Technologist vs spy: the xz backdoor debate
lcamtuf.substack.com
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of

Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.

  • Murdoc@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    9 months ago
    • Someone thought it would be a good idea to troll open source community and make it look worse than closed source, so that closed source security can be popularised (“security” trolls in FOSS community I harp about love such ideas, beware of any Graphene/Chrome/Apple and Big Tech lovers just as example)
    • Tying into the idea of making FOSS ecosystem look bad, it might be a concerted effort by closed source company/companies to propel themselves above, as FOSS development is shitting on closed source corporate model
    • A different approach, it could be the first step in a series of steps to dismantle FOSS ecosystem, considering how much trust and transparency it has that attracts everyone enlightened enough

    This is why it surprised me to learn that this was noticed/announced by an MS employee.