Good grief. I'm teaching the week of the 27th. If any of those DISA guys ask about "that siprnet cell phone" I'm gonna have to throw (literally) the book at them.
siprnet mobile phone. wtf are these people thinking. gr.
edit: after reading the gizmodo comments, it's pretty clear they have no idea how the thing works. in theory it could be a secure device, if you take out the MITM problem with radio transmission of classified data, or the MITM problem of classified data going across a public carrier's network (this is sort of like saying "lasers work for an infinite distance as long as you take the index of refraction, scatter, and divergence out of the equation"). but, running wince means that losing the thing is not as catastrophic as it seems; wince 5's big appeal to DOD was its ability to be remotely destroyed (as in wiped, not bang). the other neat thing is that it's running a RTOS, so you don't have to worry about it not being able to do shit because it's thinking too hard or pocket excel barfed on a macro.
but all this still means to me it's a good PDA, not that it's a good
idea. we already
had secure wireless communication. i mean, just to name two, we have
JTRS and
JTIDS (note: all-fucking-ready TDMA). they're standards, we spent a ton of money on them, and – surprise! – they work. grrrr.