[117625] in Cypherpunks
Re: Build a better OTP?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John A. Limpert)
Tue Sep 7 14:50:15 1999
Message-ID: <37D55897.2C5FAE9D@radix.net>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 14:25:27 -0400
From: "John A. Limpert" <johnl@radix.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reply-To: "John A. Limpert" <johnl@radix.net>
Anonymous wrote:
> Keep in mind that from the marketing point of view, Windows is used
> far more than Linux. Very few manufacturers support Linux compared to
> Windows, so it is not fair to single Intel out for this criticism.
The number of manufacturers that "support" Linux is irrelevant. The
proper question is what proportion of Intel systems with security
applications that could use the RNG run non-Microsoft operating systems.
> The question is, if Intel released an object-code-only driver for Linux,
> would it do more harm than good? Isn't it likely that they would be
> blasted even more than they are now for failing to understand the Linux
> community? This is not even rising to the question of open source and
> copyleft; this is the more basic question of whether a .o file would
> even be used by Linux developers.
Please stop blaming Linux for the world's problems.
My experience has been that source code is a requirement for any
security critical system due to auditing and validation requirements. It
doesn't matter what operating system is being used.
Supplying an object file and saying "trust us" doesn't cut it. This
isn't a question of Open Source theology, it is good design practice for
a security critical system.
--
John A. Limpert johnl@radix.net PGP keyID 0x15D681D0
