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Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive".

Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service.

How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.

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Hi Niels. I have contacts within the DoD HPCMP and have run Python 2.7 on several of the heavy machines available on the Army side of the fence. I work for Continuum, which provides both a free and a commercial Python solution that are basically "drag-and-drop" installs on x86 hardware, and when I was at the Army Corps of Engineer Research Lab I worked on an open source tool called HashDist that, among other things, simplifies the deployment of Python stacks on HPC hardware. Feel free to get in touch with me via my contact information at http://aron.ahmadia.net if I can be any help.

Thank you for this feedback! Adding to what Nacin said about our involvement. We have started work in this space, and care deeply about the electronic health record systems at both the DOD and VA, and connecting critical information between the two systems, as well as data exchange with private sector (downtown). Also, major kudos to being a Navy doc who understands what it means to upgrade Python!

Thank you for your service!

There's a ton happening here. From http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/dod-start-its-own-dig...: "The new team is already working to transfer electronic health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs from DOD."

What's new in python 2.7 that requires upgrading ?

I prefer writing python in the least-clever way I can, which doesn't require a lot of language features.

Wearing my python core dev hat: a litany of security fixes, python3 compatibility stuff, useful stdlib modules, dict and set comprehensions, probably more stuff I can't remember.

One change that comes to mind that someone might see as trivial: "{}".format("foo") works in 2.7 and not in 2.6 (in 2.6 it must be "{0}".format("foo")).

> I'm trying to get REDACTED to "modernize" to REDACTED

Loose lips sink ships, doc.

Can you elaborate on your point for others?

I think the notion is that knowing what software versions a government IT system is using internally will help attackers, for example because they'll know about likely vulnerabilities in those systems. There are definitely some attackers who are interested in, say, government and military healthcare IT systems, because they can use those to get personnel records (or maybe even more nefarious applications).

"Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.

In this case it gives an increased false sense of safety in having security by obscurity, which ends up being the worse path.

As a general rule, I try to avoid saying things like that unless they're published elsewhere. In this case, they advertise the info. And best of luck getting into these systems without a clearance.

http://centers.hpc.mil/users/COSTQuickRef.html#Python

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