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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

To many, yes.

To many on the internet which was financed by DARPA?

The irony is strong on this thread.

Perhaps you're forgetting that although the NSA have at times historically been regarded as good guys, they've since been found to quietly backdoor crypto products (etc) to others detriment.

That's a bit different from DARPA.

The NSA didn’t fund Tor, though.

Tor was initially funded by the Naval Research Lab (which is broadly similar to DARPA), and from a quick google, has received funding grants from the NSF and Department of State.

Do those same people also use SELinux?

Of course not. SELinux is functionally unusable due to it's historical ties. Which is a real shame, because the network limiting (used to be, it's been a while since I looked) is very easy to use and quite good.

So unusable that millions of people use it without knowing on their Android and ChromeOS devices.

SELinux is not unusable, it’s open source anyway.

Is that likely? People who don't trust things backed by the US gov't are unlikely to be fond of SELinux, but even beyond that, AppArmor is used in preference to SELinux by the Debian and SUSE families, which probably gives it a greater share of the Desktop Linux market (vs SELinux, mostly used by the Red Hat family) even without ideological/trust issues in play.

SELinux is turned on across all Android and ChromeOS devices.

I'm skeptical that there's much overlap between "people who seriously use TOR" and "people who use ChromeOS", but yeah Android is a fair point. (And I'll certainly grant that there are probably more Android devices out there than laptops/desktops running Debian derivatives.)

Dunno, is that relevant? Are any among us completely devoid of any inconsistencies or hypocrisy?

Given it was developed by NSA, completely relevant.

But Tor wasn’t, so it’s a derail to begin with

Tor was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory to protect communications of the US intelligence community, so while it wasn't strictly developed by the NSA, if one considers products of the NSA contaminated by their connection to the US intelligence community, it's pretty hard not to see Tor as tainted in the same way.

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