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Comment by FridayWithJohn | Hacker News Reader

Yet another reason to stick to open source.

Ok, I have full open-source stack and run a cloud service on it. I also give NSA full access to my servers. How does open-source helps there?

Why does the NSA have full access to your servers? Even if they manually wiretap your server it would require manual intervention, and is thus a good protection against blanket surveillance.

"Why does the NSA have full access to your servers?"

Because they ordered him to give it, and he elected not to go to jail.

He means "how". Open-source protects against software backdoors (though obviously not against key-sharing et alii)

What? Open source in a cloud service stack means that if the NSA thugs show up and order you to insert intercepts into your software on pain of being "disappeared", it's far EASIER to change the source and recompile than it is with proprietary software.

rimantas is referring to using open source in a cloud service, not authoring and distributing it.

What are you talking about? Open-source doesn't protect against backdoors even theoretically. Think about it. Have you read every line of every piece of software you run? Would you understand it all if you did? Even if you read the source code, did you actually compile it all from scratch or did you use a binary (like virtually every single OSS user on earth)? Are you certain that the compiler you used wasn't compromised? How exactly?

You're missing the point completely. You would at least know when someone is "poking around your data".

By law they would have to get a warrant... ie: actually obtain some real proof that you are up to no good. A lot better than this current blanket case scenario.

That's nothing more than the illusion of security. Nearly anyone using open source is using a distro. Do you imagine distro maintainers would willingly go to jail rather than putting in backdoors in the binaries they release?

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