Technologist vs spy: the xz backdoor debate
lcamtuf.substack.com
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of

Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.

    • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
      4·
      9 months ago

      The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

      • Murdoc@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        9 months ago

        Funny coincidence for me, but I just learned this listening to a podcast called Behind the Bastards: The Ballad of Bill Gates. It talked about how one of the reasons MS became so big was because so many people shared MS BASIC back in the day, but then Gates worked so hard against piracy afterwards despite that fact. So basically just one aspect of what you are talking about.

    • Murdoc@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      9 months ago
      • Someone thought it would be a good idea to troll open source community and make it look worse than closed source, so that closed source security can be popularised (“security” trolls in FOSS community I harp about love such ideas, beware of any Graphene/Chrome/Apple and Big Tech lovers just as example)
      • Tying into the idea of making FOSS ecosystem look bad, it might be a concerted effort by closed source company/companies to propel themselves above, as FOSS development is shitting on closed source corporate model
      • A different approach, it could be the first step in a series of steps to dismantle FOSS ecosystem, considering how much trust and transparency it has that attracts everyone enlightened enough

      This is why it surprised me to learn that this was noticed/announced by an MS employee.