Hi James,
James Griffin wrote:
................Thu 4.Jul'13 at 23:56:50 -0400, Thomas Jennings................
Dear OpenBSD developers and users:
Regretfully, I have decided to abandon OpenBSD and thought I would
share my reasoning with this list. I thought the 4th of July was a
good date to do so since my reasons address national security
implications. As a group of people who take development, security, and
privacy seriously, I know you will want to know why I made the drastic
decision to abandon OpenBSD and never look back.
[ ... ]
Then you'd also better stop using mobile phones, landlines, using search
engines, email ... come to think of it, any form of electronic
comminucation, and go back to living in the woods or in a cave and
clubbing your wife with large peices of wood if you're so concerned
about the security services.
Right, more or less. Even acknowledging the mail as a troll, I had a
couple of thoughts.
There may be hidden doors inside RSA and derived algorithms and
protocols we don't know. So I cannot exclude implicit backdoors inside
OpenBSD (not explicit in the code, those would have been caught by the
open source).
But if you worry about that, and I think it is legitimate, what else?
Our cousings FreeBSD and NetBSD use the same public libraries. As does
Linux. Solaris, AIX and HP-UPX perhaps use a mix of opensource and
proprietary libraries, but most certainly based on the same algorithms.
Thus what would be the mysterious OS alternative, except writing your
own cypher algorithm, outside the USA?
Riccardo
