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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

Serious question. Given the recent story [0] about spying, how much trust would put on something as obscure as this implementation of a single board computer?

The lack of trust is not yet mitigated with wide adoption by communities outside of China.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

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You can mostly rust it because putting a well-hidden backdoor is a lot of work. This work must be paid for somehow. There must be a way to activate the backdoor, either at the mastermind's command, or in certain interesting circumstances. The activation's effect should be painful enough for an adversary to be worth it. Just bricking a few million consumer DVB boxes is likely not it.

Otherwise, read "Trusting trust"; if you are targeted, trusting anything at all is hard.

US also spies but in other ways. For example intel ME.

You didn’t answer the question. All you did is try to misdirect the discussion.

I think he has a valid question. I’m in the market for a replacement for my Onion Omega2’s, so I clicked the link. The fact that the product page is exclusively in Chinese does not make me confident.

Western bias? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the concern isn’t valid. I’d worry if it was in Russian, too.

Touchy subject.

i think your concern should be relative to your value as a target of a hack. there's a reason billionaires have private bodyguards and we don't, and there's a reason high value systems are built from scratch in tightly controlled environments and use things like hardware based security

Any hacker knows that you go after the low value targets to get to the high value targets.

You hack the CEO’s secretary to get the CEO’a records. You hack the defense contractor to get to the defense agency.

The concept of a “low value” target is outdated, which is why there’s such concern about commodity IoT devices.

probs not a good idea to have this on any network with high value targets

China is an imaginary country that never existed. The Chinese people you see in the U.S. territory are all droids. I'd rather do business with the North Koreans.

Huh?

What if this guy is right?

If he's Finnish chances are that he doesn't exist as well ;)

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4573

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