
Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract - aaronbrethorst
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/dod-jedi-contract.html
======
rshnotsecure
Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the
NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built
out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA.

The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data
center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap
electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay for the NSA. Additionally, and
the FBI chose San Antonio for a significant presence as well because of this,
is Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US.

Also San Antonio has something like 4 military bases. Ft. Sam Houston where
the Army medics train, Lackland Air Force Base (home of cybercommand for the
Air Force), Kelley Air Force Base, and perhaps even 1 or 2 I can’t recall.

120 minutes to the north is the recently established Army Futures Command in
Austin, along with Ft. Hood in Killeen, the Army’s largest base in the world.

AWS does not currently have a data center in Texas, which has always
frustrated the Texas government. They did establish a shipping center in San
Marcos, but even GCO is building out in Dallas where IBM Cloud has a data
center, and Oracle Cloud has an Austin data center.

~~~
gtirloni
_> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US._

This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem:

"The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political,
rather than technical reasons"

[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-
it...](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-its-own-
power-grid.html)

~~~
meddlepal
Core to many Texans identity is a belief that someday Texas is going to secede
from the Union again and become its own independent country.

Don't get me wrong, I love Texas and I love many of the Texans I've met for
being some of the chillest, most down to earth, pragmatic and welcoming people
I have ever met, but they are a bit weird about this particular issue
sometimes.

~~~
rayiner
One if my favorite season finales ever:
[https://youtu.be/xFgNZG3gmqc](https://youtu.be/xFgNZG3gmqc)

The people with this view are also a big and growing minority:
[https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/texan-first-
american-s...](https://texaspolitics.utexas.edu/blog/texan-first-american-
second)

> Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 40 percent identify as Texans before they
> identify as Americans, far outpacing any other age group.

~~~
azinman2
I feel the same way about CA. I suspect this isn’t that uncommon — many people
put family first, then community, then country.

~~~
schrodinger
Def the same in NYC

~~~
specialp
When I am abroad I say I am from NY, not the USA. Not that I dislike the USA,
but I am proud of where I am from, and identify with being from there first. I
wouldn't knock Texans for that either. I also would not be for NY leaving the
USA either.

------
Zaheer
Original post from U.S. DoD:
[https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/...](https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/1999639/)

There's several other contracts mentioned in the post. It's a good reminder of
how much money goes into the military–industrial complex. The JEDI contract
was by far the largest contract awarded in this round. The rest of contracts
total roughly 1.5 billion dollars.

~~~
zucker42
From the link, could anyone explain why there is a $148 million dollar
contract for F35 testing expected to be completed in 2032? Why would it take
12 years to perform testing?

~~~
metaphor
> _The effort includes the test article configuration, the test article build,
> the test plan, the testing itself, and teardown and analysis._

Curiously, how long do you think it should take and at what cost?

~~~
zucker42
I'm not sure; that's part of the reason I was asking. I do think, however,
that a 12 year timeline seems too long for any project. Usually people can't
work effectively toward goals that far in the future. But maybe this contract
is more of an extended support contract?

~~~
Rebelgecko
There are 50 year old planes flying and getting upgrades today. I don't think
it's unreasonable for the F-35 to still need testing in a decade.

------
phil9987
"Google dropped out last October without submitting a formal bid, saying the
military work conflicted with its corporate principles, which preclude the use
of artificial intelligence in weaponry."

<3

~~~
mcqueenjordan
That was the PR spin, but in fact they lacked several of the basic
requirements for the contract.

~~~
stult
The DoD wasn't going to touch them in any case after they pulled out of Maven

------
topkai22
Great news for Microsoft, but I hope they don’t end up with the tail wagging
the dog. There is a reason that you don’t see many companies straddling the
defense/civilian divide that much- the military’s crazy bureaucracy, Legal,
contracting, and certification environment means that organizations that work
with them often end changing their culture to suit the government, and those
cultural changes make them less competitive in non-public sector arenas.

~~~
Bajeezus
Microsoft has had a variety of government contracts, and even government
clouds, for a long time. Not sure this will create much of a difference in
culture.

~~~
topkai22
It's a matter of type and scale. If an org is selling commodity products to
DoD as like 5% of annual revenue, it's very different than 30% as part of
suite including services.

~~~
wangyjx
errrh, Microsoft has more than 130B revenue each year. 10 B in 10 years is
less than 1% each year.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Although $10B might not seem like much in terms of revenue for the cloud
companies (that statement feels weird writing), it is potentially worth a lot
more.

The DoD drives a lot of the US economy and a lot of companies have DoD
contracts. This win, gives Microsoft an advantage n trying to get these
companies on Azure and solidifies Windows and Office 365 positions at these
companies. The follow on effects will likely be worth many multiples of this
contract.

~~~
tyingq
Hoping it also ups Microsoft's game on Azure Functions, monitoring, etc. AWS
needs a reason to be scared.

~~~
bnt
Azure Functions are pretty nice, hope they continue evolving the service.

~~~
LordN00b
As long as they fix the blasted runtime. Azure Functions has it's own dll
loader, and other complexities that means it doesn't place nice with .net or
the larger ecosystem. Currently it does not support .net 3, and I can't even
use the most recent version of System.Data.SqlClient. I like functions it was
a good move, but the 'not-quite-.net' keeps getting in the way.

~~~
tyingq
That's exactly what I meant by "up their game" and well stated.

------
gumby
Single supplier has worked out so well for the pentagon so far it’s a relief
they did this for cloud computing too. In fact they’ve worked so hard to
reduce competition in major suppliers (e.g. aircraft manufacturer
consolidation, ULA) I imagine they’ll want to do the same in computing.

/s

------
Eclyps
There’s not much to the article right now (developing story), but how big of a
blow is this to Amazon? And how big of a boon to Microsoft? I realize that
this is likely because of the people that I surround myself with, but I don’t
know anybody who actually uses Azure. Is Azure’s core business large
corporations/government?

~~~
hannibalhorn
$1B/year is quite a bit, would have been 4% of AWS's business. I suspect it
will positively impact Azure more but havn't paid much attention to their
numbers.

Not that it's relevant, but I actually signed up with Azure a couple months
ago just to build an open source project on a cloud copy of Windows 10 with
Visual Studio. I still ran into a bunch of problems with licensing type stuff,
and wound up getting calls & e-mails from a sales rep. I'm glad there's some
decent competition, but definitely prefer Amazon.

Edit: Corrected percentage, thanks to statguy.

~~~
vmurthy
The monetary benefit is one big thing but in the B2B scheme of things , a big
success story like this would be very easy to convince _other_ government
organisations and government in other countries to adopt Azure if they haven’t
moved to the cloud already. It’s the new “No one ever got fired for suggesting
IBM”.

~~~
Aperocky
Really? Why would a foreign country trust a firm deeply engrained with the US
military?

Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of
service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities
as provider.

~~~
vmurthy
Agree that not all countries would do this. But Allies? Also don’t other
countries use AWS Gov ( or whatever it is called ) even though it AWS is
“deeply embedded” in the US gov scheme of things?

~~~
Aperocky
It would not be politically expedient. US allies are mostly democracies
consisting of people that don't want to spend on the military if they don't
have to, and if they have to, better to spend it domestically instead of
giving it to a foreign firm.

Europe have its own fighter, armor, command systems despite being US allies
militarily.

------
xref
Wow what a course change. For the last couple years there have been articles
on HN about how the JEDI requirements were written to specifically _exclude_
Microsoft/ibm/gcp because the DoD preferred AWS so its selection was a forgone
conclusion. Also coverage of the resulting lawsuits by those companies over
the very aws-tailored “requirements”

~~~
eaguyhn
When I saw this article I figured it would go to MS.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-of-defense-to-look-
into-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-of-defense-to-look-
into-10-billion-jedi-contract-2019-8)

------
tanilama
Owning Post seems to cost Bezos quite a fortune.

~~~
bilbo0s
Just speculation, but I'm thinking, just like with New York, Bezos and Amazon
are happy to be rid of JEDI. Too much politics for 10 bill in revenue easily
made up elsewhere in the world.

They just seemed to let go of New York and JEDI wayyy too easily for being one
of the wealthiest companies in the world. When someone like that bows out of
such large projects so easily, something's off. And I have to take it at face
value that they maybe just want revenue and not politics. Because no other
reasons seem to present themselves here.

~~~
empath75
They made a lot of noise about building a new hq in Arlington. I can’t imagine
they’re going to build it out at any scale now.

~~~
bilbo0s
US East is in NoVA I think? Basically, the defacto HQ for AWS. Why would
Amazon have a second HQ anyplace else was always the real question?

(They seemed to like the idea of New York a little bit. Probably because of
multimodal transport connections to NoVA and the Europe/Africa side of the
world. But even that fell through. And as far as I can understand, that too
was because of politics.)

------
jhallenworld
Never mind AWS vs. Azure: I'm thinking that this is very bad news for IBM. If
there was one customer they could get, this would be it..

~~~
abledon
let the blight be purged from this world

------
anilshanbhag
A key ammo that Microsoft has to get customers to its cloud is their Windows
and Office 365 franchise. It is likely like many traditional companies
Pentagon wanted to move their mail, storage, powerpoint/excel/word, etc to
this cloud rather than use lambda or other hot features that AWS has.

~~~
jonknee
This contract has nothing to do with Office 365.

~~~
slenk
But the integration between the two helps...

~~~
p0rkbelly
What does my word processor have to do with my GPU cluster I use for creating
ML models?

~~~
slenk
I meant for things like audit logs based on your account for every single
thing you do.

~~~
p0rkbelly
That’s still different? AWS has CloudTrail that lots all actions

~~~
slenk
Having used O365 + Azure as an administrator, I have found it is much easier
to use Azure to trace security events than AWS.

They also have the capability to detect massive file copies/deletions for
special locations, etc (i forgot the technical term)

I love AWS, but I have seen some benefits with integrating O365 and Azure.

------
kerng
Azure has evolved into a mature cloud provider, definently not a bad decision.
Although, a bit unusual as we typically see the "noone ever got fired for
buying IBM" mentality usually.

It shows that Azure is moving up to challenge AWS's throne. Interesting times
to come!

------
z3t4
What do the military need 10 billion US dollars in cloud computing for ? Are
they going to fork Bitcoin? DDOS attack? If they are for example going to
archive video footage, it's probably much cheaper to print it to film.

~~~
darktimesahead
Real-time surveillance of the world. Who said what when where to whom. Was
that a threat. What were the consequences. Feeds for video, sound, https
streams from billions of Internet devices. ML to extract salient features, at
multiple levels of resolution. $10B is a drop in the bucket. This is heading
into trillions territory. I wouldn't be surprised that in 10 years half the
Pentagon budget will be spent on the cloud.

We can glimpse a world-wide stack-ranking system: "Echelon [0], who are the
1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position and what will be
their whereabouts today?". "Matrix [1], please dispose of these individuals at
these locations". Let's pray there will still be some humans between step 0
and step 1. Worse, by the logic of MAD, it is possible we are going to end up
with 2 such systems, one for USA and one for China, caught in a new cold war.
Think distributed Vietnam.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix)

~~~
Aperocky
distributed Vietnam lmao.

I think most of your description is coming form a high-ranking general's wet
dream though. When it comes to actual engineering, it would be between the
simple solution that works - or complex solution that doesn't work.

Having worked in a predictive analytics role before, I can guarantee that
'1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position' would consist of
500 innocent villagers, 30 kids playing around and 1 hospital.

~~~
7952
And a wedding party.

------
sehugg
_In a book slated for publication Oct. 29, retired Navy commander Guy
Snodgrass, who served as a speech writer to former Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis, said Trump called Mattis and directed him to “screw Amazon” by
preventing it from bidding on the JEDI contract, according to an excerpt of
the book seen by Reuters ahead of its release.

“Were not going to do that,” Mattis later told other Pentagon officials,
according to the excerpt. “This will be done by the book, both legally and
ethically.”_

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/reuters-america-
update-5-mic...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/reuters-america-
update-5-microsoft-beats-amazon-for-pentagons-10-bln-cloud-computing-
contract.html)

Mattis resigned December 2018, his successor put Amazon's contract up for
review in August.

~~~
jki275
Not sure what you mean by “put Amazon’s contract up for review” - the contract
didn’t belong to Amazon, there have been multiple ethical issues with Amazon
related to this contract, and there was an ongoing protest from Oracle.

------
freakynit
So, did someone just do the same to amazon what amazon has been doing to small
businesses?

------
netcan
Assuming "you-are-what-you-eat" dynamics, what sort of impact on msft do
>10,000 workers on mother-of-all-enterprise projects have.

------
philshem
Silver lining, ignoring politics, this will strengthen services from Azure and
create a better overall market for cloud. 3 > 2

------
40acres
Interesting. If I remember correctly when the contract was initially made
public there was a lot of critism as it seemed tailor made for Amazon.
Microsoft has pulled a great coup but I have to wonder -- President Trump has
brought up this contract in his critism of Amazon and Bezos, was this move
political?

~~~
polysemous
The guy in charge of the award bowed out two days ago...

~~~
Aperocky
This definitely sound like political pressure.

But maybe Amazon dodged a bullet here, Microsoft employees would have many
tales to tell about how their government customer users and their requirements
onto Microsoft itself. Assuming this decision stays.

~~~
mrep
AWS already has 2 entire air gapped regions dedicated to the US government so
they are already stuck in that hell hole.

~~~
Aperocky
Yes, but a smaller hell hole is easier to deal with.

------
whb07
“Dear MSFT, enjoy the gift

xoxo,

Oracle”

~~~
reilly3000
I'm sure they are a problem child, but can Oracle really afford to lose more
big customers? I feel like they are pretty universally reviled, but I am
inside the HN bubble. They have done nothing to woo developers and everything
to exploit IT management and public budgets AFAIK.

~~~
fmajid
Believe me, the corporate world that actually used Oracle database software
(unlike the open-source friendly web company employees over represented in HN)
hates Oracle even more with a passion, having actually experienced their
racketeering license practices first hand.

Oracle and IBM are engaged in a race for irrelevance.

------
bsharitt
Not terribly surprised to see Microsoft win given the Trump administration's
feelings toward Amazon and the DoD coziness towards Microsoft. I'm just happy
those poor bastards in the DoD don't have to deal with Oracle. I know if I
were still working in the DoD sphere, I'd be looking for somewhere new to go
if Oracle won.

------
mk89
To me it sounds clearly like a political move. Technically it's nonsense. I
hope now Azure invests that money to actually offer a decent cloud service
that can compete with Amazon.

~~~
techntoke
Or maybe build a descent operating system that doesn't keep infringing on
consumer privacy

------
vkaku
It's good to have competition in the cloud space. Amazon already has two
government regions, I guess (1 US and 1 CN). Can someone confirm if these are
already operational?

~~~
rswail
AWS CN regions (there are two) aren't "government" regions, they are "China"
regions.

[https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-
aws/china/](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/)

China's government makes companies store Chinese data in China and under
different privacy and security laws than other nations. In particular, China
makes companies enter into joint ventures with a Chinese company and comply
with laws related to CCP oversight. (Not saying I agree, just stating the
facts).

It's the same as Apple's iCloud for China being under the control of a joint
venture company based in China.

[https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT208351](https://support.apple.com/en-
au/HT208351)

AWS's "gov" cloud is a seperate set of regions in the US that are specifically
for US government and contractor use and accounts in those regions are
separated from the rest of AWS's infrastructure.

[https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/](https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)

~~~
mrep
In addition to govcloud, they have 2 entire air gapped (network isolated which
is why you cannot see them) regions for the US government, 1 for secret data
and 1 for top secret data.

------
crb002
Could be an albatross for Microsoft. Amazon not having control over wired
munitions is goodwill outside the US, and especially outside NATO.

------
foob4r
I wonder how azure employees feel about this.

~~~
tozeur
I don’t understand the repulsive feelings towards helping the govt. Would we
rather have the people in control of the military and our troops use out-of-
date tech?

~~~
vkou
I would rather the military be less capable, because its current capability is
being used for offensive, not defensive purposes.

If it's less capable, it's less likely to get embroiled in stupid
imperialistic adventures.

Edit: I don't understand why so many people are, at the same time, so enthused
by the idea of starving government (Because they think most of its services
are a waste of money), while at the same time, insisting on spending more on
the military than the rest of the world combined.

~~~
ploxolo
So I take you approve of Trump's decision on Syria?

~~~
senderista
He advanced a long-term goal that I agree with (disengagement from Syria) in a
manner I found stupid and immoral (abandoning the Kurds with no security
guarantees and leaving potentially tens of thousands of IS prisoners free to
escape).

------
pkz
For a lot of people the thinking will go "ah DoD uses Azure so it is safe to
put pur own valuable stuff there". But is the DoD contract actually using the
same Azure infrastructure as everyone else or is it running on a physically
separated Azure platform with staff w security clearance?

~~~
jsploit
Separate infrastructure restricted to TS/SCI w/ poly.

~~~
valleyjo
True. Underlying tech is the same though.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/L1TBx](http://archive.is/L1TBx)

------
jeffwass
The key point in the briefing (and the “developing” article is fairly brief)
is that Amazon was considered the front-runner for contract, but Trump has a
personal vendetta against Amazon/Bezos and also made comments that he’d get
personally involved in the JEDI decision (Joint Enterprise Defense
Infrastructure).

So of course this invites the question of whether petty politics influenced a
$10B govt deal.

~~~
soniman
If Amazon losing this deal makes US oligarchs think twice about getting
involved in politics, it's probably a good thing.

~~~
Grazester
Isn't the Washington Post(and in turn Bezos) that Trump has an issue?

~~~
Mountain_Skies
What was Bezos motive for purchasing the Washington Post? It certainly wasn't
financial.

~~~
p0rkbelly
Haven't followed Bezos too closely, but, never thought of him to be a
political person or saw anything where he made political comments.

Buying the Washington Post certainly forced the world around him to see him as
political...even if he considers himself not.

~~~
serf
> Haven't followed Bezos too closely, but, never thought of him to be a
> political person or saw anything where he made political comments.

You never considered the idea that the richest man in the world may be
political?

It'd be more surprising for me to find out that he wasn't political; you don't
accrue that kind of cash without playing political games at at least some
point in your portfolio -- even if it's just for the opportunity to reduce
your tax burdens.

~~~
p0rkbelly
Oh, I think he's political. I think he carefully tried not appearing that way
though.

My point is, I don't think he bought the Post to be political or political
reasons. I think he bought The Post because he's a rich collector of
nice/novel/rare things..and it seemed like a fun hobby. At the time.

If someone wanted to sell me The Post or let's say WSJ for what I consider
pocket change, I would most certainly be interested. Good journalism is
something that is going away, but, the obscenely rich can curate and prop up.

------
ArtWomb
Somewhat related to the ancillary debates around DoD contracting. A very well
written longread "In Defense of the War on Terror"

I'm certainly in no position to validate its truth claims. But in the current
climate. With Google withdrawing its bid at behest of its employees. Protests
at AWS conferences over involvement with ICE. Peter Thiel arguing Silicon
Valley companies should "do more" in the form of defense partnerships. And
given the historical roots of the Valley. It helps to stay deeply informed and
philosophically consistent in figuring out where you stand ;)

[https://areomagazine.com/2019/10/25/in-defense-of-the-war-
on...](https://areomagazine.com/2019/10/25/in-defense-of-the-war-on-terror-a-
response-to-ben-burgis/)

~~~
selimthegrim
Mr Church is entitled to his opinion but I take issue with two of his points.

As far as his list of Al Qaeda heavies killed by strikes goes, it had become
even a staple of late night comedy routines at that point that the newest "Al
Qaeda No 2" had been blown up. It felt like the military was writing the press
releases for Stars and Stripes and distributing them to everyone.

And with regard to his link about the Muslim Brotherhood and settlement and
civilizational jihad, the last I heard about Hizb ut-Tahrir in America they
were trying to buy some 40 acre dairy farm in Wisconsin and failing miserably
(no word about any mules)

------
cromwellian
At least it wasn't Oracle. You can't say Azure, AWS, GCP, et al, aren't highly
skilled, experienced, cloud infrastructure builders. There was a lot of
wining-and-dining of the Trump administration by Safra Kat which gave the
impression they'd be magically awarded the contract. Thank goodness the
government isn't that corrupt.

~~~
Aperocky
I think it would be quite fitting for Oracle to be awarded the contract. The
culture of these 2 organization would be compatible from the start.

------
known
The other day Bank of America saved $2 billion/year by rolling out their own
cloud. Why isn't Pentagon saving tax payers money?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Because the Pentagon (and the rest of the federal government) can't match
FAANG salaries so they don't get very many good engineers.

------
seagullz
Partly explains why Bill Gates characterizes Edward Snowden the way he does
(though he might not have the same judgment for someone like James Clapper who
lied to congress) [https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/14/bill-gates-says-snowden-
is...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/14/bill-gates-says-snowden-is-no-hero/)

~~~
lokeshk
How does this 2014 article by an ex boss of Microsoft, who hasn’t been
involved in any day to day activities of it for more than a decade, explain
this contract in 2019?

------
peterwwillis
....why just one provider, anyway?

------
onetimemanytime
I'll bite: do you think this was on merits alone? On one hand, if there was
pressure whistle-blowers would be whistling by now but still, I think Amazon
was hurt by WaPost (Bezos owns WP and Trump is not happy with them). Maybe
"they" tilted the process in such a way that one can't really complain. After
all Microsoft is no slouch.

------
quaquaqua1
Given the choice between Cadillac and Pontiac, the Pentagon chose....

~~~
p0rkbelly
Pontiac Aztec

~~~
Marsymars
I drove a family member's Aztek for a few years back in the day, and it was
never a particularly nice vehicle, but its primary problem was simply being
ahead of its time before the current crossover mania really took hold.

------
Ice_cream_suit
Pork wins every time...

------
indigodaddy
Amazon will likely be suing, yeah?

------
ganitarashid
It’s embarrassing that something as vital as the military is running on
Windows. Boggles the mind

~~~
Avalaxy
Ehhh, what does Azure have to do with Windows? You can run Linux VMs just
fine.

~~~
MikusR
But those run on top of Windows.

------
adultSwim
SkyNET 1.0

------
_bxg1
The Space Force is really ramping up

------
DKnoll
> ...unlike, say, New York City or Detroit, whose residents found out the hard
> way that lots of their power comes from Canada.

Interesting that this myth is still alive. It started with Bush falsely
claiming the 2003 blackout was Canada's fault before an investigation had even
been done. Here is the actual postmortem report.

[https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandM...](https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/BlackoutFinal-
Web.pdf)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Just a request: if you intend to directly refute another's comment by posting
sources, posting a 238 page document without a specific page reference isn't
really helpful.

~~~
dmak
It's called burying the opponent in papers. I watch Suits, so I know how this
works.

~~~
DKnoll
I wouldn't call sending truckloads of boxes of paperwork during discovery to
opposing counsel and linking a 238-page PDF with a good ToC and summary
equivalent, but I guess the internet has robbed a lot of people of basic
research skills.

------
svnpenn
Article is pay only.

~~~
TrinaryWorksToo
If you mash the "esc" key just as the article loads, and continue tapping it
you can read it in its entirety.

~~~
haack
I'm really surprised this works. Do you know if that's by design?

~~~
jacques_chester
It's not. Pressing the escape key stops Javascript from running.

------
w0m
Well there's that.

------
thewismit
Interesting

------
SturgeonsLaw
Does anyone else think it's disappointing that an organisation as evil as the
Pentagon used the acronym JEDI?

Perhaps this proposal should have been called Synchronised Information
Technology Holdings.

~~~
rosybox
> an organisation as evil as the Pentagon

Given your feelings about the US Military, you probably also don't like the
police. The Jedi order were a law enforcement organization, a police force.
I'm not sure you would have liked them much if you were living in the Star
Wars universe.

~~~
SturgeonsLaw
It's not just the US military I don't like, it's all militaries. I can't say
I'm supportive of any organisation which has the killing of human beings as a
core function. Especially the modern incarnation of war, which is mainly waged
against much weaker, non-threatening opponents for profit.

I would not align myself with the Jedi or the Sith, if I were lucky enough to
be living in the Star Wars universe. I'd rather be a trader in some far flung
system, quietly going about my business and exploring the universe.

------
kd3
Taking government money is taking blood money. I'm glad I'm on a trajectory of
getting rid of Microsoft tech in my life.

~~~
Transfinity
I love the sentiment, but where else would you turn? AWS takes money from the
CIA, Google has drones and Dragonfly, and Oracle doesn't even pretend to be a
bastion of freedom.

~~~
kd3
Unfortunately in that regard there is little to no choice. This is why I
continue to advocate building a truly peer 2 peer network with all services
relying on that infrastructure instead of centralized systems in the hands of
a few companies. Everything running and stored on that P2P network. It's
coming but taking longer than I'd hope for.

------
polysemous
Very interesting that the guy in the pentagon in charge of the choice bows out
two days before the Microsoft award. Possible trump influence?

------
ktta
If nothing, this will prevent AWS pulling out _much_ further ahead in the
cloud computing space.

Wondering if its Jeff Bezos v. Trump or the Office 365 possibility that did it
(my bet is on O365)

------
exoram
?

~~~
p0rkbelly
Amazon is firmly planted in NYC and are hiring thousands upon thousands. They
just will sit in Manhattan and not Queens.

Also, the contract is going to the largest company in the world now...isn't
that just "same same"?

------
samirillian
I wonder how much dirt Microsoft did on the dl to get that contract.
Backdooring ElectionGuard?

