[Wikimedia-l] Dells are backdored

[Leslie Carr]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 5:17 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 December 2013 12:55, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Can we please stop paying the Microsoft and NSA taxes
>
>
> The WMF doesn't.
>
>
>
>> and start buying
>> datacenter equipment which costs a lot less? Cubieboard/Cubietrucks for
>> instance?
>>
>> Ref.:
>>
>> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html
>>
>> Best regards,
>> James
>
>
>
> Using non standard data center equipment is a great way to add costs.
>

Naw, it's a great idea.  Let's switch to building our own ARM-based
servers (by the way, which have already been a flop commercially),
using only unproven, low-volume available motherboards and having to
buy and assemble all of the rest of the components.  And then of
course, we need to design our own cases... and since these have such a
low performance, we'll need to have a lot more rack and datacenter
space, of course which comes with a cost... and we'll have to figure
out how to run our caching layers which require large amounts of
memory... and our storage layers which require large amounts of disk
space.....  At that point we'll probably need to redesign those boards
which are incapable of doing these things, so we'll need a team of
hardware engineers, plus a deal with a manufacturing plant.

So... I think with about a 100 million dollar per year research budget
we can do this.  Who's ponying up? ;)


> As for security given the limited resources the WMF has whenever GCHQ, FSB
> and MSS have wanted to get in they have and there is nothing we can do
> about this.
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-- 
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/