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by superuser2 3570 days ago
Backdoor is a politically loaded term at this point. Backdoors (in privacy-related discourse) are vulnerabilities inserted intentionally by the manufacturer or government with supply-chain cooperation. The claim "Backdoor found in X's product" is roughly equivalent to the claim "Evidence found that X is a collaborator with the surveillance state" to many people, so we might want to be careful about throwing it around when we don't mean that.
2 comments

At least for me, there is a distinction between a Phone Home capability and a Backdoor.
That is different wording. One can find an OS X backdoor in Microsoft Word, for example. Here the OS X backdoor was found not in OS X but in some other program.