I read through this, and I am wondering why you posted this very carefully crafted troll.
If you haven't been aware that the NSA has been going rogue from the beginning of its existence, you haven't been aware of the NSA. Likewise the CIA, FBI, etc., and their equivalents in pretty much every country. Social engineering is expected. I am sure there are moles in the Debian organization. I half suspect the guys behind systemctld and the unified /bin efforts to be such moles, but that's part of the price of using a computer system. You can't build all your own tools. You wouldn't have the time. Cloning yourself doesn't help. Who is going to watch all the clones? Immortality doesn't help because you can't really trust yourself. Okay, sure, any time is a good time to review some of the socio-political reasons for using free-as-in-freedom software: Free to add what we want, and free to remove what we want. Not perfect, because of the size of the thing, but far more free than with the proprietary alternatives. Many people with common goals working on the code, in the open. Not perfectly common goals, but more so than with the proprietary alternatives. The possibility of bootstrap mitigates the possible rewards to the attackers, including attackers from government X. And, yes, you should be using Theo's OS as well as Debby and Ian's (since you insist on bringing Theo up). Maybe not as a part of your everyday toolset, but you should have it handy. SELinux? I don't know. It's one of the reasons I finally got off my laziness and started using Debian instead of Fedora for about half of my everyday stuff. It's worth looking at, just to recognize the bars that it misses in trying to layer security on top of the kernel. The current incarnation at least stays out of your way almost as well as the fundamental Linux permissions system does. Fedora suffers from the centralized processes. Nowhere nearly as much as a closed OS, but it does suffer. Debian suffers a bit from lack of centralization, but that is offset by the eclectic nature of the development community. (The old argument of centralization versus decentralization.) OpenBSD requires a higher skill level, but that suggests the real answer to your questions. If you are concerned about whether some government or some non-governmental group might pervert your libre OS of choice, what you should be doing is not beefing about it here. Become a developer. Get involved. Learn the tools. If you want more eyes on the code, join the process. Add your own eyes. If Debian is too big, has too much institutional baggage, join the openBSD team (since you brought them up). If you are good enough at the tools, start your own distro. Bootstrap your gcc with clang, or vice versa. Use that to bootstrap your new distro. (Oversimplifying, but that's a quick overview of the process.) Get as much involved as you have time to. In the meantime, be careful where you put which parts of your data when. And be careful of what kind of data you generate. Try not to do illegal things that you don't have to, and don't be too obvious about it. Don't be noisy about the illegal things you think you have to do. And don't be too noisy about trying to follow the letter of the law, either. Etc. But these are the rules you should already be following. Some parts of history have been more dangerous than others, but life has always been this way. !984 and Animal Farm were allegories of the world the authors lived in, not predictions of some dystopian future. -- Joel Rees On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 6:23 AM, Greg <greg...@att.net> wrote: > On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 20:40 +0200, Slavko wrote: > > Dňa 20.06.2013 17:12 Greg wrote / napísal(a): > > > > > I'm just wondering what debian does to check and protect its users, so > > > fuck me, right? > > > > Your protection is your responsibility. The Debian (and other OS) can > > only help you with this. Of course, some can do it better and another > > no. An some can criminalize you, when you want to see what is inside (by > > license violation), but these last are then taking responsibility, but > > do you really want to loose your own responsibility? > > > > IMO, if you want to transmit your responsibility, you must select > > another model of OS, than Debian is. > > > > regards > > > > So I have no right to ask to to even think about how software is built > or made available by debian? To protect myself I have but to debug every > line of code I use and build it all myself, on CPU's I forged in my > backyard smithy? Perhaps I could launch my own satellites to ensure safe > global access to a self-made internet. Iran has gone down that path, > perhaps we should all do likewise, or just go live in a cave or use > openbsd machines with the network cards pulled out? What if they get to > Theo? Then I'm done for! >
