5 ms·
The honeymoon is over. The Internet is now a hostile environment. We cannot assume good conduct from any party of reasonable size and should assume deception fr
by hyperdunc 11y ago
The honeymoon is over. The Internet is now a hostile environment. We cannot assume good conduct from any party of reasonable size and should assume deception from anything that isn't fully open source and vocal about it. It sucks to assume the worst...
- ageek123 11y agoIt would appear that the "party of reasonable size" here is China or Russia, not a corporation.
- hyperdunc 11y agoI'm not sure that matters. Any powerful entity wrapped in secrecy is suspect, whether they're a nation state or a corporation. We, the users, are always the victims - dependant on the infrastructure or services that have been compromised.
- static_noise 11y agoI don't really get why you specifically mention these two countries. It could be because your government is at war with them but that would be speculation. The problem goes much deeper. It could be any "larger" corporation or government or other entity having enough manpower. It could even be parts of a corporation or government entity. However which way you put it, a program of which you don't have access to the source cannot be trusted.
- lifty 11y agoCan you please explain how you reached that conclusion? What made you exclude US and UK?
- dandrews 11y agoParent is probably taking the CNN article at face value.
- eeZi 11y agoNow? The code was introduced in 2008.
- DanBC 11y agoThat has always been the case. It's always been the case that if your adversary is a well funded government you need very careful security. We knew this from Echelon in the 1980s.
- notalaser 11y agoI was thinking the same thing. Honeymoon's over? What honeymoon? There never was a honeymoon!
- hyperdunc 11y agoObjectively, perhaps not. (I suppose I remember the early days of the Internet when it wasn't that popular.) My gist is that our implicit trust in the system/infrastructure we rely on is undermined by this sort of revelation. And yet, as a whole, we de facto continue to trust in opaque entities that provide valuable yet likely compromised services because it is convenient.
- notalaser 11y agoThis should not be a revelation though. Granted, back when the Internet wasn't so popular, the risk for people like you and me, or for small companies, was relatively low. Partly because the value of Internet-accessible information was relatively low, too -- twenty years ago, if I bought a backdoored home router, all the Evil Guys would get access to would be really bad code snippets and a few folders of porn pics. But the fact that people with access to your infrastructure also had access to your data was more or less well known ever since "the beginning", and it's also why internetworks other than the Internet were a thing for a long time. > And yet, as a whole, we de facto continue to trust in opaque entities that provide valuable yet likely compromised services because it is convenient. Don't forget the scarcity of alternatives though. It takes a lot of money to come up with a credible alternative to Juniper and Cisco. Siphoning personal data is what sells nowadays, not protecting it.
- maxerickson 11y agoWhat implicit trust? Phrases like If you want something to stay private, don't post it. are bandied about by the general public. Not just by single issue privacy advocates, but by people of all sorts.