Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House cyber policy director

A. It is not metaphorically swiss-cheesed, the swiss-cheese model [1] of software security is officially endorsed. Just stack enough trash and maybe it will be okay is now accepted policy.

B. It was not driven by the NSA. It was actually driven by commercial software vendors like Microsoft and Cisco who could not meet minimum security standards, so demanded the standards be lowered to allow them to make sales. Any time the NSA gets the drivers seat in setting government security procurement standards they almost always push for actual security since the NSA is the government; they are protecting themselves. It is reasonable to distrust them for commercial and external systems, but you can trust their standards for their own and government systems are not meaningfully compromised.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

A similar claim could obviously be made of Boeing. Just imagine what is happening in their military contracts which we are not allowed to hear about. Looking at the projects which we are allowed to know about, airliners and Boeing's Starliner, clearly Boeing management needs to be put out to pasture.

The core issue is cutting corners, for profit. This is not an issue which is easy to handle in our system. It seems that the best we can do is name and shame. Let's do that at least.

It’s the tiny brick supporting their entire skyscraper.

and we know that all monopolies require government enforcement to prevent others from competing...

then we know that there's no such thing as a conflict between Microsoft and the us government

the us govt is to serve Microsoft and that's that. any conversation like this about the merits of Microsoft as a market participant are laughable and disingenuous

theres no programmer alive that knows the history of Microsoft that would speak about them as you have just done, as an honest company trying to make a product

actually sick to see how HN has been corrupted

Commenting on your downvotes is off-topic, against the rules, and when done as a snide insult like above: rude. GP might experience better results if they edited their post to remove the snide, insulting comments about downvoters.