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
This is beautiful. Thank you! lol
Ohh so it’s the NSA that my failed sudos are reported to!
I somehow misread that as NBA, and was very confused what basketball had to do with OS backdoors
NSA makes
WAY more sense
No, that’s Mark McGwire.
A OS backdoor is very simular to a backdoor cut, which allows a player to sneak behind defenders when they are focused on the ball or player with a ball.
NBA coaches have taken inspiration from many different places to perfect their plays. Computer security is just another step.
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.
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.
And because of this it makes whatever they fuck with have unnecessary security issues.
Also though they are using it to straight up spy on you whether foreign or not. They got in “trouble” for it once and pinky swore not to do it again.
Fuck the NSA
Or it could of been any person or country. It was a nothing burger and is still a nothing burger
It was clearly an attack. By who is unknown.
Notably this was in 2003 before git (2005) so linux source was in a central bitkeeper repo. So a commit with no associated data about who did it should not have been possible.
Here is a more detailed article. https://lwn.net/Articles/57135/
This incident will be reported
