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On 15/06/13 13:36, Philip Hudson wrote: > Anyone still prepared to accord Windows and MS the same respect as > other players? > > http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html > > -- > Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz > @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63 > > Oh wow, that really takes me back... all the way to 1999 and the Win NT NSAKEY conspiracy. It's probably worth pointing out that despite all the fuss, there was never any conclusive proof of mischief established and it remains just that, a conspiracy. For what it's worth, I always found it relatively credible: certainly in light of Prism/Omnivore/Echelon/etc I personally think it's a bit unlikely that the spooks wouldn't have tried getting a backdoor into windows a few times over the decades. Whether or not they ever succeeded would really fall to a proper windows internals guru (of the calibre of HD Moore, Dave Aitel, Mark Russinovich or the like) with a full suite of debuggers and six months to audit the code base. Of course, who's to say that any of the other - and arguably much juicier targets - OS providers don't have them as well: if I was a proper spook looking to infiltrate Really Important Stuff then I'd want a backdoor into VMS, AIX, z/OS. Y'know, where the really important stuff is kept and processed. And even then, with free and open source systems who's to say that the spooks haven't been fiddling - was that Debian SSH keys debacle really just an error by a junior coder or was it malicious? Back in 2010 there was a big fuss in the OpenBSD community about an alleged backdoor in the IPSEC code planted there by the FBI... Conspiracy theories are fun, but usually just that: fun stories. As you've probably all realised by now, I'm about as paranoid as they come but at some point you have to get a grip. These last couple of months I've had a big surge of clients finally pulling the trigger and I've been rolling out Server 2012 and Win8 installs left right and centre: not even once have I paused to think about NSA backdoors or other such nonsense. Of course, the real conspiracy here is the name itself of Windows NT. The story goes that unofficially Microsoft internally were calling it "New Technology" until someone pointed out that by extension, that meant Redmond was tacitly admitting that all of their prior OS versions were therefore "Old Technology", and by implication crap (which, to be fair, with the possible exception of DOS 6, they were). So Microsoft officially dropped the New Technology moniker and the "NT" ceased to have any particular meaning. But... NT was designed and master minded by Dave Cutler, the creator of VMS whom Microsoft had just poached away from Digital. To aficionados of OS design and internals, there are a *lot* of similarities between VMS and NT, to put it mildly. And what do you get if you ROT1 VMS? WNT. Now that's a conspiracy! Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq