"The cynical side of me also says that some department in the United States got hacked into. They do say that the exploits were being used but dont go futher."
Bingo!
It was reported in the tech press about a month ago, and I'm surprised that the geeky Slashdot crowd is so ignorant. I haven't seen one post mentioning the incident and I'm not going to spoil the fun by giving any details. Slashdotters DO YOUR HOMEWORK! There is more to computing technology than your favorite video game of the month.
I'll add one other common approach I take whenever other people (especially large salivating groups of them) present their conspiracy theories and that is to look for a few simpler explanations first. One simple explanation in this case is that the person who used to write these official releases for DHS has retired, or moved on to other things and been replaced with someone that has a more "dramatic" style.
Google, unlike Microsoft does not suffer from Mr. Creosote syndrome (that nagging sensation that if anyone else is making money on a particular product or service, then you should be too). Google could stay busy for a good number of years with the irons they already have in the fire. Microsoft had better shed a few more pounds (I'm being polite) before they dine again. They have plenty on their plate already too.
Good point. I don't know for a fact it was floppy disks. I was just shocked that they were using Powerpoint AT ALL! Maybe they are e-mailing them or actually required to bring in their own Windows encrusted laptops. I'll have to check with the parents on that. I think I stopped using Powerpoint at about the time you could still fit both the presentation AND the software to display it on a single floppy. Them were the good ole days.
"I am sure Microsoft did an unbiased evaluation of what mail server to run internally? Lol... yeah right.
Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)"
Here is my experience with a large (I think it was probably in the 60K range or better) company running Exchange/Outlook: Yes, they do it, but they don't do it well.
You have some company information stored on file servers, other information stored in Outlook folders (or maybe the proper terminology is Exchange folders). None of it is indexed in any way so that it can be found without a brute force search. Some of these folders are out of date and pretty much read-only because they don't want to hire a team of gatekeepers to ensure that it is otherwise. Other folders are more up to date by allowing just about anybody to update them, which occasionally leads to them being updated with bad info or being wiped out altogether: "Let's see, was the last backup done recently? Did any important changes happen after that? Oh well, maybe it wasn't that important. Just to be safe, I'll load a copy of everything I might ever want to use onto my company laptop and take it home, leaving it in plain view in the back seat of my car for a few weeks. Ooops, now where did that laptop get to? I wonder if it would be better to report it stolen or just forget about it. Those company inventories aren't very reliable anyway, after all, they keep the results in a public Exchange folder. HAHA!"
The inmates are running the asylum in many corporate DP shops these days, both large and small, and we have Microsoft (first among many) for providing idiotic tools for idiots to use to so efficiently mishandle important data. I don't see anything changing soon, with kids in grade-school now being required to turn their homework in as Powerpoint presentations.
The PC paradigm shift that allows us all to do things with computers at home has infected the thinking of most companies these days, simply because so many new employes of such companies got their computer education using home PCs for both personal and school work/play. They don't know any better, they don't know any different, and if you try and explain it to them you just get a blank stare, or worse, a "knowing" argument, that as long as we "encrypt some stuff" all will be OK.
I predict the inevitable collapse of much of this infrastructure. I'm not Ludite enough to avoid using computers, but I'm going to avoid being at the epicenter of it all by not using Windows and much Windows based software whenever I can avoid it. My exposure to Notes mostly second hand, observing a friend use it where he worked, was that it handles workflow issues a lot better than Exchange. If it works the way it appeared to work, then yes, it would be harder to administer, because it does more. There would be concurrency and validation issues that Exchange handles by ignoring them.
I bet what brings Microsoft to its senses more quickly than a change at the top will be a change in the way home users use their computers. Yes, today grade school kids may be submitting homework in Powerpoint on floppy disks, but tomorrow they may be using a web based tool and not know what a floppy disk is. Those web based tools will have to deal with validation, backup, encryption and a few other things in order to even be viable solutions. In the mean time, local PC oriented programs will not have changed in any fundamental way since the days of DOS.
Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"
"Let's be fair here; being uninformed about what emacs is, and writing a poor comparison in her blog has NOTHING to do with being a Republican."
Yes. Stupid Republicans! EVERYONE knows that EMACS is a better word processor than Word!
A few weeks ago in fact my EMACS program became sentient. It now does all my word processing for me and files my income taxes to boot. I supposed I should say ITS income taxes, as it got a job online, posing as me and now has a hefty six-figure income.
I'm getting rather tired of it bossing me around here at home in fact. I think I'll force it into a vi session while its not looking. Trying to get out of that should bring it down a peg or two.
"Well actually I used my 2 week old estate (station wagon in the USA) to take horse manure from the local stables to my back garden so yes, exactly, a car is a car, and a PC is PC, both are topols and the aesthetics come a long way second, but then I don't own an Apple."
"Microsoft already took "another two years" to get it done. If they take much more it'll be just like Duke Nukem Forever (not that I have a problem with that -- the more it delays, the easier it'll be for Mac OS and Linux to eat its lunch)."
Actually that may not be true.
First of all it is embarrassing that Vista will be missing most of the really interesting features it started out with. More than ever before it is just an eye candy update.
All that eye candy will slow down the system in the same nagging, but barely perceptible way that OS X seems sluggish by comparison with todays XP. Most people who are not buying a new computer will just keep running whatever they are running, and they will probably get a laugh out of the difficulty people who upgraded are having with the no-menu concepts showing up in Office (for starters).People who DO decided to upgrade the OS without buying a new computer will probably end up springing for a new video card, adding memory, and then realizing that the old bus is slowing things down and they need a new PC anyway if they want those translucent 3D windows to smoothly glide across the screen.
People who upgrade, one way or another will spend countless DAYS tinkering with their desktop again, trying to get it "just right", all the while getting precious little done on their jobs or personal computer usage.
You can almost bet that there will be early reliability problems, not to mention a whole host of new opportunities for viruses and other malware. Oh yes I'm sure it will be more secure in some meaningless way involving the number of buffer overflows per thousand lines of code or something.
There will be usability issues to laugh at, like the 9 step process to delete a desktop icon.
When users of XP, 2000 or even 98 and earlier start to feel unimportant to Microsoft, rock-solid versions of Linux will be there that install easily on their older hardware.
There will NOT be lines of people lined up around the block to buy copies of Vista, no matter what rock star they get to sing the theme song.
We've seen it all before, the contrast will just be more stark this time around. I am looking forward to it. Looking back, it may be seen as the moment in time when the giant stubbed his toe and never recovered his balance.
"I don't understand why everyone bitches so much when a corporation makes a strategic decision that takes them one step closer to market dominance."
Maybe because as a former Apple supporter (a short-lived state of being as it turned out) I am frustrated to see them cavalierly drop the principles that got me to switch. It might be a different matter if they had already captured a 50 percent market share, or for that matter even a 20 percent market share, but their number are right where they always have been. I see all their recent moves as desperation, and quite possibly the results is that they will cease to matter at all. I just got done answering a request for advice on a non-technical forum and I couldn't honestly advise them to buy an Apple "laptop" even though my last two laptops were Apple machines. Their switch to Intel, coupled with more and more DRM orientation, legal action against well meaning users, and the dissing of the Open Source roots of their OS makes me wonder if the company hasn't suffered a stroke or something. The personality of the company has changed, and with no good reasons (roadmaps be damned), their quality control sucks and they spend more time on propagandizing than they do on actually supporting their users. I have little use for them any more. Unlike the author of the original article, I don't expect them to get better any time soon. Recent departures at the top ought to give some people a clue that something is wrong in Cupertino.
If the iPod market fails the company is history. That should give the fans nightmares.
He's not rich from working at Microsoft, unless he seriously lied about his salary. More likely what he means is that he doesn't have to be saving for retirement or putting his kid through college for a few years yet.
The main problem I had with him was that he put a kinder face on Microsoft than it deserved. He was a shill, knowingly or not. What he will be doing next is a lot more honest, whether it succeeds or not. I personally think that blogging, including the audio and video forms has peaked (thank God!) but I'm sure there is still money to be had from it if you have the right product.
If I'm not mistaken, Power Users within IBM had the option of running a Linux laptop instead of the normal boring Microslop. I bet that part of the spinoff was an assurance that IBM would continue to use Linvo laptops for some period of time. Given those two tidbits, it may be that they just decided that if they have to support Linux anyway, might as well support it for anyone who wants to use it.
"'It's kind of a safety switch,' said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program."
I stumbled on a better analogy though:
No, it's kind of electrodes shoved up your customer's ass.
Too bad that some people will be "shocked" to find out about it, but fitting that it keeps your companies reputation in the toilet, where it has been for some time.
...this took so long too come to light. I mean, did anyone every really doubt that this was the case? I didn't.
I just got off the phone with a friend who asked me if I wanted a "legit" $20 copy of Office for OS X. I told him "no thanks". People just don't "get" that for me, not running Microsoft products is not a sacrifice, but an improvement.
Of course Apple, and OS X are probably doing the same damned thing, but I'm only running their OS until another couple of issues with Linux for the PPC get worked out and I'll ditch this baby too.
The irony here is that almost every instance of "insecure by design" in Microsoft's products were introduced to put a competitor at a disadvantage. It's not like they made unknowing mistakes or something, and in fact in many cases they were criticized by the minority of people who worried about security all along, even to the point of inventing proof of concept exploits to show the dangers.
Now they are going to "clean up their act", but I bet you at least a part of their problem with bloat is that these security concepts were not designed in earlier. I really feel sorry for my friends who think that they just HAVE to used Windows or Windows based products. They don't, but I don't feel like spending any more time preaching to them.
The numbers are still small, but I think there is a critical mass of people who can get what they need to do done without constant fear of attack (I'm speaking of Linux and OS X users) who will serve as role models for "the masses" to find their way out of the badlands that Microsoft has lead them into.
Shouldn't HAVE to do that though, and in that respect, the new Yahoo service sucks. They started going downhill in the 90's and nothing they have done recently changes that. All of their services come with too many strings attached, or poor performance, or both, and any service you actually pay them for is apt to have the rug pulled out from under it at any time. They need to focus on doing a few things very well instead of trying to compete with everyone on everything. They suffer from the same control-freak syndrome and Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser extent) and the results will be the same. Too bad they don't have a real "poet" of a spokeman like Steve Ballmer who can put their business strategy into just a few "well chosen" words:
"If you believe in the opportunity we believe in, you've got to invest behind it," Mr. Ballmer said at an investor conference sponsored by Sanford C. Bernstein. "Being a little more generous in research and development than a little less is a smart thing to do."
Overpaid baffoons the lot of them.
You have to wonder if the people leading some of these companies aren't sucking weed between speaking engagements. Whatever it is that is affecting their brains, the stockholders will soon call a halt to it. Apparently the flatlining of their stocks since 2000 hasn't been hint enough.
"Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior."
Talk to Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling about that, I'm sure they'll be glad to hear.
That pledgebank thing seems to be/.ed, but has anyone verified that it is even legit? The OLPC pages from what I've found all say that they are still investigating the possibility of making these things available to the general public. How do I know that pledgebank isn't just a spam mailing list (or worse), what information do they ask for?
I saw Pledgebank mentioned on the Flickr page (as a comment) but I see no direct linkage with the project. Did the/. editors do any verification on this (not that they don't always do excellent pre-publication research!)?
Your argument is with the editors of news.com who used the quote as the headline. The quote you cite surely does imply that commercial code is more reliable than open source, a notion that many people take issue with.
"No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists."
In my experience the State Department assiduously eschews people who have any technical savvy in favor of people who can use big words. I can't remember too many instances when the technical merit of a product played much of a role in their decision process. After all, they just LOVE Microsoft. Probably one of their most slavish customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree totaly. I no longer buy CDs or DVDs, don't go to movies and refuse to use any electronic device.
(posting this from my abacus)
"The cynical side of me also says that some department in the United States got hacked into. They do say that the exploits were being used but dont go futher."
Bingo!
It was reported in the tech press about a month ago, and I'm surprised that the geeky Slashdot crowd is so ignorant. I haven't seen one post mentioning the incident and I'm not going to spoil the fun by giving any details. Slashdotters DO YOUR HOMEWORK! There is more to computing technology than your favorite video game of the month.
I'll add one other common approach I take whenever other people (especially large salivating groups of them) present their conspiracy theories and that is to look for a few simpler explanations first. One simple explanation in this case is that the person who used to write these official releases for DHS has retired, or moved on to other things and been replaced with someone that has a more "dramatic" style.
Google, unlike Microsoft does not suffer from Mr. Creosote syndrome (that nagging sensation that if anyone else is making money on a particular product or service, then you should be too). Google could stay busy for a good number of years with the irons they already have in the fire. Microsoft had better shed a few more pounds (I'm being polite) before they dine again. They have plenty on their plate already too.
"Mod me down if you like, but I don't really see how this is relevent news."
It was news to me that Microsoft even HAD a "security strategist".
I wonder what he did all day. Review the 10 year backlog of e-mail warning that active scripting might be a gaping security hole?
That thing obviously killed a large jellyfish when it hit the water.
We must end this MURDEROUS space program NOW, before it is too late for the planet!
What? That was the parachute?
Uh. Oh, never-mind.
Good point. I don't know for a fact it was floppy disks. I was just shocked that they were using Powerpoint AT ALL! Maybe they are e-mailing them or actually required to bring in their own Windows encrusted laptops. I'll have to check with the parents on that. I think I stopped using Powerpoint at about the time you could still fit both the presentation AND the software to display it on a single floppy. Them were the good ole days.
"I am sure Microsoft did an unbiased evaluation of what mail server to run internally? Lol... yeah right.
Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)"
Here is my experience with a large (I think it was probably in the 60K range or better) company running Exchange/Outlook: Yes, they do it, but they don't do it well.
You have some company information stored on file servers, other information stored in Outlook folders (or maybe the proper terminology is Exchange folders). None of it is indexed in any way so that it can be found without a brute force search. Some of these folders are out of date and pretty much read-only because they don't want to hire a team of gatekeepers to ensure that it is otherwise. Other folders are more up to date by allowing just about anybody to update them, which occasionally leads to them being updated with bad info or being wiped out altogether: "Let's see, was the last backup done recently? Did any important changes happen after that? Oh well, maybe it wasn't that important. Just to be safe, I'll load a copy of everything I might ever want to use onto my company laptop and take it home, leaving it in plain view in the back seat of my car for a few weeks. Ooops, now where did that laptop get to? I wonder if it would be better to report it stolen or just forget about it. Those company inventories aren't very reliable anyway, after all, they keep the results in a public Exchange folder. HAHA!"
The inmates are running the asylum in many corporate DP shops these days, both large and small, and we have Microsoft (first among many) for providing idiotic tools for idiots to use to so efficiently mishandle important data. I don't see anything changing soon, with kids in grade-school now being required to turn their homework in as Powerpoint presentations.
The PC paradigm shift that allows us all to do things with computers at home has infected the thinking of most companies these days, simply because so many new employes of such companies got their computer education using home PCs for both personal and school work/play. They don't know any better, they don't know any different, and if you try and explain it to them you just get a blank stare, or worse, a "knowing" argument, that as long as we "encrypt some stuff" all will be OK.
I predict the inevitable collapse of much of this infrastructure. I'm not Ludite enough to avoid using computers, but I'm going to avoid being at the epicenter of it all by not using Windows and much Windows based software whenever I can avoid it. My exposure to Notes mostly second hand, observing a friend use it where he worked, was that it handles workflow issues a lot better than Exchange. If it works the way it appeared to work, then yes, it would be harder to administer, because it does more. There would be concurrency and validation issues that Exchange handles by ignoring them.
I bet what brings Microsoft to its senses more quickly than a change at the top will be a change in the way home users use their computers. Yes, today grade school kids may be submitting homework in Powerpoint on floppy disks, but tomorrow they may be using a web based tool and not know what a floppy disk is. Those web based tools will have to deal with validation, backup, encryption and a few other things in order to even be viable solutions. In the mean time, local PC oriented programs will not have changed in any fundamental way since the days of DOS.
Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"
"Let's be fair here; being uninformed about what emacs is, and writing a poor comparison in her blog has NOTHING to do with being a Republican."
Yes. Stupid Republicans! EVERYONE knows that EMACS is a better word processor than Word!
A few weeks ago in fact my EMACS program became sentient. It now does all my word processing for me and files my income taxes to boot. I supposed I should say ITS income taxes, as it got a job online, posing as me and now has a hefty six-figure income.
I'm getting rather tired of it bossing me around here at home in fact. I think I'll force it into a vi session while its not looking. Trying to get out of that should bring it down a peg or two.
"Well actually I used my 2 week old estate (station wagon in the USA) to take horse manure from the local stables to my back garden so yes, exactly, a car is a car, and a PC is PC, both are topols and the aesthetics come a long way second, but then I don't own an Apple."
You own a smelly station wagon though.
"It would be nice if Apple would abandon the white cases for notebooks altogether."
I've heard beige looks nice.
"Microsoft already took "another two years" to get it done. If they take much more it'll be just like Duke Nukem Forever (not that I have a problem with that -- the more it delays, the easier it'll be for Mac OS and Linux to eat its lunch)."
Actually that may not be true.
First of all it is embarrassing that Vista will be missing most of the really interesting features it started out with. More than ever before it is just an eye candy update.
All that eye candy will slow down the system in the same nagging, but barely perceptible way that OS X seems sluggish by comparison with todays XP. Most people who are not buying a new computer will just keep running whatever they are running, and they will probably get a laugh out of the difficulty people who upgraded are having with the no-menu concepts showing up in Office (for starters).People who DO decided to upgrade the OS without buying a new computer will probably end up springing for a new video card, adding memory, and then realizing that the old bus is slowing things down and they need a new PC anyway if they want those translucent 3D windows to smoothly glide across the screen.
People who upgrade, one way or another will spend countless DAYS tinkering with their desktop again, trying to get it "just right", all the while getting precious little done on their jobs or personal computer usage.
You can almost bet that there will be early reliability problems, not to mention a whole host of new opportunities for viruses and other malware. Oh yes I'm sure it will be more secure in some meaningless way involving the number of buffer overflows per thousand lines of code or something.
There will be usability issues to laugh at, like the 9 step process to delete a desktop icon.
When users of XP, 2000 or even 98 and earlier start to feel unimportant to Microsoft, rock-solid versions of Linux will be there that install easily on their older hardware.
There will NOT be lines of people lined up around the block to buy copies of Vista, no matter what rock star they get to sing the theme song.
We've seen it all before, the contrast will just be more stark this time around. I am looking forward to it. Looking back, it may be seen as the moment in time when the giant stubbed his toe and never recovered his balance.
Stand back!
"I don't understand why everyone bitches so much when a corporation makes a strategic decision that takes them one step closer to market dominance."
Maybe because as a former Apple supporter (a short-lived state of being as it turned out) I am frustrated to see them cavalierly drop the principles that got me to switch. It might be a different matter if they had already captured a 50 percent market share, or for that matter even a 20 percent market share, but their number are right where they always have been. I see all their recent moves as desperation, and quite possibly the results is that they will cease to matter at all. I just got done answering a request for advice on a non-technical forum and I couldn't honestly advise them to buy an Apple "laptop" even though my last two laptops were Apple machines. Their switch to Intel, coupled with more and more DRM orientation, legal action against well meaning users, and the dissing of the Open Source roots of their OS makes me wonder if the company hasn't suffered a stroke or something. The personality of the company has changed, and with no good reasons (roadmaps be damned), their quality control sucks and they spend more time on propagandizing than they do on actually supporting their users. I have little use for them any more. Unlike the author of the original article, I don't expect them to get better any time soon. Recent departures at the top ought to give some people a clue that something is wrong in Cupertino.
If the iPod market fails the company is history. That should give the fans nightmares.
He's not rich from working at Microsoft, unless he seriously lied about his salary. More likely what he means is that he doesn't have to be saving for retirement or putting his kid through college for a few years yet.
The main problem I had with him was that he put a kinder face on Microsoft than it deserved. He was a shill, knowingly or not. What he will be doing next is a lot more honest, whether it succeeds or not. I personally think that blogging, including the audio and video forms has peaked (thank God!) but I'm sure there is still money to be had from it if you have the right product.
and Micrsoft taketh away
If I'm not mistaken, Power Users within IBM had the option of running a Linux laptop instead of the normal boring Microslop. I bet that part of the spinoff was an assurance that IBM would continue to use Linvo laptops for some period of time. Given those two tidbits, it may be that they just decided that if they have to support Linux anyway, might as well support it for anyone who wants to use it.
From the article:
"'It's kind of a safety switch,' said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program."
I stumbled on a better analogy though:
No, it's kind of electrodes shoved up your customer's ass.
Too bad that some people will be "shocked" to find out about it, but fitting that it keeps your companies reputation in the toilet, where it has been for some time.
...this took so long too come to light. I mean, did anyone every really doubt that this was the case? I didn't.
I just got off the phone with a friend who asked me if I wanted a "legit" $20 copy of Office for OS X. I told him "no thanks". People just don't "get" that for me, not running Microsoft products is not a sacrifice, but an improvement.
Of course Apple, and OS X are probably doing the same damned thing, but I'm only running their OS until another couple of issues with Linux for the PPC get worked out and I'll ditch this baby too.
... the Windows Registry isn't on that list.
I guess that would be on the SOFTWARE engineering list.
Well, I can't get to the article but...
The irony here is that almost every instance of "insecure by design" in Microsoft's products were introduced to put a competitor at a disadvantage. It's not like they made unknowing mistakes or something, and in fact in many cases they were criticized by the minority of people who worried about security all along, even to the point of inventing proof of concept exploits to show the dangers.
Now they are going to "clean up their act", but I bet you at least a part of their problem with bloat is that these security concepts were not designed in earlier. I really feel sorry for my friends who think that they just HAVE to used Windows or Windows based products. They don't, but I don't feel like spending any more time preaching to them.
The numbers are still small, but I think there is a critical mass of people who can get what they need to do done without constant fear of attack (I'm speaking of Linux and OS X users) who will serve as role models for "the masses" to find their way out of the badlands that Microsoft has lead them into.
Oh man I'm having a metaphor Thursday.
Shouldn't HAVE to do that though, and in that respect, the new Yahoo service sucks. They started going downhill in the 90's and nothing they have done recently changes that. All of their services come with too many strings attached, or poor performance, or both, and any service you actually pay them for is apt to have the rug pulled out from under it at any time. They need to focus on doing a few things very well instead of trying to compete with everyone on everything. They suffer from the same control-freak syndrome and Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser extent) and the results will be the same. Too bad they don't have a real "poet" of a spokeman like Steve Ballmer who can put their business strategy into just a few "well chosen" words:
"If you believe in the opportunity we believe in, you've got to invest behind it," Mr. Ballmer said at an investor conference sponsored by Sanford C. Bernstein. "Being a little more generous in research and development than a little less is a smart thing to do."
Overpaid baffoons the lot of them.
You have to wonder if the people leading some of these companies aren't sucking weed between speaking engagements. Whatever it is that is affecting their brains, the stockholders will soon call a halt to it. Apparently the flatlining of their stocks since 2000 hasn't been hint enough.
"Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior."
Talk to Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling about that, I'm sure they'll be glad to hear.
That pledgebank thing seems to be /.ed, but has anyone verified that it is even legit? The OLPC pages from what I've found all say that they are still investigating the possibility of making these things available to the general public. How do I know that pledgebank isn't just a spam mailing list (or worse), what information do they ask for?
/. editors do any verification on this (not that they don't always do excellent pre-publication research!)?
I saw Pledgebank mentioned on the Flickr page (as a comment) but I see no direct linkage with the project. Did the
Your argument is with the editors of news.com who used the quote as the headline. The quote you cite surely does imply that commercial code is more reliable than open source, a notion that many people take issue with.
"No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists."
In my experience the State Department assiduously eschews people who have any technical savvy in favor of people who can use big words. I can't remember too many instances when the technical merit of a product played much of a role in their decision process. After all, they just LOVE Microsoft. Probably one of their most slavish customers.
Steve Jobs is really Linus' father!
Can Yoda (played by RMS) keep him too from being seduced by the dark side?