Hacker News Reader

Comment by xcombinator | Hacker News Reader

Hey, who you trust more?:

a)A program that is in your own servers - computers. b)A program that is on others computers.

So difficult to understand why people trust A more than B. Whatever they promise you, they can look at your data if they want, not so easy in A.

E.g The NSA have the option to see whatever they want in the USA, they have it so easy to do industrial espionage against other countries(they did it with airbus, with national security excuses).

Google can't say no to NSA. Microsoft either(they let them put backdoors in their software), but is not so easy.

View on HN

Hey, who do you trust more?

a) Servers that were made in your own in-house factories, with silicon mined from your mines, using tools made in your other factories, staffed by people who are only related to you.

b) Servers made by another company.

You _always_ depend on another company in some capacity. I'm not saying that everything should be outsourced, obviously... but even colo servers that you own are in someone else's hands, and physical access to a machine is one of the surest ways to be able to 0wn it.

You gotta trust someone somewhere.

Of course, you trust people, and companies trust people, but they want to control in witch ones they trust.

What in the world makes you think Microsoft lets anyone put backdoors into their software?

They need to send their network and security code to NSA for inspection, they look at it and MODIFY, they don't know in some cases what does the modification does.

It has been that way from 1995 days(I had family members working in MS at that time).It's normal, they are a US company after all.

I'm too lazy for citation, just search by yourself, here you can look at the "there are good contributions from NSA" probe: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01...

You know, we "can be all terrorist" mentality, like the printers mark, they need some way of accessing any computer just in case.

It's probably a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com