Z:gnu-www-ja-free-digital-society--c71b90-The other kind of malicious fe/en

The other kind of malicious feature is the backdoor. That means something in that program is listening for remote commands and obeying them, and those commands can mistreat the user. We know of backdoors in Windows, in the iPhone, in the Amazon Swindle. The Amazon Swindle has a backdoor that can delete books, remotely delete books. We know this by observation, because Amazon did it: in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted thousands of copies of a particular book. Those were authorized copies, people had obtained them directly from Amazon, and thus Amazon knew exactly where they were, which is how Amazon knew where to send the commands to delete those books. You know which book Amazon deleted? 1984 by George Orwell. [laughter] It's a book everyone should read, because it discusses a totalitarian state that did things like delete books it didn't like. Everybody should read it, but not on the Amazon Swindle. [laughter]