Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 29th Jul 2007 19:02 UTC, submitted by flanque
Microsoft "Red Flag Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker. Thanks to some major concessions on source code and a precipitous price drop, the Chinese government has now thoroughly embraced Windows and Office. And thanks to a major about-face in the way that it deals with piracy, Microsoft has also won over the Chinese people."
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RE: That's hot news
by sappyvcv on Mon 30th Jul 2007 11:47 UTC in reply to "That's hot news "
sappyvcv
Member since:
2005-07-06

which might include backdoors for NSA (like Windows had in the past).

There is no proof of this and this has been debunked before. Please don't make claims unless you can and are willing to back them up.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 4

RE[2]: That's hot news
by lemur2 on Mon 30th Jul 2007 11:57 in reply to "RE: That's hot news "
lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

which might include backdoors for NSA (like Windows had in the past).


There is no proof of this and this has been debunked before. Please don't make claims unless you can and are willing to back them up.


Well, there is this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20070719/bs_nf/53970
"the development and deployment of an FBI spyware program called the Computer & Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV)."


... if the target computer wasn't running Windows, then it is unlikely that this part of CIPAV would work at all:
"the program is capable of secretly sending to the FBI information about a computer's IP and MAC addresses, other environment variables, and certain registry-type information."


... let alone the question of how the FBI could possibly put CIPAV (a windows spyware) onto a non-windows machine (if the person of inetrest wasn't actually running windows),

... let alone the question of how they did actually get CIPAV onto a machine without the owners consent in the first place if there was no effective "backdoor" into windows ...

Edited 2007-07-30 12:13

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE[3]: That's hot news
by sappyvcv on Mon 30th Jul 2007 12:04 in reply to "RE[2]: That's hot news "
sappyvcv Member since:
2005-07-06

What you are doing is trying to define any security hole as a backdoor. This is false.

If that were the case, all Operating Systems would then contain "backdoors".

A backdoor is a hidden method for gaining access to the system that is intentionally placed there.

Again, either put up or shut up. You have provided absolutely no proof and instead clouted the discussion with an article about FBI creating spyware with absolutely no link to Microsoft itself.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE[2]: That's hot news
by bariole on Mon 30th Jul 2007 12:42 in reply to "RE: That's hot news "
bariole Member since:
2007-04-17

Off course there isn't. But that doesn't mean it ain't happening.. IBM's words on it: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2898/1.html

So if USA government was willing to put one in glorified mail client; is it so hard to imagine that it put one in the most popular operating system which world ever saw? Especially amusing is that those are called NSA keys and are present in crypto layer functioning exactly as a backdoor. I bet that Win and Notes aren't the only one with similar stuff.

And even if NSA key, backdoor key for Win crypto module, isn't really key owned by NSA - does it really matter? *Thrusted* third party problem is still present.

GNU directly attacks this problem by eliminating third party syndrome.

GNU is good.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[3]: That's hot news
by sappyvcv on Mon 30th Jul 2007 14:50 in reply to "RE[2]: That's hot news "
sappyvcv Member since:
2005-07-06

I don't care what someone else has done. Unless you have proof of MS doing it, it's not relevant. The NSA key thing has already been debunked.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE[2]: That's hot news
by TBPrince on Mon 30th Jul 2007 13:43 in reply to "RE: That's hot news "
TBPrince Member since:
2005-07-06

There is no proof of this and this has been debunked before. Please don't make claims unless you can and are willing to back them up.
There isn't any doubt about that. Many widespread US software had such backdoors. If we want to name someone else but Microsoft, we could name Lotus Notes which had (has?) backdoors as well (if I remember it right, it had such backdoors when it became an IBM product).

I have yet to read a convincing debunking about that. This was widely reported and was the reason why many govt agencies all over the World started to replace Windows.

I agree this might (*might*) not be true now. As I wrote in my post, acceptance by China is a good signal that Microsoft provided some kind of assurance about this problem and it makes me feel more confident about me and my users. But this could easily be custom builds.

Please, note I'm a Windows user and my company only uses Windows so I'm not Linux zealot trying to spread theories. Yet, the NSA pratice of introducing backdoors is well documented.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1