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Board Administrator
Username: admin
Post Number: 559
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 | | Posted on Thursday, June 2, 2005 - 3:10 pm: | |
From Daily Kos -- here are the most important comments on the whole thread:
by Kaleja -- Hypothetical, but extremely damn suspicious -- From a system design standpoint, leaving a hook for an executable program on a memory card that's supposed to be for tally purposes in an application where security is an issue stinks to high heaven. It should not be easy for an end user to change the behavior of the system. The fact that it is that easy is a lot like finding needles, scorched spoons, and rubber tubing in someone's bedroom.
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by blue florida -- agreed. It's a compelling bit of fact- that the software goes to a removable card for code. It's sure a good answer to why someone would think they could get away with it. It would leave no trace behind.
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by Fernando Poo -- True -- And any speculation would be nothing more than a "Conspiracy Theory". Of course, putting somthing like a backdoor into a large volume release would involve a conspiracy by its very nature. And there would be nothing to prove it even happened, only that it was possible.
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by technopolitical -- Bingo. There is no legitimate reason for that hook to be there, and no half-way competent code review could miss it. The only reason to give control to a removable card is to subvert the machine's internal programming.
Note that the programmers for this are highly skilled and quite sophisticated, with at least two decades of hard core programming experience -- they are not bumblers. I hope we have room in the technical report to show you what we've learned about the skill sets possessed by the programmers, based on other programs they have written for other employers. -- Bev |
