alt Hacker NewsToday when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the government of India they aren’t going to install their “security” software… those are just a couple examples.
What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?
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Maybe. I highly doubt Apple or any other company isn’t complying in some way.
It’s been widely speculated that there are gentleman’s agreements where strategic bugs do not get fixed. To apple’s credit, unlike say BlackBerry, they designed iMessage where many of the intercept methods are tamper evident.
Fork the project.
Apple sit behind the most corrupt US President in history at its inauguration, donated to a ball room and millions of dollars for other unspecified purposes. Is your argument that they will not fold...or that the backdoor is already in place ? :-)
How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches? Maybe Linus controls Linux, but can he "flick a switch and kill" any running kernels? He might be able to insert backdoors, but will they go unnoticed? Would anyone be forced to install them? Just patch the code to remove the backdoor.
I feel that you wrote some words that only seem to make sense if we don't think about them too much.