[ale] Paranoia, FUD, slow day...

[JK]

Jim Popovitch wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 16:06 -0500, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> 
>>Uh, maybe because we have the source code?
> 
> 
> I'd like to look at all the source code that could possible be
> involved...  Which file is it in?  :-)   The reality is that one would
> have to look at soo many files that it becomes a "trust" issue and
> PGP/GPG has taught us much about trusting those you don't really know.

To be useful to the FBI,  such a stealth surveillance function
would probably have to be present in the BIOS, and enabled via
some hardware mechanism (eg non-maskable interrupt) not accessible
to the OS.  Otherwise, it would be worked around by some reasonably
clever person as soon as it came to light, and anyone who cared
would just disable it.  Still, it's not beyond the realm of
possibility, which is (partly) why I think open-source hardware
design is going to become an important factor in the HW market
pretty soon.

-- JK