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Richard Stallman Speaks About Back Doors After NSA Documents Leak
An anonymous reader writes "Companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google are scrambling to restore trust amid fresh litigation over the PRISM surveillance program. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and a newly-inducted member of the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame, speaks about not only abandoning the cloud, which he warned about 5 years ago, but also escaping software with back doors. 'I don't think the US government should use operating systems made in China,' he says in this new interview, 'for the same reason that most governments shouldn't use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.'"
Stallman's position isn't a surprise. I expect him to advocate open source software over any proprietary software. He has for thirty plus years. Why would he change now? There is one thing he overlooks when he says:
'I don't think the US government should use operating systems made in China,' ... 'for the same reason that most governments shouldn't use operating systems made in the US
Stallman overlooks the fact that various foreign governments already have access to the Windows source.
Microsoft to Share Source Code With Governments
Microsoft Corp. announced this week it is making the programming code for its Office 2003 software suite available to government agencies around the globe, a move partly aimed at allowing them to inspect the product for flaws and security problems.
Though Microsoft usually guards such software coding tightly, the step is an extension of an initiative the company began in January 2003 giving about 60 governments access to the inner workings of the Windows operating system. This is the first time the software giant has shared the source code for Office, which includes the Word text processing, Excel spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentation programs.
Microsoft Grants Governments Access to Windows
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Some Microsoft bugs take a ridiculous amount of time to get fixed and all the reports seem to fall on deaf ears. We bash Microsoft for this behaviour but doesn't having a reporting relationship with the NSA help it all to make sense? Taking a long time to fix? Well, they may not be done exploiting it yet. Falls on deaf ears? Well maybe it's not a "bug" but a back door that no one was supposed to know about and Microsoft cannot comment on it without NSA approval.
Disclaimer: I am an IT Security professional.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
there are also those famous secret debug modes in AMD and Intel's chips, that grants above operating system level control, and unlocks hidden CPU resources. this has got to be the under workings of a secret NSA toolkit for full hardware and software control. I give you the AMD CPU password, which was exposed and documented in 2010:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/047243/hidden-debug-mode-found-in-amd-processors
don't you think this was all put in there for a reason? The NSA gets what they want and they want it all, they want to know everything going on inside everyone's home, in every square inch of America - this was all done by design. no one is doing anything to challenge or stop them. look at how none of these companies bothers to complain before years later something about the program they're running, which they now claim to have been against, is exposed. it's crazy, and we're not even getting to the half of it. most of this was done without warrants or any involvement from any court...
Disclaimer: I am an IT Security professional.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
I might go along with that except for the fact that the US Government is heavily involved with metadata. Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it. You may not like some of the things they do with that data.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA so that there's nothing treasonous that they can infer from the pictures once they use the metadata to get a FISA warrant to look at the actual data.
In an era when almost everyone either deals with offshore companies or has immigrant friends or neighbours, the assurance that "only foreign communications are examined" doesn't give much comfort.