[max_]

My suspicion is that. These "exploits" are planted by spy agencies.

They don't appear there organically.

[kenferry]

This kind of mental model only works if you think of things as made huge shadowy blobs, not people.

dyld has one principal author, who would 100% quit and go to the press if he was told (by who?) to insert a back door. The whole org is composed of the same basic people as would be working on Linux or something. Are you imagining a mass of people in suits who learned how to do systems programming at the institute for evil?

Additionally, do you work in tech? You don’t think bugs appear organically? You don’t think creative exploitation of bugs is a thing?

[saagarjha]

dyld has several people working on it now AFAIK

[max_]

I am not saying this one in particular.

Of course no one can admit it publicly.

But it is something that governments are known to proactively do.

You can get dirt on people a la Jeffrey Epstein. And use that to coerce them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)

[zappb]

This vastly overstates both the competence of spy agencies and of software engineers in general. When it comes to memory unsafe code, the potential for exploits is nearly infinite.

[xnx]

> overstates both the competence of spy agencies

Stuxnet was pretty impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

[bell-cot]

Maybe sometimes? With how many bugs are normally found in very complex code, would a rational spy agency spend the money to add a few more? Doing so is its own type of black op, with plenty of ways to go wrong.

OTOH, how rational are spy agencies about such things?

[max_]

Yes. Of course not all.

But some just happen to work too well.

But governments do have blatant back doors in chips & software.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Some suspect that Apple secretly backs some of these spyware services. I've heard rumors about graykey but only rumors. Thoughts?

[gruez]

>Some suspect ...

>I've heard rumors ...

So like, the comment you're replying to? This is just going in circles.