I'm deeply unconvinced by TFA (and the rest of the series). There are insufficient technical details (and those that are there are taken way out of context) to

I'm deeply unconvinced by TFA (and the rest of the series). There are insufficient technical details (and those that are there are taken way out of context) to judge whether a) the author's conjecture is reasonable, and b) the author actually has sufficient understanding of such details to make their claims credible. There's stuff like 'some code I found an FTP server one time' which add considerable amounts of doubt and ambiguity. That said, such objections merely highlight the root cause of the problem - the software and process is not auditable. If it was I could just go and check for myself. Without that access neither I nor anyone else can verify the claims, nor the counter claims that everything is legit (though see also Thompson hack, reproducible builds, etc) I'm not a 'closed source = evil' kind of a person but here it seems like an absolute no brainier.