[Cryptography] Intel's $10-100 billion Minix copyright problem

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Mon Dec 11 09:27:47 EST 2017


At 09:59 PM 12/10/2017, John Levine wrote:
>In article <E1eO76x-000Eet-FX at elasmtp-dupuy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> you write:
>>I'm now expecting to hear that Intel was *forced* by the
>>FISA "court" (perhaps not even an actual Article 3 court
>>[3]) to incorporate the ME "spy engine" into every chip,
>>and that same "court" issued an NSL to keep the existence
>>of this "spy engine" secret.
>
>Aw, come on.  Even if we imagine that we hear the whirr of black
>helicopters around Santa Clara, this imaginary order would have told
>them to provide a list of spy functions, not what process manager to
>use.  Someone just wasn't thinking clearly.  
>
>Whatever the ME does, I'm sure that they could have bought a QNX
>license and done it totally legally and just as well, probably better
>because QNX is designed to be used in constrained embedded
>environments.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

Andrew Tanenbaum's own words:

"If I had suspected [Intel] might be building a ***spy engine,*** I certainly wouldn't have cooperated, even though all they wanted was reducing the memory footprint (= chip area for them)."

"I think creating George Orwell's 1984 is an extremely bad idea, even if Orwell was off by about 30 years."

"People should have complete control over their own computers, not Intel and not the government."

"In the U.S. the Fourth Amendment makes it very clear that the government is forbidden from searching anyone's property without a search warrant."

"Many other countries have privacy laws that are in the same spirit."

"Putting a possible ***spy*** in every computer is a terrible development."

(BTW, putting a "spy engine" in every computer would seem to be a violation of the Third Amendment, as well:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/22/third-amendment-nsa-spying-column/2573225/

Should 3rd Amendment prevent government spying?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 11:24 a.m. EDT July 22, 2013
)



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