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How Open Source Might Finally Become Mainstream
geegel writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on how autocracies are now embracing open source, while at the same promoting national based IT services. The author, Evgeny Morozov, paints a bleak future of the future World Wide Web."
Have you ever looked at average open-source code ? While the kernel's code quality might be called "passable" (though it could adhere to stricter standards), the same cannot be said for most open source projects. It would not be hard, at all, to hide a backdoor in one of a dozen projects, especially GNOME and KDE are utter disasters when it comes to some of the code they run. For projects that are tested, a steady stream of exploits is available, from mozilla, the kernel, apache, tomcat, and gnome and kde (but these last 2 are barely tested at all, yet still quite a few exploits are found on a regular basis).
In commercial projects the NSA needs to infiltrate the company (I doubt anyone just lets this happen, and it would be better if they didn't for the NSA, no-one knows, that means no-one can betray you), and then commit something into it. Before outsourcing it was probably hard for the Chinese government to get backdoors into American software (though there have been incidents with japanese military vessels software suddenly refusing to target things when some Chinese boats were nearby and not behaving all that well). Today, there's little doubt the Chinese government has backdoors in many open and close source software projects.
So this is just a bogus argument. Let's get real : both commercial and open source projects are bugged and contain planted exploits. Both contain backdoors for multiple governments. Besides, software is vulnerable even without planted backdoors. The one attack that was probably government originated (though despite all sorts of predictions still no firm proof exactly which government did it, and since nobody likes Iran's govt, not even Iran's own scientists (ahmadinnerjacket had a few hundred of a run-ins with ... well everybody ... at pretty much every iranian university before becoming "there's no gays in Iran" laughing stock of the world), needless to say, the very people who would obviously be in the best possible position to pull this off)), Stuxnet, didn't need any unpublished holes. Not in the used closed-source software, not in the used open source software, not in the used hardware, not ... It was so basic a commercial company could probably have written it, yet it was capable of introducing sabotage actions in what is arguably Iran's best guarded facility, it's nuclear weapons factory.
Could an equally basic process be used to subtly sabotage an American weapons production plant ? Good question.
Then there's the fact that the Chinese have been caught bugging hardware for espionage. What exactly do you hope to do about that ?
And, yes, the US spies. So does every other country on the planet. So would I if I controlled the government of any particular country. Inside and outside of the country. But the purpose of the American govt is to change the world into America. Great plan ! The purpose of the Chinese government is to change the world into China. Frankly I really, really don't like that plan. I hear the public buses are killers. Similar things go for just about any other government (except perhaps - perhaps western Europe - perhaps, maybe if the EU was anywhere near democratic)