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

[Brian]

That means I can clarify why my much hated factual correction was
appropriate. Here was the original statement:

> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure

Let's briefly suppose that there are binaries for mediawiki (which is false
- but suppose they only gave you byte code for mediawiki) and that the CIA
had "improved" mediawiki and given you one. There is a crucial difference
between the CIA giving you that binary and giving you source code - you can
see the diffs in the source code and you can see the diffs in the binaries,
but you cannot understand the diffs in the binaries.

How the poster I replied to does not consider this distinction relevant is
beyond me.

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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)
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> 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)
>
> 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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