It's not a coding error. It's built to do exactly what it looks like it's supposed to do: diminish any ordinary person's claim of total control over the behavior of the system, such that, should the need arise, a trained hand can lift the proper latch and intervene, to gain the upper hand, ostensibly so "the good guys" win.
The good guys being those that ordered Intel into compliance with such requirements.
>The good guys being those that ordered Intel into compliance with such requirements.
There is vast case law surrounding our first amendment right to refuse this kind of coercion. No one can force you to present something as yours against your will (at least, if they want it to hold up in court).
What is more likely is that Intel won a great many more government contracts by doing this. They'd make tons of money doing it, so they did it. And if they didn't do it, their competitor would. That's how the system works in this country.
They also won government contracts by not doing it; the High Assurance Platform mode (‘setting the HAP bit’) was a feature implemented by Intel for the NSA, incidentally discovered by security researchers.
Dell sold laptops with this as an option until they were asked not to.
It would be pretty easy for a sizable country or even a wealthy US state to demand that these ‘secure’ co-processors can be disabled at the user’s discretion, via regulation.
From the NSA’s perspective, having the keys to the backdoor is an asset, but having a backdoor at all is a huge liability, now they’re not the only game in town. US businesses and citizens simply have more to lose.
Honestly, I think it’s laziness and inertia more than conspiracy.
> From the NSA’s perspective, having the keys to the backdoor is an asset, but having a backdoor at all is a huge liability, now they’re not the only game in town. US businesses and citizens simply have more to lose. Honestly, I think it’s laziness and inertia more than conspiracy.
You're assuming (fully) rational actors. It's fairly easy to have blindspots when they are (at least temporarily) useful.
nobody is seeing this for what this really is: Apple users compromised by internal agent.
Nation states already paid google employees to target gmail etc. now they targeted an apple employee to make this mistake which allows any targeted attack into those companies that gives mbp to developers very easy to carry out remotely, as this probably leave the remote capabilities put in place for the NSA wide open.
Bahhahaha! I'm so glad someone posted this! I had been trying to find my way back to this link ever since the first time I saw it!
This was part of one of the first threads I had ever read on HN, on or around the day it appeared: 3/23/2013. Actually, I think I discovered HN in late April or early May, but anyway, the user that shared it then, as much as now, also quickly got flagged and hellbanned.
For a brief moment I felt like I was reading a site that had some truths to speak to, but that illusion was dispelled as soon as it was [censored] and the flames were stamped out. Ah well...
Five years later, and I know better. This site is a tightly controlled mouthpiece, and an echochamber in service to microcorporations in search of early retirement paydays and acquisition cashouts, but hey, work-safe reading material, am I right?
It's a shame it was flagged, but that's the way of this site. Everybody pretends to be a goody two-shoes. For those who can't see it, go to your profiles and switch "showdead" to on.
To HN's credit, though, the Juicero-riffic aspects of SV are understood for what they are: the greasy, obsequious total fucking bullshit that produces nothing, or worse, wastes everyone's time, aching beneath a cloud of impostor syndrome that isn't entirely incorrect. Either that or peacocking the pick-up artistry of engraved, wooden iPhone cases, and popped collar headshots in douchey Vanity Fair biopics.
YC has its own stinky investments that one can rationalize as "teaching experiences" and "lessons learned" and maybe that's a cop out for not being diligent enough, but press too hard and the subculture gets stifled by the Steve Ballmers with a Trump-like attitude. Stack ranking kills the crab, and you get Windows Vista and "Scroogled" ad campaigns at the other end of the pole. A company of paranoid drone wonks, who wear the soulless dork uniform and drive the speed limit, to get to the morning traffic jam on time.
So leaving room for the dumber shit, the flights of fancy, gets you more of the most interesting things that can be had (the dropboxes, the reddits, the dockers, the gitlabs). For all the effort to produce one solid, tangible, self-sustaining utility though, there's definitely 9 or 99 like the link you posted, which, five years later, results in the thread we now read.
Had path.com been destroyed in that moment, instead of wasting another fruitless five years, would the world be a better place? Eh, there's plenty of insufferable nonsense going around. I'm probably as insufferable, when push comes to shove.
Should HN crush all the criticism thereof. Well, at least HN isn't a place where enemies are made, so there's that.
Facing a banking meltdown, no one's mind is fixed on what the political winds might turn into, after the seams burst, and the clean-up effort hoses off the sidewalks and sweeps the remains into the gutter.
It's survival mode, not even women and children first. So before the dust settles, or even earlier when the economy is clearly imbalanced, unstable and listing off to one side, they expect people to think about the extremists this is going to bake over the next half decade. Never going to happen.
Business people, accountants, financial operators, their minds do not work this way.
But there's easily multiple folds or layers that all add together to produce such an effect. And part of it is age brackets. If this is a fifteen year cycle, it's partly generational, and as much about the ritual of hand-off as it is about who is actually landing in the driver's seat.
But the roughest part is the polluter's mindset of those who set up the meltdown. They're definitely there to say: not my problem; so long, suckers!
Immediately prior to that there's probably some mild discussion about incentives driving performance. Why perform at all, if not to reap rewards? And immediately prior to that, there's probably a period with a good record of following the rules, aging out and retiring uneventfully.
So, if the process seems to havea natural rhythm, it's probably because human mortality means good teams eventually kick the bucket, and upstarts fill their shoes with less integrity. The faces change, but the story doesn't.
In order to feel safe expressing your opinions, you have to feel like you won't raise an eyebrow. Either that, or any owner of a raised eyebrow won't take it any further than the mild disagreement of raising an eyebrow.
It's really obvious that not only is it not possible to say whatever you want at work, but that in some cases, raising an eyebrow is the last thing you will ever do, at least within the context of one's career.
The tension at hand is founded in things that simply will not be happening any time soon. But unpredictable reactions to minor slights set people on edge all around.
The polarity is highly charged, even though no one really has murder and beatings high on their list of priorities, the paranoia and suspicion that the other side does is what leaves us destabilized.
Homosexuality, abortion, race, evolution, genetics, how the universe began, and where do we go when we die. Talking about these things at work is a mistake, but even joking about "the wrong opinion" will completely ruin you in less than an hour, so trying to feel safe about having an opinion is a bad idea, whether you feel you're on the right side of history or not.
It's not a coding error. It's built to do exactly what it looks like it's supposed to do: diminish any ordinary person's claim of total control over the behavior of the system, such that, should the need arise, a trained hand can lift the proper latch and intervene, to gain the upper hand, ostensibly so "the good guys" win.
The good guys being those that ordered Intel into compliance with such requirements.