[Foundation-l] Wikia leasing office space to WMF

[Chad]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> 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 at 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 at 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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This thread is (supposedly) about Wikia leasing some office space to
the WMF. How it degenerated into a conspiracy-fest about the CIA/NSA,
I haven't figured out yet. In any case, Alex's comments echo my own: this
back-and-forth has veered horribly off-topic.

-Chad