First time seeing hate for deepin. What’s wrong with it?
It’s by a Chinese company, and collects telemetry on its users via Umeng+, which is a Beijing-based analytics company. Even though it’s open source, the code is large enough that it’s hard to tell if there is anythinf compromising in there from the Chinese government, and/or whether/what data collected by Umeng+ is making it to the Chinese government.
It’s unfortunate, because I really like the DE. Real stand out. If it were more trustworthy, it’d be my first choice.
I mean a simple
grep -r “string” *
Does wonders to find anything, but you need to know what you’re looking for. I’d probably look for DNS names that end in government or China specific TLDs to start with.
grep -r "evil spyware" *
nothing? awesome, I guess this software is safe to use. Let’s gooo
it’s trivial to break that approach by obfuscating strings. You can do things like using base64 encoded strings in the source code, building strings from smaller component parts, or using rot13 on, say, the host component of a URI. That last one could be pretty interesting if you, as a threat actor, owned both permutations. The hostname (minus TLD) in the source code could be the nice, human readable version (www.happysite.org) that appears to be something legit. Then, when you rot13 it to www.uncclfvgr.org, traffic is sent to the evil site doing scary things. People can be far more tricksy than that. There’s also the whole issue around whether or not the binaries you’re running actually match the code in the repo. The xz kerfuffle showed how much can be hidden that way.
EDIT: I should make it clear that I don’t use Deepin or the DE it provides because I only use WMs with no desktop, so the distro and DE are of no interest to me. I don’t know if it’s a security hazard or not, I have no horse in this fight.
First time seeing hate for deepin. What’s wrong with it?
Western concerns about connections to Chinese government
Radware’s head of threat research has commented on concerns about analytics collected by Deepin, and whether these are sent to the Chinese government: while the CNZZ analytics service has been removed, analytics are still collected, now by “Umeng+”.[29] According to cybersecurity lawyer Steven T. Snyder, due to the sheer size of Deepin’s codebase, it is impossible to really scrutinize all the code comprising it to be sure the Chinese government doesn’t have backdoors.[29] The project does remain fully open source allowing anyone to review, modify or change the code to meet their standards.
Idk about worse but it is possible for two things to be bad. If one spies for china and the other spies for america, they’re both effectively the same. There’s other more trustworthy options than either however, so unless someone has a gun to your head forcing you to pick one of the two this whataboutism is a false dichotomy, just pick “something else.”
Ah yes, a dystopian government OS with direct uplink to the thought police is much less of a security risk and convenience loss than a by all objective measures reasonably working and widespread OS with broad compatibility, just because the latter is made by a for profit corporation, MICROSOFT EVUL GUYS AMIRITE
I’m a Linux user myself due to the hostile practices of win11, but get some perspective ffs
This is ridiculous. If someone could write the code, someone cluld analyze it. If noone has found anything suspicious or incriminating then this just seems like anti china propaganda. “Maybe this Chinese company is collecting data! Even though their code is publically available we cant know for sure!” Meanwhile every US company is sucking up telemetry on every keystroke. Like what a thing to argue about when Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Meta, etc etc exist. And tbh, id rather china have my data then the US anyway. The US is both more likely and more capable of using it against me.
Not just deepin, but really any piece of software made by a Chinese or Chinese owned company should be treated with suspicion. At least, until the inevitable fall of the CCP occurs.
This is insane. US companies blatantly collect data, meanwhile a chinese company releases OPEN SOURCE software that hasnt been shown to do anything malicious and your response is “but maybe they somehow hid some tracking in there”. Bro examine your prejudices.
