Microsoft: Vista won't get a backdoor 3274

After takin' a swig o' grog, DFS belched out this bit o' wisdom:

Indeed. But different enbreasties merit different levels of trust.

That would work for the wash cycle, but would come out in the rinse (next release) cycle.

No one.

There are no guarantees. Even with Gentoo, where the code is downloaded and built.

However, in all cases you are quite free to give the code a quick scan, or check it out along a number of different paths.

No. Trusting an opaque company versus a potentially transparent are not equally dangerous.

But, yes, you are right, one could get fooled, even with open source.

That's why I watch the lights on my switch very carefully, and listen to my hard drive, and go to the message logs when they seem a bit over-active.

I can't do that with Windows, unfortunately, because there's always about 3 or 4 Kbps of chatter on Windows networks.

And perhaps the dealings you've had with Microsoft enable you to trust them, too. That's an important point. If you don't get burned, you're probably safe. But get burned once, and you will be perpetually suspicious.

Personally, I think Microsoft got dinged early on with the NSA back-door business, and with some phone-home things, but I wouldn't expect them to ship back-doors in Windows.

They might ship downloadable updates that plug in a back door, but I don't think they'd do that either, unless the government was putting a gun to their head.

Actually, I don't know, it's been a long time and I never paid a lot of attention to the issue.

I really don't care. It came up as an issue, and obviously clouded Microsoft in a lot of people's minds. I'm sure the publicity reckons in how Microsoft thinks about back doors, if they ever thought about adding some.

The only back doors I can see Microsoft putting in are ones that benefit only Microsoft, by tallying mbutt data about piracy, for example. Or by detecting and reporting dual boots.

True, but it does tend to make the user a "back door" man.

-- Q: Why does a GNU-Linux user compile his kernel? A: Because he can.