14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not just Google that’s concerned about the possible NSA-built backdoors into computer hardware, but also Facebook. It seems that the company is already making sure that its code would be compatible with such a move if it makes the switch from Intel to ARM.
So, if Facebook takes the decision to change Intel’s chips for ARM’s, everything would be all set ahead of time.
Reports indicate that the team over at Facebook is already implementing ARM processor support in its translation engine, while also looking for an experienced software engineer to help port the “world’s best PHP run-time on servers based on ARM processor.”
Mix this together with the reports that Google was already interested in moving on to ARM-powered servers and the picture should be pretty clear – the Internet giants fear the giant chip manufacturer Intel did in fact give the NSA the chance to build a backdoor into its encryptions.
Everything comes following reports indicating that experts believe the NSA has built backdoors into encryptions of Intel and AMD processors, making it easy for the agency to crack the encryptions set at a hardware level.
Last week, it was revealed that FreeBSD developers said that they could not trust Intel and Via Technologies’ chip-based encryptions as they didn’t consider them to be safe anymore.
Documents revealed in the past few months indicate that the National Security Agency has gained access to the link tying together data centers of Google and Yahoo, thus having access to unencrypted data travelling through the company’s infrastructure.
The question remains whether we’re going to hear the same news coming from other companies as well. Early last week, it was revealed that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn and Yahoo had sent an open letter to the US government urging for the reform of the mass surveillance apparatus and asking everyone to abide by global norms of free expression and privacy.