Stallman withdraws claim : No Evidence of Backdoor in Mac OS X
osnews.com
osnews.com
Do you have any evidence there is such a backdoor in Mac OS X?
All Stallman's economics make sense when you realize that he's quietly sitting on a huge pile of cash.
When someone's using the law as a weapon they're trying to take away what the other person values. Just because someone doesn't value money doesn't mean the law can't take away other things.
I can't see a motivation for him to post a retraction for something he can't confirm in either regard, so I also assume that Apple has pursued some legal action.
Apple does have complete control over the software on your system. Every time you do an update you give control to them, but this is no different than any other OS that is upgradable. The difference is that OSX users have no transparency into what they are doing, and no way to audit it. So why would they need a backdoor if you will sudo and hand them the keyboard?
Lets imagine that he simply stopped talking about the back door. Is this something he is asked about a lot? If so, he would have to recant eventually, why not now?
You are correct, and I shouldn't have assumed anything. However, I still believe legal action to be the likely cause.
Except for the fact that in free and open-source you can examine the code that conducts the update.
For instance, my iPod-to-TV cable stopped working when I update my iPod touch (http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/blog_en/i-really-want-to-lik...). Could I examine the update, I could rather easily change the part that broke perfectly functional hardware and reverse the change in functionality Apple imposed upon me.
(and Yes, I'm probably going to get downvoted too but it was soooo worth it)