NSA operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report - FOSDEM 2014
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an entertaining talk showing that targeting software projects and introducing bugs is nothing new.
What it is
Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dobbsbob · 2014-04 · on “Were Intelligence Agencies Using Heartbleed in November 2013?”
I would say after watching this almost everybody could be a target of state interest from VCs to a janitor with a cellphone who works at a network they want into [this video] (FosDem2014 presention) and especially if you have any kind of trust in an open source community and your patches are accepted blindly. Personally if I were an evil intel agency I'd be going after GPU developers and manufacturers at all costs to get at their firmware sources or even possibly find ways to sabotage it at the source. It's the final frontier of awesome evilware potential. - the execution of GPU code, and transfer of data between device and host do not require admin privs so it will always run regardless of what
Recommends wang_li · 2021-04 · on ““They introduce kernel bugs on purpose””
There’s no research going on here. Everyone knows buggy patches can get into a project. Submitting intentionally bad patches adds nothing beyond grandstanding. They could perform analysis of review/acceptance by looking at past patches that introduced bugs without being the bad actors that they apparently are. From FOSDEM 2014, NSA operation ORCHESTRA annual status report. It’s pretty entertaining and illustrates that this is nothing new. [LINK] [this video]
Cites xnull2guest · 2014-09 · on “Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM”
[this video] I'm not saying that this thread or even HN is a victim of this. I do want to use this opportunity to contribute that there are NSA programs designed to derail conversations.