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> Just because you don't get paid for it doesn't mean it's not an incredibly valuable part of your contribution to the good of your neighbors. Keep up the excellent work, everyone.

Precisely, I truly do not understand how these people witness a potentially catastrophic event of such proportions and instead of asking "dear God, I wonder how many backdoors there are in the Windows operating system that we don't know and will never find out about!?! Thankfully Linux and its ecosystem can be somewhat audited!". Instead they go full blown "please make it go away, if it's visible by us it means it's terrible and dangerous! FOSS is insecure!"

I've said it once[1] and I'll say it again: FOSS delivered both on its pitfalls and its strengths.

Moreover, and I'll never get tired of repeating this:

Although this might be indeed a FOSS-exclusive or FOSS-adjacent kind of risk that ultimately materialized, as some would like to call it, it’s nevertheless also an issue where checks and balances that are only intrinsically possible in FOSS worked as expected and needed. Yes, there was an element of luck in the discovery of CVE-20240-3094, but it is undeniable source code availability and other FOSS customs tipped the scale in the community’s favor.

[1] https://jdsalaro.com/note/xz-liblzma-linux-backdoor-foss-pit...

But open sourceness in no way contributed to this being found, it was not in the source code.

If something like this happened in windows, it could be found in the same way, and the culprit could be identified and charged with crimes.

Just take the L for FOSS instead of trying a UNO reverse card

> But open sourceness in no way contributed to this being found, it was not in the source code.

Where was it? The explanation I saw included obsfucated code. ?

it was hidden in tests, so it didn't appear if you press "download source" button and build yourself / start crawling through each line of code, iirc

in some sense, exact specifics of the attack were discovered because norm of open source is even more open than the gpl-and-co require

So discovering the exploit absolutely depended on FOSS. If the vulnerability was in a Oracle product, nobody outside Oracle would have access to their tests (and publishing the bug would be a legal issue).

Disregard the comment you're replying to, they're either misinformed or deliberately inaccurate in their assessment.

The backdoor consisted of a combination of publicly visible code and binary blob test files available in the project's repository as well as obfuscated build scripts which were contained only in the released tarballs, tucked away, which, nevertheless, were also publicly accessible, decompressable and auditable[1]

[1] https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/?lang=en&id=782

> Instead they go full blown "please make it go away, if it's visible by us it means it's terrible and dangerous! FOSS is insecure!"

The cynicist in me fears this is how a large part of politics operates:

A lingering problem that is highly visible is bad: Then the public is expecting you to find a solution, and if you don't, it will reflect negatively on your public image, chances of reelection, etc.

In contrast, a massive crisis or catastrophe that occurs (seemingly) out of nowhere is actually good (as long as you aren't affected yourself), because it allows you to appear as the hero, rally people behind a common cause, access a massive amount of additional resources and funding, push through bills for completely unrelated political goals as long as you can somehow relate them to the catastrophe, etc.

This means there is a massive political incentive to push problems under the rug: As long as no one knows the problem is there, all is fine - and if the problem should unexpectedly blow up, that's fine too, because then there will be a "crisis" that you can politically benefit from.

And then some enterprising <insert enemy here> compromises all your infrastructure with a bug they found and nobody else spotted.

The visible bugs get fixed. Invisible ones get used and exploited.

> But just because something is your hobby doesn't mean you're not a professional at it.

While I do understand how you use that word here, it literally does, and it does in the general case because of incentives. (Thankfully, exceptional people that rise above this do exist, but hopefully we'll find a way to do better than basically using martyrs.)

I've now seen four articles in a range of publications using the xz incident to say that same thing about FOSS. Here's one in a defense industry publication:

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2024/04/how-fix-militarys-s...

When it appears in diverse multiple places simultaneously, I generally believe someone is coordinating a media campaign. You may think that's paranoid but look at the merits of the argument: how else is it explained? They didn't coincidentally think of the exact same argument, especially when FOSS's reputation has been well-established for a long time - why now, for this particiular vulnerability, are all these people suddenly expressing doubts? And they didn't read each other's articles: these articles need to be thought of, written, edited, and published.

You (those reading on HN) needs to push back and point out the absurdity of the argument now. Otherwise, even if it doesn't cause major changes, it will plant a seed - FUD, using the old IBM technique. Next time there's a incident, they will just keep beating that drum, as for-profit companies make another reach for more power. I'm sure others here will point out plenty of flaws in the argument; biggest of all is that proprietary software has the same problems - you can list them with ease.

Who is behind it? We may know when the first one says they are discontinuing using FOSS.

EDIT: Another reason to think it's coordinated: It's absolute BS. Nobody in IT would seriously make this claim. Everyone uses FOSS one way or another, and everyone has seen plenty of awful proprietary software. It's a deception intended for the uninformed outside IT.

Think about it: Many people saying the truth simultaneously makes sense. But for many people to come up with the same BS - and any IT professional is deceiving people knowingly - that takes coordination.

> I generally believe someone is coordinating a media campaign.

You don't need centralized coordination. Companies that sell closed-source software are inherently incentivized to defend their practices and denigrate their competitors. It's not a cabal, it's the systematic perverse incentives created by financial interests.

Why haven't I seen that argument previously when there were vulnerabilities? Why are all these people suddenly saying it, all at the same time?

1. Because this wasn't any old vulnerability, this was a backdoor placed there intentionally. 2. Because such attacks are rare (or perhaps rarely noticed), with the previous high-profile one being a backdoor attempt in the kernel in 2003. 3. Because this is the first high-profile open-source backdoor since tensions began to rise WRT cyber warfare with Russia and China.

I believe the devils advocate is that one of the 4 articles is an original article and the other three read the first one and wrote their own copy for eyeballs.

I do think for the defense and a lot of other industries it would be good for them to buy OSS code through a third-party that actually vetted the versions for bugs and other issues. Like the alternative is each of the defense companies expecting each of their developers to vet each library which is just a colossal wasted of work.

> I believe the devils advocate is that one of the 4 articles is an original article and the other three read the first one and wrote their own copy for eyeballs.

Without being pedantic, what do you think of my counterargument to that point in the GP? (No complaint if you missed it, but let's start from there.)

> When it appears in diverse multiple places simultaneously, I generally believe someone is coordinating a media campaign. You may think that's paranoid but look at the merits of the argument: how else is it explained? They didn't coincidentally think of the exact same argument

This counterargument?

I think my comment still applies. One of them had an original thought and the other copied them.

However, on further research I think at least with this article you are correct. The guy works for Chainguard [1] so he has a financial interest in the Iron Bank no longer existing.

The guys previous article for Log4J [1] is arguing for public funds to be spent auditing OSS. And given his current work I don't think he's against FOSS; just as long as you get the FOSS through him.

[1]: https://www.chainguard.dev/

[2]: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/08/military-should-red...

C'mon, you didn't even read to the end of the paragraph you quoted.

A crowd is also easy to hide in if it's not actually watching things closely. I expect the actual solution is that we move to sponsored open source, closed contribution projects. No way can we depend on the C equivalent of a random nodejs package for our most important infrastructure.

How do you know you can trust the contributors?

Need to start doing basic verification of identity, being suspicious of users always using a VPn and proving their real location, many many years of contributions before becoming a maintainer and having that control etc.

This. Most important contributors are employed by big tech anyway. If you're an independent contributor at the minimum we need to have a way to hold you accountable.

Siloing it back to big tech just creates the same problem again, because they have no incentive to keep it open.

It's not siloed, the problem becomes one of trusting Microsoft with your address data. Then them verifying it correctly (which they won't) Then on maintainer checking if they're giving ownership to the right person.

And just like everyone else, these have been compromised before.

Funny thing is other services such as banks and even Tinder (!) are way better at automatically not trusting and even demoting VPN users. Perhaps GitHub and others should do better here with making that stuff more visible.

Oh and it appears the dev was working via email rather than the mailing list for a bit too. Probably should be more suspicious of any back channel attempts like that too.

at least with Windows the backdoors are obscured from my immediate view!!