Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: Apology - not necessary
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry () piermont com>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 18:11:39 -0400
John Nicholson writes:
What was said was, if I may paraphrase, that if a country might use it's intelligence agency against the US or US companies, then that country might put pressure on a software firm developing protective software to give the intelligence service the "keys" to getting in the back door. Therefore, this creates a risk in using that software. Maybe not a large risk, but this is a reasonable concern for certain companies and facilities.
The reason this is fairly silly is because so far as I know, in all such circumstances the government contracts provide source availability. To cause undetected trouble, the evil suppliers would have to somehow contaminate the compilers used by the customer to build the code, too. No one has ever shown any "back doors" or similar problems in FW-1. However, lots of people seem to keep spreading rumors about it having one sort of flaw or another. This is hardly fair to the company.
You seem to have no problems about the same implication for French software.
Says who? If someone slandered a French company this way, I'd say the same thing. Perry
Current thread:
- Apology Jason L. Snowden (Sep 24)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Frank Willoughby (Sep 25)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Marcus J. Ranum (Sep 25)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Paul D. Robertson (Sep 26)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Paul D. Robertson (Sep 29)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Marcus J. Ranum (Sep 25)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Perry E. Metzger (Sep 29)
- Re: Apology - not necessary John Nicholson (Sep 29)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Perry E. Metzger (Sep 29)
- Re: Apology - not necessary Frank Willoughby (Sep 25)