An anonymous coward writes "Former cypherpunk shares his conspiratorial view on Linux security:
Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:
"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)
This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. In other words, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military and, as a result, they have significant pull in its development. In that respect, the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.
Next, the FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report is well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end). To me, this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!"
(Score: 1) by cykros on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:28PM
So let me get this straight... The US army is the largest user of Redhat Linux. And somehow that means they're pushing for more security vulnerabilities in it, despite security for what they are involved with being a matter of life and death often for large numbers of people?
I'm not saying nobody's engaged in any funny business, but it would appear to me that if anything, the US Army making such heavy use of RHEL indicates that it's NOT intentionally weakened.
In other news, "US Army != NSA".
Now, if we see an article suggesting that "Al Qaeda" is primarily using Redhat Linux, I'll be a little more open to conspiracy musings on purposeful security holes being snuck in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:14PM
Because knowing the vulnerabilities beforehand gives you the competitive edge over adversaries and you might want to have it rather than having a level-playing field.
For US, with by epic margin the largest military budget, this seems logical.
(Copied from my previous comment)