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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

I may be willing to believe the NSA are misguided, but nobody uses the bad guys' name for themselves on purpose. The NSA used Minitruth as the name of their backdoor? Gimme a break.

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This isn't a rumor or some strange conspiracy this is just how crypto-export controls were done for a short while in the US.

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.52.html#subj1

>but nobody uses the bad guys' name for themselves on purpose.

Why not, I've heard of software teams naming themselves Cobra from GI Joe.

I assumed it was the work of the programmer tasked with installing the key for the NSA, not some self-deprecating humor.

>The NSA used Minitruth as the name of their backdoor? Gimme a break.

More like the guy charged with implementing it had a sense of hunour / clear perspective.

The folks at the Iris group were very much like that. Around the same period, the project that would become Lotus Quickplace and the iNotes web client was codenamed "Shimmer", after an old Saturday Night Live fake ad for a do-everything product that was both "a floor wax and a dessert topping".

You must not be familiar with 'palantir'. A seeing stone used for spying, communication, and manipulation by Sauron and Saruman in LOTR.

This is a joke on the implementation. I bet only the lotus devs ever read those names before.

I'd rather not be spied on at all, but if someone's reading my emails I sure hope they have a sense of humor.

I don't know, The darker side of me gets a kick out of it, really. It's interesting language to say the least.

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