Amazon is seeking a court order that would prevent Microsoft from doing work for the US Department of Defense under a contract that Amazon says was awarded improperly.
[...] Amazon alleges that the president "launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS [Amazon Web Services] to harm his perceived political enemy—Jeffrey P. Bezos," the founder and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.
Amazon and the US have agreed to an expedited briefing schedule, in part to consider a motion for a restraining order or preliminary injunction that Amazon intends to file. A joint status report filed in court yesterday by Amazon, the US government, and Microsoft described what's happening next in the case:
AWS intends to file a motion for temporary restraining order and/or preliminary injunction to prevent the issuance of substantive task orders under the contract, which the United States has previously advised AWS and the Court will begin on February 11, 2020, given the United States' consistent position that the services to be procured under the Contract are urgently needed in support of national security. The parties have agreed to an expedited briefing schedule on the issue of preliminary injunctive relief, and respectfully request that the Court expedite consideration of the issue, as described below.
[...] both the US and Microsoft "intend to file partial motions to dismiss" the case, the status report said.
[...] The status report also says that the US government "does not intend to file an answer to AWS's complaint." Instead, "the parties will file cross-motions for judgment on the administrative record."
[...] Trump "escalated his intervention, jettisoning any appearance of impartiality by making clear to DoD (and to the world) that he did not want AWS to get the JEDI Contract," the lawsuit said.
Is it wrong to root for Microsoft to win?
Related Stories
Sorry, Amazon, Microsoft wins JEDI contract again upon re-evaluation:
After a monthslong[sic] investigation by the Pentagon, the Department of Defense said Friday that it's sticking with Microsoft for its $10 billion cloud computing contract. And Amazon is not happy.
As a quick refresher: Microsoft was originally awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract in October 2019 after facing off against other tech giants like IBM, Oracle, and Amazon in a fierce, yearslong[sic] bidding process. The contract would provide cloud computing services to the U.S. Army and is valued at as much as $10 billion for services rendered over a decade.
[...] The agency went on to say that this decision does not mean work will begin immediately since February's temporary injunction still stands, but it is "eager to begin" working with Microsoft to modernize the Pentagon's IT infrastructure.
In response, Amazon's cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services, tore into the DoD and Trump in a scathing post to its public sector blog, calling the government's investigation "nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision."
[...] You can read the statement in full here. TLDR: Amazon is royally pissed and the government can pry this contract from its cold, dead hands.
[...] In short, it appears the JEDI saga still isn't over so grab some popcorn and settle in, folks. This one's shaping up to be a doozy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @01:01PM (13 children)
It makes zero sense for DOD to use the commercial "cloud", here's hoping this stays blocked in court forever.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:31PM (9 children)
I agree. However it would be difficuilt for the army to do more than just buy hardware, programming the entire cloud interface is not really a military thing. Which demonstrates the problem of 'info war'. Suddenly you need brains in vats and whole different types of people, ones who may *gas* smoke ganja.
you might like these though, it is just twice as bad hosted in a foreign country, near where your soldiers are being sent to die meaningless deaths as cucks for a fanatical cult:
https://archive.is/5II5U [archive.is]
https://archive.is/HTALt [archive.is]
https://archive.is/SiNIS [archive.is]
https://archive.is/wZMMJ [archive.is]
Also, I have been rewatching 'The Pentagon Wars' with Kelsey Grammar and Cary Ewes, and let me tell you this movie stands the test of time. I think it's still at tpb.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:42PM (8 children)
What are all these https://archive.is/.... links?
Do they belong here?
If not, is there a way to auto filter them?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:32PM (7 children)
They are unerasable memes at a known non-tracking durable site so you don't have to go to my homepage or a corp site to see them.
They are signal not noise.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:46PM (5 children)
They do not appear to lead to any working web site. Could it be due to uMatrix?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:57PM (4 children)
Probably. With uBlock Origin I can load them fine.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:05PM (3 children)
I'll stop worrying that they are anything dangerous. Thanks for the info.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @08:02PM
you might want to unblock archive.is -- it's sort of a clone of archive.org , may have the old page you are looking for if the Wayback machine doesn't have it.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:24PM (1 child)
if there is another filedrop you prefer, let me know ill upload them.
the more archiving the better for my work.
archive.is is critical though you should know it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:55PM
Feed them into the Wayback Machine on archive.org, that way the original URL gets preserved too, which results in less obfuscation of the source that way. Heck, make your own WARCs, MHTMLs, and ZIPs and upload them into a collection there yourself.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GeminiDomino on Thursday January 16 2020, @12:54AM
One of these statements must be false.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:41PM (1 child)
Please, like the defense department could possibly research, develop, build and verify a redundant grid of routing nodes that distribute computing capabilities across the entire country.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:49PM
Hmmm.....this is an interesting idea. Perhaps we should have the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency look into it!
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:03PM
Are they really using "commercial" cloud?
A lot of governments get them to build private cloud. It is not multi-tenanted like the commercial offerings - it just uses the same tech stack.
It makes sense, they'd provide full stack data centers better than traditional data center vendors that build base storage and network and then the customer overlays everything else using commercial software, try to glue everything together and build a bunch of automation over it all the disparate pieces top to bottom. Why wouldn't you use a product that does all that already and is already well proven at a much bigger commercial scale?
You also get the benefit of being able to hire folks that know that shite top to bottom instead of being reliant on key persons with proprietary implementation locked up in their head.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
I'll take the Cowboy Neal option, Alex: I'm rooting for them all to lose.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @02:53PM
Trump is the Jar Jar Binks of the JEDI Contract.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:10PM (18 children)
Short answer: Yes, generally speaking.
Longer answer:
Not if Microsoft can or could somehow play fair and square. I see no evidence of wrongdoing by Microsoft here. It is wrong, IMO, in this instance to root for Microsoft to win because the deck was stacked in favor of Microsoft (or actually against Amazon) by outside interference. That may not be Microsoft's doing. But if Microsoft could not have won this by simple fair commercial competition, then thy don't deserve to have it magically handed to them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:25PM (6 children)
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:39PM (4 children)
Didn't you read what I said? I'm all for rooting for best service at the lowest price. It seems apparent that Microsoft would have lost that competition, had it not been that Trump hates Bezos for personal petty vindictive triggered reasons.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:41PM (3 children)
Remember when the government picking winners and losers was a bad thing?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:49PM (2 children)
The rules are different for Trump.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:08PM (1 child)
You lost me when you used "rules" and "Trump" in the same sentence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:44PM
Sorry, Trump feels that rules do not apply to him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:30PM
the government shouldn't be in the business of extorting tax dollars from whoring cowards and handing it over to private corps. fuck em.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:43PM (3 children)
It seems to me what we really want is both to lose. Amazon and Microsoft are both hell-hounds dragging their demonic, flaming assholes across the carpet of our day-to-day lives.
I'm trying to glue some stupid Azure piece of shit to some AWS diarrhea puddle because the higher-ups at my company heard cloud and assumed it would automatically be better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:33PM
imagine you're a free man, and tell them to fuck off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @08:11PM
Award the contract to Oracle. It'll be FOBAR.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:08PM
Yea, cross/multi cloud is a wall even Trump would be proud of.
Using kubernetes helps though, but I've not tried with Azure, only Google (GKE) and AWS (EKS) using Rancher. Your use case could be different of course. I stay away from Azure as much as possible.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:44PM
microsoft is israeli now, so this is also about the u.s. army using infrastructure it has no physical control over.
It is effectively a command decapitation sold as a business decision.
It is very bad for the united states in every possible way.
More so for the soldiers who will rely on said services for their lives while they walk through minefields in iraq and afganistan.
Should one or another unit not be enthusiastic enough about israel, I hope they have their own TI-200's in their backpacks.
Otherwise amazon and microsoft are both companies who primarily make listening devices for people not intelligent enough to know the danger of bugging their own homes willfully for the state, and the cultural hegemony which dominate it.
Sadly in the case of the united states, these are the same people who did 9/11, so good luck on that security check, to the extent you know what this word even means.
And like I have said, keep an eye on the statue of liberty, millenium tower in SF and other spectacular locations where some columbs of smoke on teevee would scare 'the (fascist) base' into a blind murderous rage against whoever they are told to hate in that moment:
https://archive.is/wZMMJ [archive.is]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:02PM (5 children)
It doesn't sound from TFS that Microsoft is really the defendant, it sounds like the real defendant is the president of the United States.
And here's the problem: The president decided that he didn't like what somebody wrote about him in a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post). So he decided to use the power of his office to try to harm Jeff Bezos' businesses any way he could. There are two problems with this:
1. That's a violation of the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press. A major point of that is that the government cannot penalize you for writing things that are critical of politicians (unless you are credibly threatening to kill them). It's pretty clear to me that this administration doesn't believe freedom of the press should exist, for instance revoking reporters' White House press passes if they write anything critical of anything the administration has done.
2. That's also potentially penalizing US taxpayers, because Amazon's bid might have been cheaper or better in some other way than Microsoft's bid, and the US DoD couldn't choose that bid because of the president's actions. Which means that the DoD gets a worse product or a more expensive product than they otherwise would have gotten, which is bad for us because we have to pay for it.
This is the same kind of instinct that got the president into trouble over Ukraine: When the interests of the United States government or its citizens conflict with his personal interests, he chooses his personal interests every single time.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @04:09PM (4 children)
I am convinced.
There is no bottom.
There is no low that is too low.
There is no evidence that will dissuade Trump and his Fox News fed band of mouseketeer cheerleaders.
Trump really could shoot someone on fifth avenue and there would be no consequences. None. It would all be explained and hand waved away.
I believe Trump will be re-elected in 2020, but not by my vote. I also won't support him in 2024 and beyond.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 15 2020, @09:07PM (3 children)
Among his truly hardcore supporters, they've gotten to the point where they actually have a religious devotion to him, and firmly believe that he cannot do anything wrong under any circumstances.
Which, incidentally, happens to be one of the signs somebody is the anti-Christ.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)
That observation has not escaped me. There is another term used in Thessalonians is "the lawless one".
Trump openly bragged before the election that he was the ONLY one who could negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians. We will see. (Dan 9:27) Some people say this couldn't refer to Trump. Well if you believe it, then it must refer to someone at some time. Someone is going to sign that peace deal.
And as far as someone who would enter the third Jewish temple and defile it, proclaiming himself to be above all others, who does that kind of bragging sound more like than Trump?
Yet evangelical Christians are his most rabidly blind supporters. Wow.
Just sayin'. Take it for whatever you think it's worth.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 15 2020, @10:55PM
If you want the full case, a "formerly fundie" writer lays it out: Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? [benjaminlcorey.com]
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @03:49PM
I'm fairly certain that my Evangelical Church is not.
My mom's as well (story time):
During children's sermon, the pastor asked if anyone knew what a king was. He then went on to ask in the US had a king. There was a rumble of restrained laughter, and the pastor said, we're not going to go into that...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:36PM (2 children)
subject says it all
This is, let me tell you, not the original intent of the internet.
I promise, I was there around that time, not a single person said 'we are building this to facilitate electronic warfare between large institutions and militaries of the world.'
That was always the thing that would inevitably happen if 'somebody didn't do something' about the things that were 'getting out of control.'
Now here we are, aren't we. Companies no one trusts going to near war over who we ARE TO BE FORCED to trust, with apparently nuclear facilities and assets, because we have no other choice. Not unlike the appearance of bizarro satellite formations, or our upcoming bath in 5g mystery radiation.
Place your bets, but I'd bet no one is even daring to place one on us poor humans without bunkers over 1km underground and 100 year food supplies.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:53PM (1 child)
Goodness, where's the "Tin-Foil Hat" mod?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:36PM
ahh, the slaves' constant refrain of "conspiracy theorist".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:31PM (1 child)
With all the bitching and moaning here about politicians being on the dole and subverting selection processes, you want to root for a case of explicit political interference in the contracting process? This is exactly why things are so effed up these days and we have this particular person in the White House. People don't have principles any more. If it benefits my guy (or cause), then it is all fine and good, but it if benefits your guy (or cause), then I oppose it on my deep seated principles!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:46PM
yes, and if the american taxpayers had any integrity left they wouldn't be paying for the country's destruction, regardless of which fake ass party was in office.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:04PM
Yes. Rooting for Microsoft to win the contract means you reject Amazon's claim of political favoritism and corruption. We haven't even begun to examine the evidence for or against that claim.
If you're already picking Microsoft's side, that means you think that we, the American people, have no right to question the actions of our politicians. That we have no right to gather evidence of corruption and cry foul.
Ask yourself this: would you root for Microsoft to win the contract if it was Obama being accused of playing favorites?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 15 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)
Thank goodness no partisan comments are allowed in front page summaries! Just think, we could have had a nice aristarchus submission!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 15 2020, @08:08PM
> ...partisan comments
Nobody here (or anywhere, really) likes MicroSoft, not even people that run their software, hating on MS is just normal.