American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted For Anything | Hacker News Reader

American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted For Anything

falkvinge.net

24 pointsTsiolkovsky8 comments

Today, software from two American companies — Microsoft and Apple — run most of the world’s infrastructure, in terms of governments, authorities, social security, et cetera. It has come to be taken for so granted, you can barely buy a piece of hardware without code from at least one of these two American corporations.

Nonsense. Yes, Microsoft has it's tentacles in many corners, but Apple is not even close to running most of the world's infrastructure. Regardless though, I can buy lots of hardware without Microsoft's or Apple's code running on top of it. What is this guy talking about?

Go to any consumer electronics store and try to buy a computer not running any code from one of these two companies.

Yes, if you're a sysadmin, getting naked iron is no problem. But you're gonna have code from these running on your network, as it stands today.

You said infrastructure. Not consumer gear.

How many sysadmins are running down to Best Buy to purchase their server farms? I doubt very many. A healthy percentage of companies have their infrastructure based on Linux.

Exactly. XBox's and iPhones are not the "world's infrastructure". The real infrastructure of the world runs on big iron mainframes, SCADA systems and whatever Cisco puts on their hardware.

While I agree with his feelings on the dangers of SOPA, his claim that "you can barely buy a piece of hardware without code from at least one of these two American corporations.", referring to MS and Apple, seems just a bit far-fetched.

Microsoft and US-based cloud companies are facing similar "perception issues" (as they phrase it) on the Patriot Act. Unless Congress and the Administration change their positions, this is going to be an increasing burden on American companies trying to compete internationally.

Domestically too, I know sales people who sell to US financial institutions who remind prospective clients that competitors store their data in US data centres; thus the institutions' data would be exposed under the Patriot act.

It's not just international businesses that have these concerns, any business that serves customers who want their data protected against unreasonable search and seizure have these issues as well.

Inflammatory headline, baseless assertions, and generally uninteresting. Flagged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com