The story does not tell us how Linus Torvalds responded to the NSA, but I’m guessing he told them he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open, and all changes to it are reviewed by many independent people.
Yeah I’m guessing the answer would be more colorful based on the historical data we have
based on the historical data
There aren’t enough swear-words in the English language, so now I’ll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.
Beautiful
It’s like our very own Gordon Ramsay
This is beautiful. Thank you! lol
Also experience shows that it’s possible to backdoor software in very subtle ways that could go years without anyone spotting them. So if he had decided to he probably could have done it, despite Linux being open source.
I would pay money to see daddy Linus flip off some big shot intelligence official
Oh man would die to see his reply. It would probably start with something like
“The fact that I have to explain this to a person who works in a national security agency makes me really worried…”
Ohh so it’s the NSA that my failed sudos are reported to!
Recent versions of sudo changed that message and now I’m sad 😢
Damn, I’m going to miss those messages one day on my Debian stable server.
Switch to doas so feds don’t get any more reports!
Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.
Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.
If (usr_permission = ROOT) … Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) …
The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.
It’s widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.
The other side of that coin is the NSA developing SELinux
This is because NSA has two roles: eavesdropping on foreign adversaries, and protecting our internal systems from adversaries. Under the first role, they might introduce an exploit known only to themselves. Under the second, they help protect US systems from exploits known to others.
