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No Backdoor in Vista
mytrip wrote to mention a C|Net article stating that Vista will not have a security backdoor after all. From the article: "'The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,' Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. 'Over my dead body,' he wrote in his post titled Back-door nonsense."
Thus far, every single comment is posted is the same boring obvious joke. Does nobody ever have anything to say in here?
Anyway, I found this whole story ludicrous in the first place. If they were to put in a backdoor, they would never speak about it publicly. Publicity over something like this is the last thing MS needs right now.
Besides, the cryptography group at MS are an accomplished lot. I doubt they would risk their careers and ideals doing the government's dirty work although there is nothing that compels them to. From Ferguson's blog:
[I]n the unlikely situation that we are forced to by law we'll either announce it publicly or withdraw the entire feature. Back doors are simply not acceptable. Besides, they wouldn't find anybody on this team willing to implement and test the back door.
Precisely.
We all know there will be buffer overruns, and the occasional hacker access through IE7. I'd even be willing to bet that the new RSS feed being built into the OS at a low level will provide lots of ways into the Bitlocker.
No worries, then! The cops won't be able to get into your files, but the criminals will!
As the Who might have said: "Meet the new Windows, same as the old Windows".
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
He seems to be ethical.
I have a problem with that statement. If you are an ethical person, does it not logically follow that you be constrained from associating yourself with unethical people? Microsoft is not only provably unethical; they are actually a criminal organization. How can anyone be truly considered to be ethical if they take a job at Microsoft?