alt Hacker NewsThis comment comes across as unnecessarily aggressive and out of nowhere (Stallman?), it's really hard to parse.
Does this rewording reflect it's meaning?
"You don't actually need code to evaluate security, you can analyze a binary just as well."
Because that doesn't sound correct?
But that's just my first pass, at a high level. Don't wanna overinterpret until I'm on surer ground about what the dispute is. (i.e. don't want to mind read :) )
Steelman for my current understanding is limited to "you can check if it writes files/accesses network, and if it doesn't, then by definition the chats are private and its secure", which sounds facile. (presumably something is being written to somewhere for the whole chat thing to work, can't do P2P because someone's app might not be open when you send)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Whether the original comment knows it or not, Stallman greatly influenced the very definition of Source Code, and the claim being made here is very close to Stallman's freedom to study.
>"You don't actually need code to evaluate security, you can analyze a binary"
Correct
>"just as well"
No, of course analyzing source code is easier and analyzing binaries is harder. But it's still possible (feasible is the word used by the original comment)
>Steelman for my current understanding is limited to "you can check if it writes files/accesses network, and if it doesn't, then by definition the chats are private and its secure",
I didn't say anything about that? I mean those are valid tactics as part of a wider toolset, but I specifically said binaries, because it maps one to one with the source code. If you can find something in the source code, you can find it in the binary and viceversa. Analyzing file accesses and networks, or runtime analysis of any kind, is going to mostly be orthogonal to source code/binary static analysis, the only difference being whether you have a debug map to source code or to the machine code.
This is a very central conflict of Free Software, what I want to make clear is that Free Software refuses to study closed source software, not because it is impossible, but because it is unjustly hard. Free Software never claims it is impossible to study closed source software, it claims that source code access is a right, and they prefer rejecting to use closed source software, and thus never need to perform binary analysis.