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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Lasse Collin, the other xz maintainer, has acknowledged the backdoor (tukaani.org)

submitted 7 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

They haven't particularly made a comment on the situation so much as acknowledged it's happening. They seem to be going with the story that they had nothing to do with it and this is news to them. Hope to hear more from them soon so we can find out more about the situation, how and why this happened, etc.

(The sceptical tone isn't because of disbelief of Collin, it's because we don't know enough about the situation to be able to say Collin is or isn't telling the truth here.)

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[+] SteefLem@lemmy.world -124 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Sorry but if the maintainer says it didnt know? Sounds fishy. Or just a bad maintainer.

[–] Thorned_Rose@kbin.social 79 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You realise that this comment is exactly part of the problem of why this happened, right? 🤦🏻‍♀️

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 38 points 7 months ago

Do you think being maintainer makes you some kind of all knowing being? That's not how that works. You write code and review code of others.

If there are multiple maintainers, you may obviously not even notice what another maintainer is doing; then you wouldn't need multiple maintainers with write access if you could handle it all by yourself.

[–] RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago

I suggest you read a little in how the backdoor was implemented. It wasn't as obvious as you think. I personally don't think the owner had anything to do with it.

[–] jarfil@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago

Who's paying him? Seriously:

If nobody is, then we got our value's worth.
If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.

[–] communism@lemmy.ml 13 points 7 months ago

If I were the co-maintainer of a project I wouldn't suspect that the person who had been actively contributing for over 2 years had injected malicious code into a binary file to distribute in the tarballs. "Jia Tan" had already gained Collin's trust by then