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Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

In my view it's kind of embarrassing that any nations got caught by this at all, even in 2009 you had VPNs which could be used to setup a secure network over a dumb and unencrypted pipe. If the keyboards are smartcard-capable you could even have possibly used S/MIME.

In the worst case, use the telephone in your hotel room to setup a SLIP or PPP connection back home using a known-good and known-clean laptop brought from home. But an Internet cafe? Really?

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It's embarrassing, but it's not surprising. Clearly some of the participating countries were more focused on an economic discussion than a game of cloak and dagger.

But there's a lot more to this than countries not taking proper security measures. It's not easy if your "adversary" has a 0-day exploit for your Blackberry that came straight from the company that made it (which may be the case).

Seeing secure, totally open hardware come out of this would be great.

Yes, that would be great... the U.S. uses Blackberries everywhere too and whatever hacks GCHQ or NSA can come up could be found by FSB or others as well. Not to mention the rest of us "average Joes" who would be at risk from insecure phone software.

I wonder if this will cause countries to abandon OSX & Windows in favor of open source software.

The bigest takeaway from all of this is that you can't trust closed software that was developed by foreign corporations.

Firefox logs in to GMail and Facebook just as well as Internet Explorer does, and the open protocols that would be used by OSS are just as susceptible to interception on the wire as the closed protocols used by Skype.

I do agree (and have for years) that people with Important Data should rely exclusively on open-source software if it is important that the data is handled properly, but OSS is not a panacea to this by any means.

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