[Bradford] Defcon 3: Debian thermo global nuclear init standoff [systemd vs Upstart]

[David Spencer]

Yep Rob, to add a backdoor to sysvinit you'd have to go back 40 years in
your tardis *and* then work a Jedi mind trick on everyone that could see it
in plain sight.

Oh yeah and I forgot:
The killer colon of Lennart
http://zaitcev.livejournal.com/219483.html
(Not the *anatomical* colon his ideas emerge from, no, this is a
*typographical* colon.)

And Dave Airlie less than two weeks ago explaining to Linus why Linus is
crazy to want kernel updates in the Fedora installer:
"+Linus Torvalds afaik there is no QA capacity for doing something like
that, the whole reason Fedora has a serious pre-release freeze period is to
make the installer not get screwed by collateral damage in the main OS,
like systemd/dracut/kernel/devicemapper changes."
Yeah, so don't *do* that, genius...

This is just part of the fallout in our current month of October 2013.
Does Debian *really* want to join such a party?

-D.

(and I hope everyone enjoyed the lotr/starwars/who/zombies references so
far.  Any requests for the next rant?)



On 29 October 2013 20:42, Robert Burrell Donkin <
robertburrelldonkin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 6:56 PM, David Spencer <
> baildon.research at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> And there's this:
>> http://monolight.cc/2011/05/the-systemd-fallacy/
>>
>
> systemd is all about control
>
> FWIW...
>
> If I wanted to pwn Linux boxes, the way I go about would be through
> initialization scripts.
>
> But shell scripts are easy to read, and sys admins have a habit of poking
> around in them to debug issues or to tweak them for local needs.
>
> C (unlike more obvious alternatives like Python) is much trickier to debug
> or decompile. System admins will in future need to approach corporates like
> RH. Given friends in these corporations, if they were to insert any special
> goodies then likely of being found out is slim indeed.
>
> Good for the NSA. Good for revenues at the corps. All Free as in Freedom
> Fries...
>
> But who cares about being pwn'd by Uncle Sam if your box boots 1.3 seconds
> faster...
>
> All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds
>
> Robert
>
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