More trojan horse issues

Linux Weekly News is reporting more trojan horse activity, this time hitting util-linux. Looks like someone read that Bruce Perens Article. Assume that win.tue.nl is not safe for the moment.

Comments

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, i see quite a few "MS (must/could be /probably is) behind this trojan".
Seriously people, whether you like the products, or the marketing, doesn't change the fact that most people at MS are good natured, smart, and usually kind people. Just cause we got quite a few unethical assholes around in marketing, doesn't mean we are all evil people. Has anyone here who claims the first sentence to be true ever met anyone from MS? It might change your perception of the people who work there a bit.
I've worked for MS Research for a few years, and have used Linux since 1992.
I can say for a fact that nobody i've ever met would dream of doing something like this.
Even the MS zealots who are around wouldn't try to do this, because in the big scheme of things, who the hell cares? What do you win? 15 years in a federal prison?
There are quite a few linux users around MS.
There's also quite a few people who contribute to open source projects.
At least at MS research, they could care less about it, too. It's not discouraged at all. We get paid to Research, not run NT.
We've got researchers whose research mainly involves (and involved before coming here) creating netscape plugins on UNIX machines. Nobody even batted an eye at that one. Most of us are atheistic when it comes to OSes, and will use whatever the hell works best for us. Do you think the Windows police come running in with electromagnetic guns threatening to destroy our hard drives if we don't install NT?
Most of you have a seriously screwed up view of how MS works.
On a random subject, since no rant would be complete without a tangent, IMHO, it'd be funny if they broke MS up, cause nothing would change. There is no communication between product groups as it is. Really. I still can't understand how anything gets developed at all around here, or any sharing occurs (actually, i do know this one. It happens because the idea is to see if you can reuse as much as possible of supposedly working tested parts from other apps before having to redo in a new app)
They actually set up internal help lists for most products, because if say someone from the NT5 team emails the Visual C++ team to ask a question, the odds of getting an answer are about the same as Steve Jobs getting his head out of his ass.
Probably worse (if thats possible).
Most people seem to think there is some inter-group communication and collaboration on design or something.
That cracks me up.
If only they knew.

Anyway, thats enough of a rant for now, i'm afraid if i type any more, Win98 will run out of system resources and crash.

(Incidentally, inside MS we bash some of the cruddy shit produced even more than people on slashdot do. It's hard not to make fun of things like shipping a zero bug release by moving 8000 bugs from priority 1 and 2, to priority 3 and 4.)

We know what to do

[Bruce Perens]

Don't say you weren't told this would happen.

We know how to handle this. Cryptographicaly sign everything, have good cross-signings on your keys, and check the signatures when you download.

A tool to automate signature checks during downloads might be nice.

Bruce Perens