56
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
56 points (95.2% liked)
Privacy
38209 readers
219 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
So the whole thing about FOSS is that at its core, someone could add malicious features or whatever to a codebase, but it can be discovered if people notice adverse effects and dig into it.
Like that one supply chain attack by "Jia Tan" on xz tools, that was quite nefarious, well planned and executed, yet some nerd noticed a slightly longer than normal response time and looked into it (a gross simplification, some luck might have been involved but you get the point). If it were a closed-source proprietary tool, the owners would shrug their shoulders and gaslight people into believing it's nothing.
That's why people make a fuss about binary blobs in FOSS code, if anything unwanted was happening, it could always be from there.
My personal level of checking is ensuring that I have gone to the correct official source, but I will generally have to trust the builder that was linked from that source did not modify or inject anything.