Microsoft: Vista won't get a backdoor 3268 plus 1

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 01:06:02 -0800, Jim Richardson

I wouldn't call a product that probably only had a few hundred people (at most) working on it comparible to Windows that has had 10's of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands over a 20 year period) of people working on it.

I was talking hypothetical. From an absolute standpoint, you can't be certain your code is secure.

Why are you calling him Erik?

I have never said there was backdoors in GCC. And I would never say it's impossible for there to be backdoors in Windows. We're talking about actualities here, not theoreticals. Microsoft, and the developers working on the code in question say no, there aren't any back doors. They even go so far as to say "over my dead body". That's pretty unequivocal.

At some level, we all have to trust what we use. I was speaking from an absolute standpoint. You can't trust anything, be it Windows or Open Source, if you haven't looked at the actual object code, and even then there are theoretical exploits that could occur in the hardware with innocuous looking code.

All this was largely in response to people that seem determined to believe that open source is impossible to hide secrets in. It's not impossible.