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Deputy national security adviser KT McFarland is expected to leave her position and accept an ambassadorship to Singapore, a senior administration official confirms to ABC News.

The move is the latest indication that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is taking full control over the National Security Council, following up on last week's decision to remove Steve Bannon from the principals committee.

McFarland is a former Fox News commentator brought on to the job by Trump's former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who resigned after reports that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations with Russian officials during the campaign.

McFarland is expected to remain at her post for the next two weeks before President Trump formally submits her as a nominee for the ambassadorship.

According to the same official, McFarland is "excited" to accept the position, and McMaster thought she did a great job as deputy national security adviser.

The official characterized the move as a "promotion," because instead of working as a deputy, she will be a leader in a "critical diplomatic outpost."

ABC News' Erin Dooley contributed to this report.

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KT McFarland to depart as deputy NSA, take ambassadorship to Singapore, official confirms - ABC News

Joseph Baucum , jbaucum@pnj.com 8:00 a.m. CT April 10, 2017

University of West Florida students Ian Briggs, left, and Jessica Aguilar work on a computer program in the Battle Lab at UWF on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.(Photo: Tony Giberson/tgiberson@pnj.com)Buy Photo

The University of West Florida's role inevolving the Southeastas a power in cybersecurity workforcedevelopment will soon expand exponentially.

In a joint sponsorship betweenthe National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, the university's Center for Cybersecurity has been designated as the National Center Academic of Excellence (CAE) Regional ResourceCenter for the Southeast region.

Only six institutions were given the regional designation. As part of the honor, the universitywill serve as the CAE Regional Resource Center for all colleges and universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Puerto Rico.

"The goal of the National Security Agencys CAE office is to increase the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals by expanding the number of CAE institutions," said Eman El-Sheikh, director of theCenter for Cybersecurity."Our missionwill be to provide leadership to do that in the Southeast."

The university plans to host workshops and professional development activities in the local area and across the region in its role as a resource center. They include a CAE mentor and peer reviewer workshop in June at theNational Cyber Summit in Huntsville, Alabama, andaworkshop on securingsoftware development for faculty in Pensacola in the fall. It will alsocreate an online resource portal thatcolleges and universities in the Southeast can access.

At left, Dustin Mink, University of West Florida assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity, and student Nathan Earley talk on Wednesday, April 5, 2017, in the UWF Battle Lab.(Photo: Tony Giberson/tgiberson@pnj.com)

With cyberattacksescalatingastechnology advances, a qualifiedworkforce in cybersecurity is critical. According to the Department of Homeland Security's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies, aboutone out of every five Americans havebeen victimized by cybercrime. Cyberattacks also cost the average U.S. company more than $15.4 million annually.

To ensure enough qualified professionals exist, El-Sheikh said the National Security Agency's goal is to increase the number of CAE institutions across the country. More than 200 colleges and universities across the U.S. and Puerto Ricoare already designated as a CAE based on their degree programs and close alignment to specific cybersecurity-related criteria and curriculum.

But a substantial amount more could benefit from earning the designation.

"Currently less than 5 percent of institutions have it, and in our world, that designation is a gold star," El-Sheikh said.

Martha Saunders, University of West Florida president, expects the university'sdesignation as a CAE Regional Resource Center to further its mission of being a community resource. She anticipatescybersecurity to change and be redefined dozens of times over the next few years, but she saidas changes in the industryoccur, the university will always play a handin developing the kind of workforce that is needed.

"There are lots of centers for cybersecurity across the U.S. that could have been picked, but they chose us," she said of the CAE Regional Resource Center designation. "I find that encouragingnot just for the university, but for the whole community."

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NSA awards UWF Center for Cybersecurity with designation - Pensacola News Journal

Special to The Washington Post.

Yul Williams is the technical director for the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, working with computer scientists, mathematicians and engineers to develop new technologies in the cybersecurity field that will assist the agency in its intelligence operations. In a conversation with Tom Fox, Williams described an NSA idea incubation technique that has led to many innovations. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What is your main area of focus at the National Security Agency?

A: My work is centered on cybersecurity, and its mostly of a defensive nature. We are trying to gather ideas from the workforce that we can develop and implement to enhance our overall mission. Our CYBERx incubation model provides a venue where anyone in the workforce can present concepts to an audience of senior leaders that may have the potential to affect the manner in which we conduct business.

Q: If I am an NSA employee and I have an idea, how do I get it to you?

A: We developed a crowdsourcing tool that is available to the NSA workforce. The workforce can look at the idea submitted and vote for or against it. They can leave comments saying why an idea is great or that it has been tried before. Afterward, a group known as the Innovators In Residence reviews the idea and decides how we can bring it into the incubation stage.

Q: What happens next?

A: We guarantee the idea champion will have an audience within four weeks with the Innovators in Residence, which will make the determination whether the idea should move to the next stage. The group makes a list of all the good and bad things about the idea. The focus is mostly on the negative comments because they surface the institutional fears as to why the idea hasnt been implemented before. Our emphasis is on proving why those fears are unfounded. If the idea champion cannot overcome those concerns, the idea dies on the spot. We refer to this concept as a fast failure, and it limits the energy expanded on ideas with low mission potential. If the idea has merit, the group helps the idea champion develop a pitch that can be used to convince the organization of the value of the idea to the bottom line.

Q: What happens if an idea passes that phase?

A: The idea champion is given an audience with the RIP or the Resource Investment Panel that is made up of NSA senior leaders who run organizations and have staff. Instead of giving funding for the first round of development, we ask the RIP to loan a resource to the project. For example, a resource may be an analyst who might have skill in microelectronics or optoelectronics. Once the RIP concurs, it provides resources to the idea champion who then has up to five months to conduct experiments. During that phase, the idea champion must periodically meet with the RIP and explain the experiments status. If all of the requirements are satisfied, the idea champion meets with the same panel, now called the Strategic Investment Panel or SIP. The SIP must come to a consensus about turning the idea into a product and deploying it.

Q: How many ideas on average go through this process?

A: There are around 117 ideas percolating in the crowdsourcing process.

Q: Can your approach be adopted by other agencies?

A: I would strongly encourage other federal agencies to adopt an incubation model. I am shocked at the amount of interest employees have in lending their ideas to make us a better agency. You should see the passion that people bring to the table and the pride they have when their idea makes it to the end of the incubation model or is even considered. We dont attribute failure of an idea as a personal failure. We celebrate that the person was willing to step away from what they do on a daily basis and take an idea through the process.

Q: Tell me about your management philosophy or management style.

A: My leadership style is to respect the professionalism of the people I work with. I learned long ago that if youre working with low-skilled people, it is more direction-oriented. In this environment, we have very professional people, so you want to leverage what they have to offer and challenge them to do things that they did not believe were possible. I find that people always exceed their own expectations.

Q: Have you learned any important leadership lessons during your time as a manager?

A: One of the lessons I learned is to always seek out others who have more experience in areas where you may be lacking so you can consider a wider range of ideas. It is important to confer with a diverse set of people who you can bounce ideas off of and those that help you to grow as a professional and as a person.

- - -

Fox is a guest writer for The Posts On Leadership blog and the vice president for leadership and innovation at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

nsa-innovate-qanda

Keywords: Yul Williams, NSA, cybersecurity, innovation, fast failure

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Yul Williams on fostering innovation at the NSA - Standard-Examiner

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has labelled some members of the free software community habitual, hateful and reflexive contrarians.

Shuttleworth added a comment to his own Google+ post thanking those who worked on Ubuntu's recently-abandoned Unity Project.

But as he read the comments on that post, his mood changed and he soon added a comment about past debate on the Mir windowing system.

The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind, he wrote, it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance.

Shuttleworth thinks that was bad because We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available.

I came to be disgusted with the hate on Mir. Really, it changed my opinion of the free software community.

I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream.

When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence.

The comment concludes with three words of profane and terse criticism: Fuck that shit.

Shuttleworth has form using strong words to describe Mir opponents: he once labelled opponents them the Open Source Tea Party.

The comment takes his ire to new levels and represents an unusually-blunt criticism of the free and/or open source software community from a senior figure in that community.

Grab some popcorn: this could get interesting.

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Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti ... - The Register

Ubuntu's dream of a single Linux platform across all your devices has died, swiftly, following a single gunshot to the head. Holding the revolver: founder of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth.

Shuttleworth has shocked and surprised the open source community, even those who were critics of the Unity effort that was started six years ago.

"I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell," he wrote on the official Ubuntu blog Wednesday. "We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS."

The decision came during a new-fiscal-year evaluation of Ubuntu's various projects. Unity in its eighth version but without ever having made it to public release didn't make the cut.

Developers are in shock so much so that the Ubuntu blog has been knocked offline by traffic as we write (cache of post) although Reg readers will have suspected something was coming. In an interview with us in February, Shuttleworth admitted that time was running short for the project, which he noted was already a year late.

Calling it his "white whale," Shuttleworth noted both the project's failings and his personal investment in the project. "I feel the team has earned a fair shot and I may take my carrots," he said meaning that he would have do something he didn't want to because it was the healthy choice.

In that interview, he also reflected on the dream that was Unity: "Unity 8 delivers a unified set of experiences across all the kinds of personal computers. I care about developers I need to give them a Linux environment wherever they want to do their developing if that's on a phone it needs to be on their phone. If it's on their goggles it needs to be on their goggles."

Sadly, it won't be on any phones, fondleslabs, goggles or desktops: Canonical is killing development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets altogether including, presumably, its Mir display server and thus paving the way for a Wayland-powered GNOME experience. The irony of course is that earlier this month, the new Samsung Galaxy S8 phone came with the ability to attach it to a screen and keyboard and use it as a desktop computer Unity's dream.

"I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry, where there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed alternatives available to manufacturers," Shuttleworth wrote in his post Wednesday. "I was wrong on both counts."

Despite noting that the Unity team had delivered a "beautiful, usable and solid" platform, he said he had to recognize the bigger reality. "I respect that markets, and community, ultimately decide which products grow and which disappear," he noted.

And if there was any doubt that the decision came as a blow to his dream of one Linux to bind them all, Shuttleworth wrote: "This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and the product, both of which are amazing. We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile."

So, it's back to GNOME and bye-bye Unity.

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Ubuntu UNITY is GNOME-MORE: 'One Linux' dream of phone, slab, desktop UI axed - The Register