this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
419 points (98.6% liked)
Programming.dev Meta
2490 readers
11 users here now
Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
Links
Credits
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Its open source and a lot of people are looking at it. The odds it has a back door intentionally put there are slim to none. It would get noticed.
Did they catch this?
Don't know, I don't have enough information. Though my point were if it were intentional. I am going to hazard a guess by how they are scrambling to send out patches that it probably wasn't intended by the creators.
The kind of developers that would put a back door in their software probably are also working on things with far more value potential than an open source forum where they could easily be caught. Perhaps like banks or weapons depots.
No. They didn't catch this. It compromised an administrator on a massive instance.
It wasn't intentional. It proves that when it is intentional it'll be easily done and it's a mistake to trust the Lemmy code base.
And the problem was fixed right afterwards and is currently being pushed out for admins to update to. Look, like it or not, shit happens. Expecting it to be full proof is unrealistic. It is a young software.
Just because it happened unintentionally, doesn't prove that we can't trust the developers to not put back doors in. Even if they did, why would they? What is there to gain for the developers adding a backdoor to it? Versus the risk of doing so? Is it ever worth the trouble when it is very much possible to find out if they did?
Lemmy has no financial value. That is the point. We don't use credit cards here, people rarely use their names, email verification isn't mandatory on all instances, passwords are potentially useful but you still need to know who they belong to. It is just such a great risk to their reputation for such a small gain.
Which is expected. When it comes to security the fact it happened at all is the problem.
I don't expect the software to be fool proof. All software has bugs and problems, but this software is specifically developed by bad actors who will eventually use the platform to fuck you over.
The developers aren't trustworthy on the account of their extremist ideology, not on account of this bug happening. This bug is evidence that despite the fact that this project is open source you should not just brush off that extremist ideal as "no big deal".
And immense social value.
Why would they build the platform open source if they wanted to put a back door in it? Go touch grass you shut in.
What do you mean by that? Are they hell bent on using Rust Nightly and making overly-judicious use of
.unwrap()?edit: I see that you mean they are Marxist-adjacent.
We can argue non stop about politics, but that isn't the point. Whether or not we agree with their politics is irrelevant to their ability to build a social platform. Until we start to see their beliefs affecting their software decision making in a negative way, we cannot complain about it. As they may or may not have popular opinions, that is a very good reason for them to have a great platform. So they can share them without fear of retaliation.
However, they have so far done nothing to show they can't be trusted to not make unbiased or malicious software. It is incredibly rude to assume they will.
If you have evidence showing they cannot be trusted, please come forth with it. We need to know it.
You'll be about a billion days too late and the entire network will have been compromised for ages. You don't operate on a "oh let's just trust the authoritarian communists until they do something bad" policy.
Alright, so what do they plan to do? Compromise Lemmy, sure. Then what? What do they gain? Propaganda?
Basically pull data on various accounts (IP address, activity history, etc), people, and trends. They could promote given posts or suppress posts or hide things from moderators. They could distribute whatever malware they might like, target specific accounts that way....
The possibilities are many.
Even so, it just seems like a lot of work and risk for something that would not be necessary to achieve those or similar goals. Besides, if word gets out that the software is compromised, then people will just stop using it. The much better/easier solution would be run scams, vote manipulation, etc as it doesn't kill your platform that you would then be using to push a goal or agenda.
The name of the game is to not be noticed. You have a bad user or instance, they get banned and make a new one. Compromising the whole thing though? That's one and done, especially where the Lemmy croud is a lot more tech oriented than most other platforms.
My point being that why compromise Lemmy for a short while then have it die vs playing the long game and have an ever increasing user base to scam, steal from or manipulate? It just doesn't make sense when you think about it.