Breaking Encryption Won't Make Us Safer

The British government wants to build backdoors into standard encryption libraries. This means the technology that protects your financial transactions could have a backdoor. These same backdoors were just exploited in the WannaCry outbreak that just took down the NHS. Who created that backdoor? The NSA, whose incompetence allowed this “tool” to fall into the hands of a Russian government-affiliated hacking group. You don’t do anything illegal? Great! You do have a bank account, right? You do have private conversations with your significant other, right? Would you want either to be open for potentially anyone to see? Probably not. Resist government’s demands to force Internet companies to open backdoors for them. Nothing good will come of it. ...

June 5, 2017 · Chris Short
Microsoft Office

Microsoft Opens Up Kinda

Microsoft announced on Sunday that it would share Microsoft Office 2003 source code as part of the Microsoft Government Security Program. The program is designed to make governments feel more comfortable about Microsoft’s security practices. The source code for Office 2003 is going to be shared with the governments of more than 30 countries. I’m sure the United States will have numerous teams from different agencies analyzing this source code. It will be interesting to see what the NSA has to say about it. Something I’m curious about is if a government finds a blatant security flaw of some sort are they to fix the flaw themselves or is Microsoft the only person allowed to manipulate the code? I’m Microsoft isn’t going to want to have over 30 different versions of Office 2003 out there but it sure would be nice to strip out the Excel game and all of the other non-sense incorporated into Office in an effort to speed things up and make it more secure. ...

September 20, 2004 · Chris Short