Of course, now the warning is out, the spies can just remove enough unnecessary components to keep the weight constant. Still, I guess it at least makes their lives more difficult.
How does that help? If a foreign government spy agency had access to your laptop, and replaced a binary with their own custom build - how would free software save you?
I don't think jrockway is referring to the software on the laptop, but rather software that the US government is buying. If the source code is available (especially as open source), malicious code should theoretically be less likely to make it in.
It does matter because the assembler doesn't know that Laptop #14838 will become the CIO's. For the same reason that the White House procures food by going to a random store on a random day -- to have a chance at poisoning the president, you'd have to poison a bunch of people. If 100K new laptops were bugged, you'd bet at least one hacker would notice.
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.
This seems to me insane: if somebody has the access to your laptop to install malicious hardware, they also have access to install much more difficult to detect malicious software.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadThere are all sorts of nifty pieces of electronics that can be put inside of laptops.
You don't have to break a RSA key if you can just read the password off the keyboard.
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistahardwa...
Solution to malicious code being inserted into code by terrorists? Free Software.
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/15/computing.s...