Privacy

31974 readers

362 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

555

NSA Asked Linus Torvalds To Install Backdoors Into GNU/Linux [2013] (falkvinge.net)

submitted 3 months ago by awiteb@lemmy.4rs.nl to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

63 comments fedilink hide all child comments

repost from: https://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 273 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] reisub@discuss.tchncs.de 127 points 3 months ago (2 children)

based on the historical data

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 105 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 33 points 3 months ago

It's like our very own Gordon Ramsay

[–] UniversalMonk@lemmy.world -3 points 2 months ago

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

This is beautiful. Thank you! lol

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 44 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago

I would pay money to see daddy Linus flip off some big shot intelligence official

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

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..."