Comment on Pentagon Warns Microsoft: Company’s Use of China-Based Engineers Was a “Breach of Trust”
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days agoThe US has long since had a practice of outsourcing labor many times over in pursuit of the lowest labor costs and maximum profit.
Getting your girdle in a twist because you found out the guy on Fiverr debugging your middleware has non-White ancestors maybe misses the root of the problem.
Feyd@programming.dev 5 days ago
??? This is about giving chinese nationals root access to US military IT systems to save money. It’s actually terrible opsec and should be a way worse scandal.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Yes, but we wouldn’t want to fly in the face of our tradition of letting Microsoft off scott free for severe governmental security breaches, would we?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Not how software development works. I don’t have root access to every production system because I can submit pull requests to a Dev instance of the code.
One of the principles of FOSS is that you shouldn’t need security through obscurity. Knowing how a system works won’t compromise its integrity if the security protocols are sound. Having third parties participate in a project shouldn’t compromise the project if the lead developers are doing proper code review and QA. A system that is predicated on being a black box to a hostile government in order to maintain security is rigged for failure.
But, more importantly, the idea that a foreign government can only obtain information on the inner workings of a system when people of that national origin work on the project is severely shortsighted. Do you genuinely believe there aren’t significant numbers of domestic American developers of European ancestry who wouldn’t happily sell access to a foreign government for the right price? Do you genuinely believe there aren’t numbers who could be gulled into exposing the inner workings of their software inadvertently?
Nothing about Hegseth’s complaint improves operational security. He’s hinging his whole worldview on the notion that every other white person at Microsoft is as much of a nationalist as he pretends to be.
Feyd@programming.dev 5 days ago
I’m sorry but you just straight up don’t know what incident is being discussed here. Go look it up instead of talking about unrelated bullshit.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Again, working on a codebase doesn’t give you access to the production systems. Neither does being Chinese affect whether you are a reliable third party contractor.