On Jan 24, 2009, at 2:41 PM, Alex wrote:
I'm criticizing the switch from "Wikia leasing office space to WMF" to "Is the CIA evil?" I just responded to the most recent email in my inbox; I thought that would be more appropriate than responding to all 17 CIA/NSA-related emails. I was not criticizing you in particular.
The topic of this thread is "Wikia leasing office space to WMF," that should be rather clear from the subject. And the topic of the list is "Wikimedia related issues." Its almost on topic for the list (MediaWiki is at least mentioned occasionally), its certainly not at all related to the topic of the thread.
Brian wrote:
It was a clear factual error which I corrected. If you aren't going to criticize the original comment you have no basis for criticizing the correction. At any rate, what exactly is the topic of this thread, in your opinion?
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Alex mrzmanwiki@gmail.com wrote:
Brian wrote:
If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure
PHP is an interpreted language. Surely you wouldn't use someone elses
byte
code.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com
wrote:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
Given that we know that NSA conducts massive illegal spying operations,
there
is possibility that selinux is altered in a fashion that will make it
easier
for NSA to spy on selinux' users. I don't know what are CIA's
contributions
to MediaWiki, but unless it is trivial to review them, I would not
accept
them.
If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure. You could very well be suspicious about it. But we're talking about open source. They would be providing the changes, which are to be reviewed, like any other code, or perhaps even more, due to coming from the CIA.
Take into account that CIA and NSA need good software, too. So if they add a backdoor, they would need to add it *and* at the same time make it easy to protect from it, as they wouldn't want their own systems spied by their own rootkit (and someone will end up forgetting to apply it).
Instead, contributing good fixes, make everything easier.
OTOH I encourage you to review selinux. That would make a great heading 'Nikola Smolenski discovers NSA backdoor on Linux code'
This is getting rather off-topic, especially for this thread, and possibly for the list as well.
-- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
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-- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
Yeah, agreed. While on-topic for the list, it's off-topic for this thread. U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the development of open source products, especially media wiki, however *IS* a topic I am very much interested in seeing further discussion about; to that end I would much rather fork this thread into a different title than see it be killed totally.
-dan