[jijji]

the ideal properties of a backdoor were visualized to me the day i hacked into an author of a largely distributed piece of smtp mail server, only to find sitting in his home directory an unpublished integer overflow exploit written by him years earlier for a version of the software that is currently in wide distribution...

[dvfjsdhgfv]

That's close to perfect, indeed. The drawbacks in this scenario are that (1) not everybody runs an SMTP server, (2) if it's open source (and if it's very popular, then it is), some other smart people will look for the bug and publish it for fame. That's quite different from a backdoor built into a processor (although I really doubt Intel was really involved in any shady practices, it looks like they were not smart enough).

[paulie_a]

Judging from the numerous decades old bugs recently found, the concept of many eyes needs to die.

And in the case of SMTP, it's basically a pinata of bugs for the last 30 years regardless of platform