> Russian FSB has actually wrung Windows code reviews out of Microsoft so if they didn't find any back door in that code I'd say there are none to find...

So it's entirely possible to do a code review of an entire operating system and be sure that there are no vulnerabilities?
Of course, you can't be sure that something as simple as an ssl library is safe, but an entire OS is no problem. Despite the fact that there's no way to know if the code you're reviewing matches the installed binaries.

> there is always the option of doing a personal code review of what is it now, 200 million plus? lines of Linux source code and then compiling your own Slackware
Yep, that'd be even easier than the Windows code review, especially since thousands of other people have already done some initial review for you. You can then compile it yourself and know that the source code matches the binary, unlike Windows.

(The trojaned compiler attack is fairly trivial to defeat, so don't bother going there .)

This is nothing but cultural imperialism - imposing our own, "correct" values at gunpoint and forcing the native peoples to accept it or die.

Yeah well, I ain't a moral relativist. They treat people as property (and hey force them to accept that at gunpoint).

Some cretins dreaming about bio-weapons does not give them any real capability. And no, they are neither easy to make nor cheap nor easy to use. This is just the usual exceedingly unethical fear mongering used to sell more copy and to keep the population docile.

It is also not a new tactics, but most people are still cretins that fall for it every time:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken

While that certainly plays a role, it is a minor one. It does stand in the way of solving things, but if you do not have developers that can do secure software engineering competently (and that is the normal case), then giving them too little time and money to do secure software engineering does not matter. The other thing is that people that actually understand software security are much less likely to declare something finished or secure than those with only a superficial understanding of things. Software security really is an additional, and exceedingly hard to obtain, qualification. That most "programmers" these days struggle even with simple things (see http://blog.codinghorror.com/t... , for example) is not the root cause.

Depending on how you write the definition, "similar products" can cost anywhere from about $35 on up to about $500.

If the data doesn't belong to us, then the cops don't work for us, either. If we don't have a right to the methodology, then we're simply slaves.

A couple of years ago I picked up a Pentax 67 with the personal commitment to put a few rolls of 120 through it every year. You can get great lenses for stupidly cheap prices if you keep an eye on that auction site. Provia for landscape/nature work - there's nothing like a big, brilliant transparency.

--
.nosig

Wake me up when there is pricing, and I'll decide how interested I am. I'm not interested in a product which could cost $INFINITY dollars.

And yet again you make an erronous assumption. Many non-geeks do those things for HOBBIES, and only have one computer(and maybe a tablet...)

Which means that they do those hobbies on their personal computer.