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Primary inspiration for this article
This is a break for politics. I'll be taking these on occasion to break from the normal Library investigation to talk about something going on in the ever-changing political sphere.
China announced recently that they're changing gears in their technological development policy, focusing more on independence from US hardware and software. Indeed, they've made a great deal of money copying the most popular Western websites for their own pseudo-intranet (see: TaoBao, basically Amazon, Baidu, basically Google ), showing that their only concern about intellectual property is when they rip it off from Western nations.
Russia recently announced that they were edging out Microsoft products because of an ongoing feud with the US over technology dependence. The US obviously holds the top spot by far in technological economies, hosting Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, and just about the entire who's-who of the internet domain. They are also at the top of the list for exporters of hardware, a problem that is not likely to go away soon considering the capital required for production.
Now let's take that to current day, where it's all sunshine and daisies between the two super powers. After the Petya ransomware attack last week that, ironically, Kaspersky admitted with a low level of confidence, but persistent hunch that this ransomware is a Pet(ya) of a Russian actor. This lead to a renewed discussion about whether or not Kaspersky software should be banned from US government and defense systems.
Now this is a logical discussion. If there is truth to the alleged ties between CEO Eugene Kaspersky and Russian intelligence, it makes sense to doubt the antivirus giant. In the article that inspired me to write this post, a former NSA employee said that proving the Kaspersky software is not backdoored is nigh on impossible, and definitely is not as simple as allowing for a US source code audit of their software.
All of this falls back eerily on the discussion of nationalism. Should a country be entirely economically independent from all others? Shouldn't the US be using US technology, not some Chinese hardware that we assume isn't backdoored?
The question comes down to known unknowns versus unknown unknowns. We know that many US Antivirus software companies put out software that may not be up to snuff with Kaspersky. But we also know they aren't backdooring their software for the sake of international espionage. It's a complicated debate, one that I am very hesitant to pick a side on.