But don't all the suggested distros here (as well any user friendly ones in general) rely on the kernel written by Torvald's team. With that team being based in the US and at least Linus himself having acted as a three letter agency asset before, can they really be called privacy friendly or even secure? (I'm talking about the CIA or NSA having had a backdoor into Linux in the past and Linus also having banned Russian contributions last year while not banning American contributions, much less moving the operation outside of the US)

[–] leighms@mastodonapp.uk 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@RedPandaRaider @FallenWalnut
As it is fully open source with many tens of thousands of people poking about with the code, if there was any form of 'back door' it would have been found and removed.
There would also been a massive howl of condemnation against Linus that everyone would have heard about.

So many people have taken the basic code and built different flavour distros with it, it is very well understood.

[–] RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We have found the backdoor though and it has been found only years later.

Look up Bvp47 https://www.securityweek.com/chinese-researchers-detail-linux-backdoor-nsa-linked-equation-group/

[–] leighms@mastodonapp.uk 1 points 2 weeks ago

@RedPandaRaider
Interesting. As far as I can figure out from the technical papers there is no suggestion that it was an intrinsic part of Linux. A malware tool that was introduced somehow.

It does illustrate the importance of keeping patches up to date.

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