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Showing posts from September, 2019

Can federal programs really be Agile when multiple firms are involved?

Transparency is one of the core pillars of the Agile mindset. Transparency exposes issues earlier making it possible to address them in a move-left fashion. Transparency is critical to the success of Agile and is one of the Agile tenets that is hardest to implement in large enterprises and federal projects. The Federal contract/project cycle is designed to use competition to reduce cost and fraud risk. One of the unintended consequences of this is that the competitive process punishes transparency and rewards those that let their partners fail. Federal projects don't die. They just move to the next phase as part of another bid process. This means contracting companies work on the project for the government while working on securing the next bid round by working for themselves . Federal contracts involving multiple partners and sub-partners punish transparency and encourage companies to let their partners fail to secure better positions in future phases of the project. I

No hack required for Linux on Chromebooks with the Termina VM and containers or Virtualbox

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Chromebooks have a security model that traditional laptop OS makes are still struggling to broadly implement. Chrome OS (Chromebook) is one of the more secure platforms for web browsing and web applications restricting users to a limited set of high level APIs. Power users   and developers often belittle the system because they are unable to install and run arbitrary applications. The ChromeOS and Chromium teams have resisted unbridled execution of the Linux programs because that would weaken the security profile of Chrome based devices.  ChromeOS/Chromium  as now addressed this issue by providing secure sandboxed environments that execute Linux programs that are highly isolated from the Chrome operating system. Chromebooks, including CloudReady devices, now support isolated  Crostini  Linux containers with only a single preference setting.  Crostini Linux runs in a sandboxed Linux Container inside a Linux VM.  Programs running inside Crostini are heavily isolating from the core C