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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

This is effectively giving Microsoft RCE on your computer.

We trust github.com and small-time publishers far too much. There’s a reason Debian packages software and runs mirrors.

Short of that, I really like the AUR model, especially -git packages. The scripts are so simple they can actually feasibly be reviewed (for the average arch Linux AUR user, anyway?) and are usually just "clone, make, install".

You probably already give Microsoft RCE on your computer (or Apple, or the maintainers of your linux distro, etc).

I'm curious why you think this is true of GNU/Linux distributions. I can't think of any besides Ubuntu (Snap) that this really makes sense for.

Unless you're running Gentoo or similar, you're trusting your distro maintainers to produce clean, non-malicious binaries any time you install anything from the package manager.

I don't think people read the code before running a build with portage

Choosing to download and run programs is not giving someone else RCE, unless you download and run something that allows for RCE. It's not an inevitable truth like it is with Windows or (usually) Ubuntu (not sure about MacOS).

> Choosing to download and run programs is not giving someone else RCE, unless you download and run something that allows for RCE.

In my experience, auditing compiled executables is hard. How do you do this?

So what's your approach? Are you Amish? Or did you compile every component of your setup (UEFI firmware and [C,G]PU microcode included) from source after auditing it? Or are you just convinced that a system that can't have a third party run arbitrary code simply can't exist? Please elaborate.

Simple. First, bootstrap a new universe...

Ah you see I tried that but ran into a bug: the closer you inspect one of the universe's registers, the less accurate my reading of the value is. It seems that I can either ascertain the memory location of a declared variable OR its value, but the closer I get to one, the foggier the other gets.

Has anybody else encountered this bug when manipulating the fabric of space-time in Rust? It's throwing a pretty major wrench in the gears of my newest HN-inspired project: making a Rust port of the Universe for added memory safety.

Knowing if you have an RCE backdoor and having an RCE backdoor are two different things.

Well, you hit the nail on the head with Ubuntu - I've been trying to cut that distro out of my life, and it keeps popping up every place I've worked at. I trust Debian dearly, but even then - there's just so much surface area! At least Debian is easy to strip down (and the docs are quite good). These days I like to be explicit about everything I have installed, and still - things seep through.

But where does Debian get the source for those packages?

I agree that github is uncomfortably large, but the problem isn't this tool, and the solution isn't something Debian can achieve on their own.

True, but if you install it anyway (like the author), might as well do it with this tool.

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