Re: Apology - not necessary

Perry E. Metzger (perrypiermont.com)
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 18:11:39 -0400

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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

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