’re likely to be incomplete.

While I understand the inherent nature of bureaucracy makes it difficult to build fully-functioning systems that can handle digital migration with any sort of grace, it’s completely incomprehensible that a system containing files collected over the last decade would funnel into a single storage space with no backup. It’s one thing if this was just the Air Force’s fault.

But this is more Lockheed’s fault — and despite its position as a favored government contractor — it’s also known for its innovation and technical prowess. Neither of those qualities are on display in this public embarrassment. And if it can’t recover the data, it’s pretty much erasing more than a decade’s-worth of government mistakes, abuse, and misconduct. And while no one’s going to say anything remotely close to this out loud, there has to be more than a few people relieved to see black marks on their permanent records suddenly converted to a useless tangle of 1s and 0s.

Filed Under: air force, corrupted hard drive, dod, inspector general, investigations
Companies: lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Chickens Of The Sea..?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Americans eat about 4.5 billion pounds of seafood annually — placing third behind China and Japan. The US ranks 15th in farmed seafood production, and America exports about a billion pounds of caught fish every year. The oceans might seem like an endless supply of fish, but we’re actually starting to over-fish several species. Here are a few suggestions for what seafood to order and some technological alternatives to traditional fishing.

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: aquaculture, aquapods, codfish, endangered species, fish, fish farming, food, kampachi, oceansphere, seafood, tuna
Companies: kampachi farms, lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Fusion Is Less Than 30 Years Away (Maybe)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fusion has been a promising potential energy source for decades. The joke is that it’s always just 30 years away. Every so often, people working on various forms of fusion make some news with press releases claiming that they’ve discovered some revolutionary new way to achieve cheap/free/clean fusion. But whenever a fusion science “breakthrough” is announced in a press release in lieu of a peer-reviewed journal, it usually turns out to be disappointing. Everyone wants to see fusion energy become a reality, but it’d be nice to see real scientific progress towards it instead of promotional hype to boost the reputation of a lone inventor or a company’s skunkworks program. It’s great to be optimistic about the future of fusion; just don’t cry “wolf” too many times, okay?

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: andrea rossi, cold fusion, dynomak, e-cat, energy, fusion, lenr, low energy nuclear reaction, skunkworks
Companies: lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Quantum Computers Are Both Here And Not Here…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Quantum computers are starting to become a commercial reality as multiple companies start to take advantage of the strange laws of quantum physics to solve complex mathematical problems. The hardware is difficult enough to build, but assuming the hardware actually exists, programmers now have to figure out how to write software for qubits. Here are just a few links on these new computers that aren’t quite ready to replace desktop PCs.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: algorithm, hardware, physics, quantum computer, qubit, silicon
Companies: aerospace concepts, d-wave, google, lockheed martin, nasa

DailyDirt: Separating Salt From Seawater…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There’s plenty of water on our planet, but unfortunately for us, not all of that water is drinkable or easily obtained. A whole ocean of water is even locked away underground trapped in minerals that we hopefully won’t need to tap into for fresh water. However, drought conditions could get worse, so we might have to explore more exotic ways of getting potable water. Here are just a few desalination technologies that might become useful soon.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: desalination, drinking, drought, graphene, microfluidic channels, perforene, potable, salt, seawater, shock electrodialysis, water
Companies: lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Eating Food On Other Astronomical Objects

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Manned missions outside of low Earth orbit take a bit more planning since supplies are a trickier to deliver the farther out astronauts go. NASA is looking at a trip to Mars in a couple decades, and part of its preparations is creating edible items that are safe and nutritious for such a long trip. Here are just a few interesting stories about eating in other gravitational environments.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: astronauts, buzz aldrin, food, mars, moon, space
Companies: lockheed martin, nasa

If You're Typosquatting Domain Names To Get Misaddressed Emails, Maybe Don't Target A 'Brand Protection' Law Firm

from the just-saying dept

Via Slashdot, we learn of a lawsuit filed by a “brand protection and anti-counterfeiting” law firm, Gioconda Law Group, against Arthur Wesley Kenzie — a guy who apparently has been registering typo versions of company domain names (typosquatting) and then receiving the emails received at those domains — possibly using them to pitch his own “security” help to the companies. He did this to Lockheed Martin, who chose to just get the domain transferred to them via the UDRP process, but Gioconda is suing for “trademark infringement and unlawful interception of a law firm’s private electronic communications.” The trademark claims may make sense — since you could argue that there’s a likelihood of confusion. And, clearly, what this guy was doing was sleazy. But is it really “unlawful interception of a law firm’s private” emails? That’s where it seems much trickier. After all, he didn’t actually “intercept” anything. They were sent to him. The “problem” is that the senders chose the wrong address.

Gioconda seems to be claiming that because the emails didn’t bounce, he was guilty of setting up special email boxes to intercept the law firm’s emails:

“We discovered the cybersquatting and sent several test e-mail messages… to see if they were delivered to the misspelled e-mail addresses, and indeed, they were received by active mailboxes.”

But, uh, plenty of domains are set up to allow any email to be received by an active (usually admin or default) account. So the fact that the emails went to a live account, rather than a bounced account doesn’t automatically indicate “unlawful interception.” That said, it does seem like what the guy did was pretty questionable, but it just seems dangerous to set a precedent that having someone send an email to the wrong address is somehow an illegal “interception.”

Filed Under: arthur wesley kenzie, typosuatting, udrp
Companies: gioconda law group, lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Robots Inspired By Nature

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biomimicry for robot design is a fascinating area of research, and all kinds of interesting robots are being developed that almost look like natural creatures. Here are just a few more examples of machines that are adopting biologically-inspired features.

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: biomimicry, drones, locomotion, robots, scorpion
Companies: lockheed martin

Would A Moron In A Hurry Confuse Military Equipment With A Bamboo Fishing Rod?

from the skunk-works-me dept

The term a skunk works project has become a pretty generic description over the years for a somewhat autonomous project within an organization (often used in secret or to build a self-competitor). The term originated with Lockheed Martin, and while the name Skunkworks is a bite off of the popular Li’l Abner comic, Lockheed has become incredibly aggressive over the years trying to enforce its trademark — almost certainly a losing battle. But, even so, the company seems to be going too far on some of its claims. George alerts us to the fact that Lockheed Martin sent a legal nastygram to the maker of some bamboo fishing rods that are sold on the guy’s domain SkunkworksFlyRods.com.

In typical giant conglomerate fashion, the cease & desist doesn’t spend much time on pleasantries and goes straight to the demands and threats. It claims that the use of “skunkworks” is clearly in “bad faith” and demands he not just cease & desist, but also hand over the domain name. While the article linked above notes, correctly, that LM needs to defend its trademark, that’s only in cases where there’s actually trademark infringement. You could make a pretty strong case, I imagine, that no one is going to confuse this fishing rod with a fighter plane.

Filed Under: fishing rod, skunk works, skunkworks, trademark
Companies: lockheed martin