Join The Police FOSS
I had this dream … with a subplot involving one of Stephen’s ex-girlfriends ¹ … about government infiltration of the OSS community and scene.
It wasn’t a sudden revelation or anything … I’ve been aware of it for a long time, but it is the first time I’ve dreamt about it and, given the way it usually goes about these things, I can’t help wondering what my subconscious has recently noticed that I haven’t; there was no hint of a cause or sequence of events for that particular story element, it was just the background environment in which events took place, so I really have little to work with here, but … given how my subconscious usually goes about things … I know that that was the salient point of the dream, not the ‘action’ — just as Semantics ² are opaque without knowledge of the Pragmatics ³, so the what (the action) is meaningless without the where (the location or environment) ⁴.
So, your thought for the day from me, based upon my subconscious telling me I should actively be paying more attention to the phenomenon than I have thus far, is that … as what is probably the second-most significantly core element of Linux after the kernel is the bash shell and, for a quarter of a century (right from its inception and release), the Shellshock ⁵ exploit evaded the ‘many eyes’ ⁶ of the World … if you think the (F)OSS community and its work aren’t riddled with government operatives and backdoors from every country in the World …
I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
—
¹ A Hungarian? Really? During the Cold War? Seriously, Stephen … what were you thinking!?
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics + https://whereangelsfeartotread.medium.com/fightin-talk-dc0039c9d94f
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
⁴ Points of View (1986 advert for The Guardian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)
⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law
