[Foundation-l] Wikia leasing office space to WMF

[Brian]

Let me make my position clear:
* Correcting factual errors is always appropriate.
* This thread no longer has a clear topic.


On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Alex <mrzmanwiki at gmail.com> 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 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)
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>