71–80 of 219 posts
July 2000 is I guess a pre-Google world...so how would "Call 411 and ask for the number of main naval base in Bethesda, MD" work? Just curious how the operator did these lookups?
Almost everybody was already using Google by late 1999.
The dot com bubble killed the competition.
I can't help but feel like the author sounds excessively credulous. I had to stop reading after he wrote "I could tell something big was up and there simply wasn’t time to debate the merits of handing over my source code to the NSA", because at that point my eyes rolled so hard they fell right out the back of my head. After I put them back in, I skipped down to the comments. I have a hard time not agreeing vehemently…
HN is so paranoid. All government is bad, anyone from a spy agency is some double/triple/quadruple agent who's actually a terrorist child soldier working for Facebook on the side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but if you think the NSA is the shadiest government agency on the planet, then you live in an information bubble. Do you think the NSA is shadier than the KGB? What about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? Or even the CIA? I know people are upset about the Snowden revelations but there are much graver sins that have been committed by other agencies.
Whataboutism
It's not whataboutism if the claim is making a comparison against all other possibilities. "shadiest government agency on the planet" may be an objectively false statement as applied to the NSA. You can compare the NSA to other contenders for "most shady" using any number of metrics and create an ordered list. None of that is whataboutism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whataboutism
No, it's not whataboutism. His statement is that "the NSA is the shadiest agency". I am arguing that it is not the most shady. If I tried to justify the NSA's behavior _because_ of what the GRU/IRA/CIA does, that is whataboutism. Hope this was a bit helpful.
Interesting story, but wouldn’t be surprised if the real play here was to get his source code so they could get some bad guys to use a modified version that the NSA could crack. Put a back door in and then intercept traffic trying to download the encryption app to download the back-doored version. The fact that the NSA has to call him in the middle of the night to learn that the free version didn’t use strong encrypt…
But also, if they did want to do that, they could probably backdoor it pretty easily just by patching the binary a bit. Reverse engineering and changing binaries is way easier than cracking encryption, and they probably have some of the world's top reverse engineers.
The fact that they asked for an existing algorithm backdoor, among other things, makes me think they really were trying to crack at least one thing encrypted with it. As for whether it was to deal with a time-critical situation or whether that was just a confidence trick to make him more likely to give up the code, who knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why... Your security should never depend upon security of your source code. If you're doing things correctly, then the source code doesn't change anything about the security of the data that is encrypted. Perhaps you mean that he chose to use 40-bit keys instead of 256-bit keys in the free version? I mean, I guess. But that's just a matter of better understanding the details. It sounds like he outlined this c…
> Your security should never depend upon security of your source code. For sure. I don't think it's about that, though. Even if the application in question were open source, if the project lead is willing to cooperate in any way their government asks, they could probable ensure the existence of a back door. For this reason, where possible, I would prefer to use encryption software written by people who are principled…
I drew the ire of our security services in a much dumber way sometime in the early nineties; after having seen Wargames, I set up my MicroVAX, rescued from a dumpster at the local bank, to ID as a DoD box whenever any of my friends dialled into it. A few weeks into this, I get a summons to get down to the local police station ASAP. The commissioner then gives me a good verbal beating for being such a stupid kid; appa…
Certainly doesn't make me want to use any software made by this guy.
I guess to be fair, this was in 2000. Before we knew the Snowden revelations, etc. I also wonder if he handed over just the source code to the shareware version or the full version? Also, nearly everything is open sourced now...so I guess it isn't the biggest boundary to cross?
It's probably an #IFDEF or an if (registered) somewhere in the source code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whataboutism
Not really, a comparison was implied. They didn't say "shady agency", they said "shadiest", which makes a claim and invites dispute about the others' relative shadiness.