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Huawei Tops Intel as Top Linux Kernel Contributor for 5.10
- infocollector 6y agoHow is security taken care of when contributions are being done by Huawei (backdoors in 41k lines of sourcode?)? But I am guessing there is no real fight between open source software and state actors - perhaps someone who knows more about the security of the kernel can comment.
- harikb 6y agoIf a state actor really wants to do it and someone could get it past reviews, I am sure they could bribe any contributor from any country (including US). Why single out China? We never raised concerns with Russian contributors.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- b0rsuk 6y agoMaybe not single out China, but many people think China is particularly untrustworthy: they insist Chinese law is used outside China, and lecture people how they should refer to China in public; they operate concentration camps; the Chinese language has no word for *mutuality*, China benefits from free speech and access to institutions in the West but doesn't allow the same in China for journalists or businessmen; China treats Chinese-speaking minority in Western countries as Chinese citizens, and even blackmails them by threating their family; Winnie the Pooh is extremely thin-skinned and can have games like Devotion removed from Steam and GOG even after the reference is removed from the secret area in the game; there are many instances where businesses with Chinese shareholders were pressured not to publish anything mildly critical of China. BBC team visiting China investigating covid19 faced obstacles reminiscent of The Truman Show; WHO scientists investigating covid19 recently not permitted into China; China doesn't even formally frown at corruption; Journalists disappear or regularly get sentences in China; Western liberal democracies have flaws, but I'll take Western values over Chinese values, thank you very much. Also, the West has less leverage over China than over Russia so it's important not to yield any ground.
- netsharc 6y agoHere's me being European and thinking, how many of these could be applied to USA as well. At least Xi Jinping is a properly ruthless politician, his thinner-skinned equivalent in the USA is just a fucking idiot running around screaming. Yeah, yeah, "whataboutism". BTW, Chinese values, or Chinese government values? I'm sure the average Chinese would speak up if they knew they wouldn't end up in reeducation camp. Yeah I'll give you one thing, at least in the West it's still possible to speak up. Meanwhile, in Washington DC at the moment, there are violence-ready Americans openly demanding democracy be ignored and to install their preferred fuckwit as ruler. Seems like they're just as brainwashed as a Chinese who's been fed CCP propaganda.
- b0rsuk 6y agoI'll give you another example. A man was removed from a Polish reality TV show because he had been accused of rape outside Poland. The TV station was TVN, owned by US. The participant had received a sexual favor from a 16 year old. The age of consent in Poland is 15. I'm not impressed by ruthless politicians. Ruthlessness is good for action movie thrills. It takes much more skill and leadership to forge compromises and unite people using respect. By the way Spartans sucked even at combat, they just had really good PR. No matter how you slice it, they were completely average, even if you exclude naval battles or battles which included their allies. (extremely long reads for those interested in history) https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... re: whataboutism. Whataboutism has no place here because it's not even on the same order of magnitude. You're comparing tons to kilograms. We don't even know the full extent of what China is doing because free press is not allowed to operate there, doctors and journalists get sentences.
- brianwawok 6y ago> I'm sure the average Chinese would speak up if they knew they wouldn't end up in reeducation camp What is the average standard of living in China 50 years ago vs today? There has been remarkable growth for millions of people. If your standard of living was 10x your parents, you might not view life as that bad?
- raverbashing 6y agoReality check: if a state actor wants to add a backdoor it's easier at the parts closest to the consumer: the integrators, not the fundamental technology Of course you could be playing the long game as well like with Dual-EC-DRBG
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoIt's not even necessary to mention China and Russia, the NSA is equally interested in placing a backdoor in the Linux kernel. People were paranoid about it already 20 years ago [0], but according to Linus' father, NSA actually tried to pull it off [1]. [0] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-... [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/11/nsa-ask-linus-torvalds-include-backdoors-linux-father-says-yes https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/11/nsa-ask-linus-torvalds-i...
- secfirstmd 6y agoEh you may want to read up about the NSA history of backdoors.
- barbacoa 6y agoSaving people the google search, I believe secfirstmd is referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gRsgkdfYJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gRsgkdfYJ8 For anyone not good with faces the guy responding is Linus Torvalds who created and still manages Linux.
- curiousgal 6y agoHonestly, people seem to forget that this happened. They lose their shit at the slightest mention of Huawei/China but don't even have an issue using software released by the NSA[0]. Unpopular opinion, but if I had to choose between China and the U.S. spying on me, I would pick the one who's less likely to have me extradited from whatever country I am in or ban me from flying. 0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra
- philliphaydon 6y agoSo you choose the US?
- rat9988 6y agoI understood china.
- philliphaydon 6y agochina has extradition laws just like the US. But the major difference (other than the list of countries they have treaties with) is if you insult the US government, nothing would happen, if you insulted the ccp, they would make up some false accusations to extradite you and throw you in jail, like whats happening already with Hong Kong. So you're definitely safer with the US than you are with china.
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- ronanyeah 6y agoHuawei has already made some 'careless mistakes': https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-denies-involvement-in-buggy-linux-kernel-patch-proposal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-denies-involvement-in-b...
- mlindner 6y agoAnd they follow the "deny, deny, lie" aspect of their government as well. Wish they would have some honesty. You can't call a project named after your company not involved with your company.
- haukem 6y agoNormally the identity of contributors is not really checked when you want to contribute to an open source project. A valid email address and a name is sufficient to contribute to the Linux kernel. All changes to The Linux kernel are getting publicly reviewed, so the hard thing is passing this technical review if you want to introduce a backdoor. If people know you, based on previous contributions, the review could be less hard, so it could make sense to build up a reputation before. In the Linux kernel not the company builds up the reputation, but the individual engineer who contributes. If this is a Huawei hardware it could be easier for an engineer with a Huawei mail address to get changes integrated, because people assume he known the driver and hardware well and people trust claims like, "this can not happen because the closed source firmware takes care of this". If the Chinese intelligence agency wants to integrate a backdoor into mainline Linux it would be easier to just build up some own fake identities and use them. It probably would be easier to just analyze the Linux kernel and use bugs introduced by other people. The NSA also contributed to the Linux kernel, look for contributes from a nsa.gov mail address.
- LinuxBender 6y agoI would expect that malicious code would itself not be a proper backdoor, but rather a framework or hook or API that makes it easier to bypass restrictions. Subtle behavioral changes in the kernel combined with user space code could empower a state actor to move unnoticed. I think of it like 20 parts of a munition. Each piece by itself may look mostly harmless. This is all theory of course, but that is how I would do something malicious in the kernel. A theoretical example would be a simple kernel API combined with something like systemd's binfmt mount and a benign looking PNG image file that when parsed by binfmt, instructs the kernel to do something interesting such as tickle an undocumented CPU instruction.
- dcolkitt 6y agoNot just contributed. SELinux is primarily authored by the NSA.
- haukem 6y agoNow Huawei is fixing bugs in SELinux: https://git.kernel.org/linus/68dae71b7cde628a082e982c0abbf6e4de7b7db5 https://git.kernel.org/linus/68dae71b7cde628a082e982c0abbf6e... Or reports them, so the NSA can fix them: https://git.kernel.org/linus/3a2f5a59a695a73e0cde9a61e0feae5fa730e936 https://git.kernel.org/linus/3a2f5a59a695a73e0cde9a61e0feae5...
- arthropodSeven 6y agoGonna be great when Congress gets word of this
- absolutelyrad 6y agoWhat can congress do? They're already blacklisted. The only thing left is to shoot your own foot. Maybe avoid that? I've seen nothing logical that came out of Trumps silly blacklisting except cashing out on the reputation the US had for pennies on the dollar. China is destined to be Europe and the US combined in term of tech. Time will tell if their culture causes problem for them. Smart high intelligence people + strong work ethic + competition and not rent seeking by incumbents. They're only second to Israel in terms of average human intelligence. Every top math Olympiad participant representing the US is of Chinese ethnicity/descent, this should be noted.
- rscho 6y agoChina is destined by US and European politicians to take power, because those in power are totally corrupt. This has nothing to do with the instrinsic abilities of respective populations. Same goes for Israel. And you have a strange definition of ethics given the amount of IP piracy going on with the blessing of occidental politicians.
- absolutelyrad 6y ago> And you have a strange definition of ethics given the amount of IP piracy going on with the blessing of occidental politicians. What IP did Huawei steal? 5G?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- marcus_holmes 6y agoSuggesting that human intelligence varies by race is a very old, very debunked idea that no-one believes any more outside of some small racist cliques.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoNot surprising after I saw how many R&D offices Huawei has in Europe. They basically placed their offices right across their competitors like Ericsson, Nokia, Imagination, etc. to the point that in every European Tech hub you will find a Huawei office.
- raverbashing 6y agoMoney and strategy talks If only Nokia hadn't got dragged down by the Symbian fools
- scns 6y agoHave you heard of the "Burning platform" memo?
- mcraiha 6y agoHave you read "Paranoidi optimisti" by Risto Siilasmaa? All the big problems software wise were cause by Symbian. "Unfortunately, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Siilasmaa later learned that the overall build time of Symbian was two weeks." https://www.flashover.blog/posts/technical-debt/ https://www.flashover.blog/posts/technical-debt/
- im3w1l 6y agoHoly shit, how did that happen? Edit: it seems the compilation time was 2 days in that article, I wonder what the rest was.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoSymbian definitely had to go. But that's why Nokia had Meego-Harmattan. It's as if Apple announced they were going to stop developing their own software, right after replacing classic Mac OS with OS X. And, instead of adopting Windows for future Macs, Apple was going all-in on Solaris. And, Steve Jobs had just stepped down as interim CEO, and his replacement just happened to be a former Sun Microsystems executive. And, Apple's investors were apparently okay with this.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agotbh... "state actors" have been "contributing" to the Kernel for years..
- lrossi 6y agoOriginal post: https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ Lines of code are not a good metric for the importance of the contributions. You can see that the top developer actually made a single 26k loc commit that just removed a driver.
- bluedino 6y agoAren't there 2 million lines just for the AMD drivers?
- MegaDeKay 6y agoMuch of this is auto-generated header files e.g. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.11-rc1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....
- giantg2 6y agoTrue. Wouldn't more lines of code give someone more chance to slip in backdoors?
- corbet 6y agoI would love to find better metrics than changesets and lines of codes — I agree that both are awful ways of measuring actual software-development work. I have yet to find something better, though; suggestions welcome.
- m463 6y agoI wonder if folks should even look for it, because it will become an employment metric. sorry you spent too much time on "learning", we need more "corbet-curve-units" from you.
- contingencies 6y agoGoodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- cosmiccatnap 6y agoIcing on the cake for an all around bad year for intel
- tristor 6y agoThis doesn't surprise me. I've been working in the open source software space for a good while and many many many of my former colleagues now work at Huawei. All of them report to me that it's a great place to work where they're well compensated and put on teams of smart people with ample resources to get things done, including doing things in the open.
- giantg2 6y agoThis is concerning
- mrtweetyhack 6y agoI don't want to touch anything Huawei contributes to
- Triv888 6y ago(Unknown) and (none) are pretty large contributors too...
- iqandjoke 6y agoSurprise that Apple is NOT on that list