Interesting discussion on Linux and politics

Found some good discussion on this page, for anyone interested in NSA, backdoors, politics, etc.

Some more

Dear z!

This Links are well known long time, probably i think Month ago. So, Julian never says that Debian owned by NSA. This Articles are a blah blah blah and nothing else. At present Time, the NSA and CIA uses 4000 Vulnerabilities every Day in Programms, OSs, Tools and much more. Well, build up your own Opionion and don’t believe the PIPE!

[quote=“z, post:1, topic:294”]Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA « IgnorantGuru's Blog

Found some good discussion on this page, for anyone interested in NSA, backdoors, politics, etc.

Some more

http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-and-how-cryptography-affects-your-life/[/quote]

Best Regards!

townsend

Hmm, I was reading about the debate over systemd (produced by Red Hat, monolithic and containing some binary) versus sysint (traditional, and entirely readable scripting) , and also the possibly dubious motivations of Red Hat (whose biggest customer is the U.S. Army).

Even if I’m barely literate in bash, it would reassure me that so many hairy, cantankerous sysadmins can understand sysinit. I’m less trustful of people in suits, or uniforms.

I was considering the wider question of: can a computer system be “open source” all the way down to bare metal? After all, if a lower layer of abstraction can be subverted then doesn’t that subvert the security of the layers above it?

I came across this project: http://www.openfirmware.info who have published an open source BIOS. Is anyone using this? I’d use it if I felt confident that, by flashing my computer with it, I wasn’t going to brick it, but only after seeing some other people already doing well with it.

I also note that Qubes is based on Fedora (Red Hat’s distro): Redirecting to Google Groups I wonder why they chose that distro?

Dunno what you are referring to, but systemd in Debian main is 100% open source. Anything else would be against Debian policy.

I was considering the wider question of: can a computer system be "open source" all the way down to bare metal? After all, if a lower layer of abstraction can be subverted then doesn't that subvert the security of the layers above it?
Both yes.
I came across this project: http://www.openfirmware.info who have published an open source BIOS. Is anyone using this? I'd use it if I felt confident that, by flashing my computer with it, I wasn't going to brick it, but only after seeing some other people already doing well with it.
Bricking is a risk. Libre Software BIOS is difficult. See also http://me.bios.io/Main_Page and http://www.coreboot.org/.

There is also some Libre Software hardware, but I am not much into that topic.