It's an open secret that Windows is backdoored for the NSA to be fair and that isn't even including the truly dodgy stuff like Intel Management Engine being a backdoor on a BIOS level with remote access

Do you have a source for literally any of those allegations?

I'm as big of a Windows and ME hater as they come, but I'm not aware of any proven backdoors in either. Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point. The only 'backdoor' discovered was the undocumented killswitch command that disables it after initialization.

> Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point.

Links? Activists say the opposite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Assert...

"Activists" =/= "Security Experts".

Like I said, ME has been literally almost completely everse engineered and no one's found evidence of it being a backdoor.

everything in that article could legitimately just be attack vector reduction

Not the parent, but have you heard of Snowden leaks? Also this from the old times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Snowden says nothing about backdoor'ed Windows.

And _NSAKEY... There is no evidence that it was ever part of a backdoor. But it is good for a laugh.

It's safe to assume that Windows is backdoored, as it's closed, not audiatable and is a part of PRISM. It's not a proof, but this is how good opsec works.

And yes, this is not equivalent to what the parent said, but your reaction should be similar.

While it is closed, we've had enough leaks from that era of Windows (which are still on GH) to know the kernel is not backdoor'ed.

I would put my money on that these leaks have full source code. Also, currently, Windows even AFAIK sends keystrokes to the US, where NSA has full access to any company whenever they need by the law, with no oversight. No backdoors are required.

Too late to edit, I would't put my money on the reliability of these leaks for security-relevant decisions.

> Also, currently, Windows even AFAIK sends keystrokes to the US,

This is exactly the kind of FUD I'm pushing back against. You just casually mention this like it's some established fact. Do you have any proof of this?

Surely it would be extremely easy to verify, given that anyone can set up a Windows 10/11 VM with mitmproxy and see every outgoing connection. I myself have quite a number of those VMs for various application-related RE projects, and let me tell you, I've never noticed every single one of my outgoing keystrokes present in the logs.

You'd think it might stand out...

Do you really think the most used US-based operating system does not have backdoor?