by Dietrich Schmitz
It seems that every day, we learn more information about how governmental agencies can with impunity view your Internet activities, your emails, documents, everything.
Today, Liveleak has a story about how the FBI admits they have a method whereby they can remotely activate your PC's camera should they need to do so. Of course they add that it would only be done in extreme narrowly restricted cases such as terrorism. Isn't that the excuse our government used for invoking the Patriot Act?
Anyhow, it is quite illustrative of how proprietary based software development can ultimately lead to exploitation. I can assure the readers that no such exploitation will occur with open source transparency at work. That's thousands of eyes around the world thoroughly scrutinizing Linux source code. Whereas, by comparison, there are only a limited few at Microsoft and, given each project being segregated, one hand won't necessarily know what the other hand is doing and the 'whole picture' becomes obscured. Many simply don't want to do anything but their own coding and won't participate in cross project code maintenance and debugging.
That is the essence of open source transparency. Nothing ever goes unnoticed for long. Bugs are identified, fixed and the repository system gets an update within a matter of hours. The codebase remains 'fresh', not stale.
Unlike open source Linux, bugs in Microsoft's proprietary code may linger for months, even years, going entirely overlooked and unfixed which contributes to exploits such as the one discussed in this story.
So please. End proprietary software exploitation. Begin using open source Linux today, won't you?
Be safe.
-- Dietrich
It seems that every day, we learn more information about how governmental agencies can with impunity view your Internet activities, your emails, documents, everything.
Today, Liveleak has a story about how the FBI admits they have a method whereby they can remotely activate your PC's camera should they need to do so. Of course they add that it would only be done in extreme narrowly restricted cases such as terrorism. Isn't that the excuse our government used for invoking the Patriot Act?
Anyhow, it is quite illustrative of how proprietary based software development can ultimately lead to exploitation. I can assure the readers that no such exploitation will occur with open source transparency at work. That's thousands of eyes around the world thoroughly scrutinizing Linux source code. Whereas, by comparison, there are only a limited few at Microsoft and, given each project being segregated, one hand won't necessarily know what the other hand is doing and the 'whole picture' becomes obscured. Many simply don't want to do anything but their own coding and won't participate in cross project code maintenance and debugging.
That is the essence of open source transparency. Nothing ever goes unnoticed for long. Bugs are identified, fixed and the repository system gets an update within a matter of hours. The codebase remains 'fresh', not stale.
Unlike open source Linux, bugs in Microsoft's proprietary code may linger for months, even years, going entirely overlooked and unfixed which contributes to exploits such as the one discussed in this story.
So please. End proprietary software exploitation. Begin using open source Linux today, won't you?
Be safe.
-- Dietrich
