I did read something about windoze versions having a back door in security or encryption so the NSA or one of those 3 letter departments could freely access your info.
And with all those hidden files it makes a person wonder whats up.

heres a very quick way to make an expensive door stop as it was refered to in one of my posts.

iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT DROP

Then having a cron job to do an iptables -F every 30 mins to reset the firewall script just in case you lock yourself out, without forgetting to do a IPTABLES -P FORWARD ACCEPT.....

<rant>
grsecurity is VERY flawed, it's protection messure's can't stack up against a combination of special patches. It's buffer overflow protection is laughtable, it's RBSAC is also quite laughtable. Using grsecurity is a horrible idea, hell I don't even know why it exists aside from stupidity. My personal preference for RSBAC is SELinux or LIDS. For buffer protection, there really is only one, execshield-nx, which can actually take advantage of No Execute on x86 system's running a AMD64 chip. grsecurity is horrible because it just doesn't get anything completely right.
</rant>

Edit: Also, RSBAC and LIDS are two different types of system, LIDS is a MAC system, similer to SELinux but LIDS allows better controll then SELinux in most cases.

I think the comments in regards to linux out of the box not secure compared to windows actually fairly interesting.

I believe while Windows is actually tighter out of the box, linux has its advantage because there are plenty of tools out there to harden your box to extreme measures that a windows box my not necessarly be able to do.

To me as an onlooker and user of both windows xp and linux environments centOS 3.4 at the moment I have personally benefited from the flexability of linux, the documentation, linux community and freely available sourcecode to adapt things to my own needs

This is most stupid statement in this tread I have read. LIDS (Linux Intrusion Detection System) is set of MAC controls
RSBAC is not SELinux
RSBAC means Rule Set Based Access Control which is more than MAC.
SELinux uses Role Based Access Control is more than MAC.

Yo can compare grsec to RSBAC or SELinux if you want. I believe that you have read somewhere something not understanding what is what.

By the way Steve Gibson usually has no idea what he is talking about. Best example: his nanoprobe could be used for quite some time to launch DOS attack. There is more abot him, no point do discuss.
Killing IE is really not efficient way of getting rid of MS sneaking around. Or rather user leaving traces of computer usage everywhere.

I read that too. It was a book called "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown. Other then that, I haven't seen it anywhere as a real topic.

You mean like this one taken from these ?

Reading the links you posted, so far all I see is it is speculation. From the first article:
If it truly is a backdoor then that is sad. That backdoor should be taken out of the OS then.

Depends on the legality of its use.

For example a government agency cannot just simply tap your phone for the hell of it but they can if they are authorised to do so my an official.

This thread is silly. If the NSA wanted to get into your computer they don't need a "second key" to do it. They are the NSA for cryin out load, they can easily get into your computer without being given a key. You can encrypt it anyway you like and they will still easily get whatever they want.. It is what they do... break encryption that is and they are extremely good at it and don't need "second keys".

100% agree if the NSA wanted to look into your system they will. Besides you would of had to do something illegal and naughty enough for them to even get to this stage. Anyway who needs a key to get access to your system when the NSA could get a warrant like any government agency

Were you paying attention?

It's all fairly moot of course, since I'm guessing the keys have been changed since 1999 when this story was all the rage ...

As for the NSA -- I know everyone likes to think that they can bend steel with their minds and walk through walls and silly things like that, but computers and math don't bend to imagination ... It's just ones and zeros ...

As an example of why the idea of the NSA guessing keys to crypto systems is just silly, let's look at 128bit IDEA.

There's more here.

why not close the thread before it gets silly

Why not leave it open so the adults can have a constructive conversation?

The NSA does a lot more than just guess. They have the some of the smartest mathematicians, engineers, and computer geeks in the world thinking of ways to break encryption. Most of the algorithms and computer hardware they've developed is kept top secret so we no one knows for sure exactly what they are capable of. I'm sure they like it that way.

I'm also sure they are not using the stupid brute force method suggested. I'm sure their algorithms are a bit more complicated and efficient than that.