[Foundation-l] CIA/NSA development of mediawiki (was: Wikia leasing office space to WMF)

Dan Rosenthal swatjester at gmail.com
Sun Jan 25 00:44:21 UTC 2009


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 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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>
>
> -- 
> 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



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