zbruceli

Good to know! :-)

Much appreciated. If you are interested, I have written profiles on a few other open source giants like Brendan Eich, Fabrice Bellard, and Richard Stallman on the same personal blog site.

Author here. This is part of a series on the people behind important open source projects that power the Internet infrastructure (previously Brendan Eich, Fabrice Bellard, and Richard Stallman).

I framed it around the XZ backdoor in March 2024 because it's the cleanest illustration of the thesis: OpenSSH was the target, and OpenBSD wasn't exposed. The backdoor reached sshd on Linux through a distro patch that linked in libsystemd (and with it liblzma), not through upstream OpenSSH. That gap between "the code he controls" and "everything bolted on around it" runs through his whole career, from NetBSD in 1994 to the DARPA money in 2003 to LibreSSL after Heartbleed and pledge/unveil.

My argument in the piece is that the personality and the security model are the same thing: the traits that made him hard to work with are why the code holds. I'm sure people here who've used OpenBSD in production or dealt with the project directly will have corrections or nuance, and I'd like to hear them.

Microsoft now controls the collective entirety of human and machine intelligence (OpenAI and GitHub). Will it be a threat and what we can do about it?

Surge is a new alternative to Bit Torrent, claiming to be 100% secure, 100% decentralized, and 100% anonymous. And the client and network are both 100% open sourced and owned by the community: so full transparency and no adware or malware. It has a modern and sleek user interface, and very fast in downloading large files across the globe. Please give it a try! :-)

“The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.” by Whitfield Diffie. - nMobile is an extra secure and trusted chat app, available on iOS and Android today. - Why nMobile? To eradicate the roots of security hacks and privacy issues of popular chat apps such as whatsapp and signal, by removing all centralized servers. - Targeted audience: people who put highest priority on security and privacy, such as crypto community, minority groups, and financial/legal/health professionals. - Why is it better? nMobile runs on dataRide, a blockchain powered distributed communication system by over 20,000 independent, open source and community run relay servers.