I’ve seen a few articles now that US fighter jets have kill switches in them, so the US could just render them useless for anyone they’ve sold them to.
Is this true? It sounds insane to me, I’ve always assumed that countries that buy these jets have full control over them. It’s a gaping hole in your defence if you don’t.
Yes. Until pretty recently Java didn’t contain unlimited strength encryption algorithms by default because of this/not getting around to updating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Cryptography_Extension
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-7024850?focusedId=11988280&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-11988280
I’m not gonna dig deeper, but it seems like the actual policy change was as late as 2011 based on the comment, but they didn’t get around to changing it for another few years.