Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "Ken Thompson Hack: Every Computer Is Backdoored?" video.

@logangraham2956 Unless of course the infrastructure that everything is built on top of has been backdoored for decades and every piece of tech we use from the routers and up are all corrupted. How do you check that packets you want sent are sent and packets you don't want aren't when the router itself is corrupted at a hardware level? Consider for a moment that Intel has a management engine in their CPU's now, and that's just what they've told us about. Consider that the BIOS, or what passes for one now, can actually connect to a network and phone home. At least, this is what they've told us is new functionality. What if they've had it for decades and only now admit it?
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Unless both the computer you're on and the routing equipment you use are compromised at a hardware level. It could just copy all your files verbatim.
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Not unique to the US government. I'd bet a lot of money on there being less than 2 in the whole world that aren't equally as controlling.
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Or the simple solution, it's implemented at a hardware level and doesn't even need to touch your files, just read them and obscure what it's doing, which at a hardware level would be super easy. After all, keyboard input is routed through the CPU, it could log keystrokes and send them over the network and if the router is equally compromised you can't even detect it. You could even be receiving data that tells your computer to upload everything and you would have no idea.
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I suppose we could all use 6502 based computers. Maybe Ben Eater is ahead of the curve and building the infrastructure for our dystopian future.
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I don't know if I read this paper when I was a kid or read an article where someone talked about it, but I've been thinking about this since I was a child, and I have no solution short of starting from scratch on the hardware. As it stands, I don't really trust anything, and that's probably a huge part of why I'm always depressed. I hate making online purchases because I don't trust the whole system from top to bottom, and I cringe every time I put in any financial information. However, I know that it's a choice between doing it all myself or at least pretending I trust it enough to go about my life. This is one of the more unfortunate tradeoffs we make to actually live.
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Detecting power draw is so simple to implement that it's possible the compromised device would have circuitry to only set it off if enough current is being drawn. It's not like it would need to be running 24/7 365, just when you're actively using it and as a slow drip, and when you idle your computer as you go to the bathroom or to get a snack it could kick up the use a little.
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@AJMansfield1 But if it's not a practical means of checking, then what's the point? You couldn't trust anything until you've checked it. So it kind of sounds like you're in the same boat with me, don't trust anything.
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@AJMansfield1 This is true, and the 6502 has been picked apart endlessly, including having the entire chip delidded and imaged. So one could always go the Ben Eater or 8-bit Guy way and just start from that point.
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