Comment by cromwellian
12 years ago
Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
12 years ago
Yea, but as collateral damage, the rope hung the tech companies and damaged their brands by who knows how much.
They deserve to have their brands damaged.
They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government.
Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of one of their network engineers and forced him to turn over some keys. Again, whose brand deserves to be damaged here, the company, or the immoral nation state with vast military industrial resources at its disposal?
Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
What an unbelievably stupid line of thinking.
Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here.
> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.
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> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies
Because they promote themselves as tech-based companies, yet abdicated their professional duty to design secure systems because insecurity makes for easier monetization.
You would very much blame a car manufacturer when it turned out that all of its cars were keyed the same.
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Supposedly the US government is tapping fiber they own. Would you fault someone for not having security between rooms in their home?
They also gave the NSA and co. front-door access, and probably knew about the back-door access, but couldn't do anything about it.
It may be the case that the tech companies need to have their brands damaged for the greater good, at this point. If it turns out that G and Y are operating in an environment (USA) where a rogue government endangers consumers and prevents legit business from being done, G and Y need to either remove themselves from that environment or fall.