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Comment by ConfusedDog | Hacker News Reader

Ideally for improving security, they should invest on supporting open source software, hardware and standards. Open Design Principle is much better long term strategy than Security by Obscurity. But for developers in China, there are a lot of obstacles with contributing to open source communities worldwide, so I can see that probably not going to happen.

End of the day, policymakers are more educated with economics than cybersecurity and computer science. They probably still gonna use Microsoft products.

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>They probably still gonna use Microsoft products.

Even if they did get rid of most MS products. Some senior guy probabbly fires up windows and installs a dozen search bars.

I knew a guy who served in the gulf, he was pretty high ranking, handled some security stuff. Got a request from someone important to basically break all the rules because important guy didn't want to walk too far from his CHU to make a call home.... but he was high enough ranking so they did it. It wasn't even a far walk.

> Some senior guy probabbly fires up windows and installs a dozen search bars.

A "security expert" at a F500 once showed my a web page on his laptop. Only 40% of the page was visible due to his 7-8 search bars.

"Open Design Principle is much better long term strategy than Security by Obscurity."

Better would be both. You have a strong, open base, like Linux, but you modify it, so you habe a second level of defence.

This approach ends up blocking you from receiving updates due to do incompatibilities between your changes and upstream so it's not a great solution.

If you do it right, you get all the core components without incompatibulities.

But you will have to do more by hand and yes, then there is also a chance that you mess up those patches and create new vulnerabilities. But if you have a big budget ... like if you are a big military and security really matters, than it is probably worth it.

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