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Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely



On Sunday, March 02, 2014 07:21:28 PM Chris Bannister wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 11:53:28PM -0600, yaro@marupa.net wrote:
> > > > On Sun, 2014-03-02 at 10:55 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> > > And then there's NSA (and the companies they outsource to) - they *do*
> > > have an agenda that would be furthered by creating divisions and
> > > uncertainty in Debian. They've made large investments in software hooked
> > > to the existing init system - and while they'll have to retool to use
> > > systemd it doesn't mean they have the same access required to replace
> > > existing malware installations, additionally they would probably enjoy
> > > seeing less people use Debian.
> > 
> > The trouble is, how effectively can the NSA hook itself into open source
> > software? How easily could they get backdoors into something without
> > upstream noticing? Might be effective getting hooks into something
> > downstream, but I don't see the NSA getting anything into something
> > upstream without someone noticing, since patches are generally reviewed
> > before integration.
> > 
> > To sum up my thought on that, the NSA needs cooperation from someone
> > OUTSIDE the NSA to get their hooks in.
> 
> What! You mean that they want someone to "act" like Edward Snowdon?

Though I know you're making a joke, I'm really serious, I'm not certain how 
NSA spyware works in source code readily available to the public.

Conrad


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