Why is .gov only for US government agencies?

shawn wilson ag4ve.us at gmail.com
Mon Oct 20 22:54:12 UTC 2014


On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 11:44 AM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2014 10:45:44 -0400, shawn wilson said:
>
>> 3. I don't want to see the report on how many Allaire ColdFusion with
>> NT 3.5 .gov sites are out there
>>
>> .... any other reasons not to do this? Maybe, but here's the real
>> question - why in the hell would we want to do this?
>
> See your point 3.

I think you're assuming that people go back and fix stuff when they do
massive changes that are out of scope - they don't. First they aren't
being paid to do so, gov contractors always run over budget and work
is never delivered on time so why would they want to make it worse,
etc. No, if a massive domain move started, stuff would be fixed enough
to make it work with a new domain, and stuff would stay at and
possibly worse than the current state of "working". I can handle stuff
staying at the current state as long as China/Russia doesn't use it to
get more of a foothold into our infrastructure, but making this stuff
worse might be a really bad thing.

Just something to consider - lets say web stuff is ok, email ports,
old SOAP (and whatever was/is used on mainframes) stuff doesn't break.
I'm betting something accesses
relay-4.building-10.not-yet-offline.missile-defense-system.mil someone
fails to point to building-10's dns in a dns migration which may be a
cooling system that gets changed by some computer and shit hits the
fan because we wanted to normalize our gov tld with the rest of the
world. No, I think I'll pass on finding out what breaks here.

Again - give me a real reason we should do this. And if not, if it
ain't broke, don't fix it.

PS - MDS is only 10 years old so any part of that still online is
likely to have audits (and any installs would be in east-EU and
hopefully on classified internet - one hopes - so who knows). It was
just an example I pulled. It's more possible that some Blackberry
system can't get updated after we stop holding them up and we budget
for this and gov email goes down :) Just saying I don't want to find
out what gets left behind and breaks here.



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