Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings

Tue Sep 24 21:58:22 UTC 2002

>
> PPS. I'm really really amazed at how people can consider any opaque 
> system
>     truthworthy.  Most computer users naively trust their secrets to
>     effectively every one of thousands of Microsoft engineers who can
>     easily plant trapdoors.  The same goes for trusting Intel.  How 
> hard
>     it is for a CPU designer to plant an obscure bug causing switch to 
> a
>     privileged mode?  It is hard _not_ to create trapdoors like that by
>     mistake, even in much simpler designs (check the 30-year old 
> report on
>     Multics security).
>

I think it's even worse. Having traveled quite a lot in my previous 
job, I on one airplane realized that the person sitting next to me was 
working on the sales budget for one of our largest competitors.....

I once (also on an airplane actually) learned that most investment 
banks have a ban on their employees to use their laptops or in other 
ways work on airplanes. Make sense to me. But I keep breaching it.

- kurtis - /  (...as I am sitting in the air somewhere over northern 
Germany)