Government spooks helped Microsoft build Vista

[Ian Petersen]

> Given that Linux is open source, it'd be hard for them to hide something
> in it.

Given that the kernel is a couple of million lines of code, it might
be easier than you think.  The hard part is getting it past Linus (and
his various lieutenants), but, IIRC, this has happened before.
Certainly someone has tried.  I remember something about some code
that tried something similar to this:

if ((currentUserId = 0)) {
     // benign-looking code
}

The extra parentheses around the assignment silences the compiler, and
you're left hoping that a human reviewer catches the fact that you're
assigning zero, not comparing to zero.  I can't remember if this
particular exploit ever made it into the wild, but I'm certain it was
submitted for review.

Ian

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