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Comment by rdslw | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, sure. Thats the company which according to Google (March) has a huge mess in own nest of Certification Authority resulting in google chrome removing their certs: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/googl...

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This. I would trust most non-security tech CEOs to give better security advice than the executives at Symantec.

The Symantec CEO has been in that position only since Symantec acquired Blue Coat last year, where they were CEO previously. The Symantec CA happened well before their current term.

Blue Coat. Has problems with foreign governments being unfriendly?

I guess what goes around comes around: http://surveillance.rsf.org/en/blue-coat-2/

What a fantastic website is that! To add to your point: Amazing how skewed ones morals can be if they believe they're doing the right thing by providing those countries these kinds of tools.

More reasons "trust us" isn't acceptable anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat...

In case of Syria, this must have been used to help the regime identify people to be disappeared, for sure.

He's doing a bang up job so far then!

Yup. The tire fire of the security industry is saying that letting other people look at the code is a security risk.

Personally, I think maybe they got scared that someone might figure out that their code is worse than everything else on the planet, and so they want to try to put the clothes back onto the Emperor.

Not sure that applies in this case. If the only party you allow to look at your code is one that's heavily invested in secretly hacking it, then you're probably going to give them some zero-days which they'll use maliciously. It's different if you let everyone look at it, since a white-hat might find something helpful. But this isn't a choice between everyone and no-one, it's between a known black-hat and no-one.

Why is it not a choice between everyone and no-one?

They have already divested their certificate business. http://investor.symantec.com/About/Investors/press-releases/...

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