[ILUG] Trojans (was: PS's + Virii)

[Colm Buckley]

Bernard Tyers wrote:

> that was onereally big point that i always wondered about open-source.
> what was there to assure unsuspecting people that noone had rewitten
> an application with trojan code in it?

Generally, software should only be used if it's from a trusted source -
this applies both to OSS stuff and closed apps.  In the case of OSS,
generally there's one, or a small number, of "known maintainers" for a
given application; you should only use stuff from the main distribution
sites, or trusted mirrors, and check the md5sums.

I'd say that OSS is generally *better* than closed-source stuff in this
respect; it's a hell of a lot easier to check for suspicious changes in
source than in binaries - and there are *lots* of people who have a good
hard look at the diffs of all the important packages...

Do you trust *all* 15,000 coders in Microsoft?  Pity there's no way to
check that they've put anything nasty in...

            Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley B.A. B.F. # colm at tuatha.org colm.buckley at tcd.ie colm at computer.org
Department of Computer Science      # +353 87 2469146 # whois cb3765
Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. # http://www.tuatha.org/~colm/
I just got lost in thought.  It was unfamiliar territory.