Originally Posted by
flyallnite
Interesting. The last brief from the company mentioned that there would be a 2 year product renewal cycle, but that doesn't seem to be helpful in this particular situation. Do you think an Android platform would be secure enough?
Define "secure enough."
Andoid is just a Linux distro.
Linux is secure enough to operate the International Space Station and is the basis for most (if not all) of the military use secure network infrastructure except for some that runs wild stuff like Intel iAPX 432. A big topic of conversation among security experts at the moment is whether
any new hardware is secure. There is a lot of paranoia about the largest spying agency of them all, the US Government, having exploits that become systemic vulnerabilities once bad guys figure out how to employ them. That whole conversation goes over my head very quickly and I'm not sure the US Government could have people forcing chip makers to install vulnerabilities ... but then again, if someone had told me in the late 1960's that the US Government cared about who Martin Luther King got blow jobs from, I'd have thought them a bit nuts.
Anyway, anything is more secure than a Delta jet full of $10 an hour non english speaking outsourced employees with questionable credentials. If they can steal the candy (FA treats) out of my zipped shut bag down in my FO cubby hole, there isn't anything on that jet which is all that secure.
If it were me, I'd care less about EFB security and just build the thing so it was a push device with no PHP access back into the servers on the operations side. Use a screen with revision dates and let pilots verify, just as we do now. Delta's wanting to make this thing a lot more complicated than it need be to sell upper level management on the concept that it is not a "toy." Meanwhile, we build a 45 function Swiss Army Knife out of Unobtanium (which RT on ARM will be) when a butter knife is sufficient for buttering our bread.
Just my opinion and I'm uneducated on the status of the EFB program. Can't recall who posted that was working on the device. I'd would love to hear their opinion of MS's funeral notices for RT.
Frankly, something like this could do the job very cheaply and effectively. Good alternative to a cloud based software distribution. With this, the distribution gets a lot easier. Then it's just as easy as an enhanced BYOD.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...-20&ascsubtag=