Re: Public guix offload server

["Jonathan McHugh" <indieterminacy@libre.brussels>]

I have utmost confidence in the Guix project, it has lots of smart and inquisitive people to suppliment its accountable structures - a very useful bulwark against exploitative behaviour!

====================
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels

October 22, 2021 12:59 AM, "Tobias Geerinckx-Rice" <me@tobias.gr> wrote:

> All,
> 
> zimoun 写道：
> 
>> Do you mean that trusted users would try WM-escape exploits?
>>> The world has been formed by warewolves inside communities
>>> purposely
>>> causing harm. Looking further back, Oliver the Spy is a classic
>>> examplar of trust networks being hollowed out.
> 
> So…
> 
>> I cannot assume that on one hand one trusted person pushes to
>> the main
>> Git repo in good faith and on other hand this very same trusted
>> person
>> behaves as a warewolves using a shared resource.
> 
> …li'l' sleepy here, bewarned, but before this gets out of hand: I
> never implied direct abuse of trust by committers. I don't
> consider it the main threat[0].
> 
> There are the people you meet at FOSDEM and the users who log into
> machines. Both can be compromised, but the latter are much easier
> and more likely to be.
> 
> Such compromise is not laughable or hypothetical: it happens
> *constantly*. It's how kernel.org was utterly owned[1].
> 
> Trusting people not to be evil is not the same as having to trust
> the opsec habits of every single one of them. Trust isn't
> transitive. Personally, I don't think a rogue zimoun will
> suddenly decide to abuse us. I think rogues will abuse zimoun the
> very first chance they get.
> 
> That's not a matter of degree: it's a whole different threat
> model, as is injecting arbitrary binaries vs. pushing malicious
> code commits. Both are bad news, but there's an order of
> magnitude difference between the two.
> 
>> For sure, one can always abuse the trust. Based on this
>> principle, we
>> could stop any collaborative work right now. The real question
>> is the
>> evaluation of the risk of such abuse by trusted people after
>> long period
>> of collaboration (that’s what committer usually means).
> 
> Isn't that the kind of hands-up-in-the-air why-bother
> nothing's-perfect fatalism I thought your Python quote (thanks!)
> was trying to warn me about? ;-)
> 
> Zzz,
> 
> T G-R
> 
> [0]: That's probably no more than an optimistic human flaw on my
> part and ‘disgruntled ex-whatevers’ are probably more of a threat
> that most orgs dare to admit.
> 
> [1]: I know, ancient history, but I'm working from memory here.
> I'm sure it would be trivial to find a more topical example.