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An anonymous coward writes "Former cypherpunk shares his conspiratorial view on Linux security:
Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:
"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)
This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. In other words, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military and, as a result, they have significant pull in its development. In that respect, the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.
Next, the FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report is well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end). To me, this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by evilviper on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:11AM
I've seen plenty of paranoia in my time, but his is the paranoid rant to end all paranoid rants... And I do mean literal, textbook definition schizophrenia, requiring medical help, before he harms himself or someone else.
He's making all kind of untenable connections all over the map, converging in an ultra-massive conspiracy between the US Army, the NSA, RedHat, PulseAudio developers, GNOME and GTK+ developers, and culminating in systemD being the satanic love-child of all of them... SystemD is designed by sinister kernel devs, and intended both to "turn Linux into Windows" (user-unfriendliness, lack of transparency, and unreliability) while giving the NSA (or is it the US Army? Or perhaps the evil RedHat corporation, who has "infiltrated the kernel"?) a purpose-built back-door into all Linux systems.
A vast conspiracy to make Linux into "systems that create vulnerabilities and concentrate corruption (wealth) in their hands." A "closed, complex, dark system where they can hide and manipulate without being exposed for what they are." He knows it's real and not paranoia because of his past experiences: "I had received out-of-place business offers and other questionable things in the past. I got phone calls in the middle of the night, hang ups, just to let you know you were on someone’s list."
His proof of these evil kernel developers consists of his observations of "disturbing patterns in how daemons were being used" in KDE, one instance of Linus publicly scolding one RedHat-employed kernel dev (for trying to save face and discounting/downplaying the 30-second boot-delay he caused). And users being frustrated by PulseAudio is somehow also further proof of a sinister conspiracy.
His proof of the Army and NSA's control of Linux kernel development consists solely of the factoid that the US Army is RedHat's single biggest customer. And his proof that systemD is the software anti-Christ consists of a rant from a random Arch Linux *end user* who doesn't like systemD (for unspecified reasons), and found it difficult to use Arch without systemD.
And... that's it. Some rants about the good-old days, and disappointment with kids these days. And that's the proof of an ultra-massive government/corporate conspiracy, centered around systemD...
Do YOU see ALL home-page stories?
dev.soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=1
github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/78
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:31AM
Sounds about right to me.
(Score: 4, Funny) by pe1rxq on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:03AM
You probably just made his nemesis list.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:30AM
Since his conspiracy is not centered on harm to himself, it is not paranoia.