this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
286 points (85.2% liked)
Technology
59116 readers
3258 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.
In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.
While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.