[iwar] Historical posting


From: Fred Cohen
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Mon, Jan 1, 1999


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Date: Mon, Jan 1, 1999
From: Fred Cohen 
Reply-To: iwar@egroups.com
Subject: [iwar] Historical posting

          

 I find this story amusing in terms of its irony and its blatant lunacy.
 
The Pentagon/DoD/US Federal Government probably is/are the biggest client(s)
MS has, but not because they are in collusion on spy matters.
As for the French complaining about this sort of thing, I think they have no
room to talk on the matter of spying or eavesdropping on 
communications.  They spend quite a bit of time and money doing this
themselves, especially here in the US.
 
It is ludicrous to think that the NSA forced IBM to accept Gates & Co.; to
work with IBM as a plant by the NSA to work up a world-wide spy
scheme as the report seems to claim.  Such a plan (!!!) could not have been
this successful by intention.  Only chance and timing could
really have made such a thing possible.  Besides, the NSA and the USFG fail
at schemes much smaller than this with frightening
regularity.  To posit that such a sweeping take-over of nearly all the
desktop computers in the world could be engineered by a government
agency, ANY government agency, seems to come more from the likes of a
Hollywood science-fiction  B movie screenplay than from any
credible reporting source, let alone the French.  Besides, even the much
vaunted NSA has nothing like the computing horsepower or the 
manpower to deal the flood (of biblical proportions) that such traffic
monitoring would produce.
 
I have heard this one before, and then it seemed to stem from the
observation that Windows et al consumed resources that could not be 100%
accounted for (by assignment to programs and processes that were then
running).  The answer is simple:  MS writes very resource-inefficient
software, sometimes called "bloat-ware".  They are not alone in this.
 
This story stretches the "conspiracy theory" theory a little too far for me,
and sounds more like "dis-information" than information.

Ross A. Leo

Ross A. Leo, CISSP, CBCP
Director, Information Assurance & Security
CSOC Houston
Voice:  281.853.3516
Fax:      281.853.3140


 






 


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