Mailing List Archive

2009/1/24 Gregory Kohs <thekohser@gmail.com>:

> Please, in your rush to judgment about the character of my "attacks"
> here, take some time to actually explore and learn about United States
> law. The Foundation could be in serious trouble here, and you're
> spending an awful lot of energy railing against the messenger.


You're a troll. You spend tremendous time and effort around the
blogosphere posting attacks on Wikipedia and Wikimedia wherever you
can. Your comments get deleted from the WMF blog when they're
trolling, and it so happens they almost always are. You're *still*
furiously sockpuppeting on en:wp as well.

Given this, of course I'll assume you're trolling here as well,
because, well, you are.


- d.

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How was this message constructive? If you think he's a troll, don't
respond to him. I happen to think he raised some interesting issues.

Mark

2009/1/24 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:
> 2009/1/24 Gregory Kohs <thekohser@gmail.com>:
>
>> Please, in your rush to judgment about the character of my "attacks"
>> here, take some time to actually explore and learn about United States
>> law. The Foundation could be in serious trouble here, and you're
>> spending an awful lot of energy railing against the messenger.
>
>
> You're a troll. You spend tremendous time and effort around the
> blogosphere posting attacks on Wikipedia and Wikimedia wherever you
> can. Your comments get deleted from the WMF blog when they're
> trolling, and it so happens they almost always are. You're *still*
> furiously sockpuppeting on en:wp as well.
>
> Given this, of course I'll assume you're trolling here as well,
> because, well, you are.
>
>
> - d.
>
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



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On Jan 24, 2009, at 2:41 PM, Alex wrote:

> I'm criticizing the switch from "Wikia leasing office space to WMF" to
> "Is the CIA evil?" I just responded to the most recent email in my
> inbox; I thought that would be more appropriate than responding to all
> 17 CIA/NSA-related emails. I was not criticizing you in particular.
>
> The topic of this thread is "Wikia leasing office space to WMF," that
> should be rather clear from the subject. And the topic of the list is
> "Wikimedia related issues." Its almost on topic for the list
> (MediaWiki
> is at least mentioned occasionally), its certainly not at all
> related to
> the topic of the thread.
>
> Brian wrote:
>> It was a clear factual error which I corrected. If you aren't going
>> to
>> criticize the original comment you have no basis for criticizing the
>> correction.
>> At any rate, what exactly is the topic of this thread, in your
>> opinion?
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Alex <mrzmanwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Brian wrote:
>>>>> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure
>>>> PHP is an interpreted language. Surely you wouldn't use someone
>>>> elses
>>> byte
>>>> code.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Platonides <Platonides@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>>>>>> Given that we know that NSA conducts massive illegal spying
>>>>>> operations,
>>>>> there
>>>>>> is possibility that selinux is altered in a fashion that will
>>>>>> make it
>>>>> easier
>>>>>> for NSA to spy on selinux' users. I don't know what are CIA's
>>>>> contributions
>>>>>> to MediaWiki, but unless it is trivial to review them, I would
>>>>>> not
>>> accept
>>>>>> them.
>>>>> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure.
>>>>> You could
>>>>> very well be suspicious about it. But we're talking about open
>>>>> source.
>>>>> They would be providing the changes, which are to be reviewed,
>>>>> like any
>>>>> other code, or perhaps even more, due to coming from the CIA.
>>>>>
>>>>> Take into account that CIA and NSA need good software, too. So
>>>>> if they
>>>>> add a backdoor, they would need to add it *and* at the same time
>>>>> make it
>>>>> easy to protect from it, as they wouldn't want their own systems
>>>>> spied
>>>>> by their own rootkit (and someone will end up forgetting to
>>>>> apply it).
>>>>>
>>>>> Instead, contributing good fixes, make everything easier.
>>>>>
>>>>> OTOH I encourage you to review selinux. That would make a great
>>>>> heading
>>>>> 'Nikola Smolenski discovers NSA backdoor on Linux code'
>>>>>
>>> This is getting rather off-topic, especially for this thread, and
>>> possibly for the list as well.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> foundation-l
>>
>
>
> --
> Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)

Yeah, agreed. While on-topic for the list, it's off-topic for this
thread. U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the development of
open source products, especially media wiki, however *IS* a topic I am
very much interested in seeing further discussion about; to that end I
would much rather fork this thread into a different title than see it
be killed totally.

-dan

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2009/1/25 Dan Rosenthal <swatjester@gmail.com>:

> Yeah, agreed. While on-topic for the list, it's off-topic for this
> thread. U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the development of
> open source products, especially media wiki, however *IS* a topic I am
> very much interested in seeing further discussion about; to that end I
> would much rather fork this thread into a different title than see it
> be killed totally.


Well, SELinux is widely-available and no-one's found the s3kr1t code
that funnels your keystrokes back to the NSA, and you bet they've
looked. The main reason people know about SELinux in practice is how
to switch it off, but anyway ...

Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and
enhancements? It'd be worth asking.


- d.

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That means I can clarify why my much hated factual correction was
appropriate. Here was the original statement:

> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure

Let's briefly suppose that there are binaries for mediawiki (which is false
- but suppose they only gave you byte code for mediawiki) and that the CIA
had "improved" mediawiki and given you one. There is a crucial difference
between the CIA giving you that binary and giving you source code - you can
see the diffs in the source code and you can see the diffs in the binaries,
but you cannot understand the diffs in the binaries.

How the poster I replied to does not consider this distinction relevant is
beyond me.

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Jan 24, 2009, at 2:41 PM, Alex wrote:
>
> > I'm criticizing the switch from "Wikia leasing office space to WMF" to
> > "Is the CIA evil?" I just responded to the most recent email in my
> > inbox; I thought that would be more appropriate than responding to all
> > 17 CIA/NSA-related emails. I was not criticizing you in particular.
> >
> > The topic of this thread is "Wikia leasing office space to WMF," that
> > should be rather clear from the subject. And the topic of the list is
> > "Wikimedia related issues." Its almost on topic for the list
> > (MediaWiki
> > is at least mentioned occasionally), its certainly not at all
> > related to
> > the topic of the thread.
> >
> > Brian wrote:
> >> It was a clear factual error which I corrected. If you aren't going
> >> to
> >> criticize the original comment you have no basis for criticizing the
> >> correction.
> >> At any rate, what exactly is the topic of this thread, in your
> >> opinion?
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Alex <mrzmanwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Brian wrote:
> >>>>> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure
> >>>> PHP is an interpreted language. Surely you wouldn't use someone
> >>>> elses
> >>> byte
> >>>> code.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Platonides <Platonides@gmail.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>>> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> >>>>>> Given that we know that NSA conducts massive illegal spying
> >>>>>> operations,
> >>>>> there
> >>>>>> is possibility that selinux is altered in a fashion that will
> >>>>>> make it
> >>>>> easier
> >>>>>> for NSA to spy on selinux' users. I don't know what are CIA's
> >>>>> contributions
> >>>>>> to MediaWiki, but unless it is trivial to review them, I would
> >>>>>> not
> >>> accept
> >>>>>> them.
> >>>>> If the CIA were to hand you a improved-mediawiki binary, sure.
> >>>>> You could
> >>>>> very well be suspicious about it. But we're talking about open
> >>>>> source.
> >>>>> They would be providing the changes, which are to be reviewed,
> >>>>> like any
> >>>>> other code, or perhaps even more, due to coming from the CIA.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Take into account that CIA and NSA need good software, too. So
> >>>>> if they
> >>>>> add a backdoor, they would need to add it *and* at the same time
> >>>>> make it
> >>>>> easy to protect from it, as they wouldn't want their own systems
> >>>>> spied
> >>>>> by their own rootkit (and someone will end up forgetting to
> >>>>> apply it).
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Instead, contributing good fixes, make everything easier.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> OTOH I encourage you to review selinux. That would make a great
> >>>>> heading
> >>>>> 'Nikola Smolenski discovers NSA backdoor on Linux code'
> >>>>>
> >>> This is getting rather off-topic, especially for this thread, and
> >>> possibly for the list as well.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> foundation-l mailing list
> >>> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/
> >> foundation-l
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
>
> Yeah, agreed. While on-topic for the list, it's off-topic for this
> thread. U.S. intelligence agency involvement in the development of
> open source products, especially media wiki, however *IS* a topic I am
> very much interested in seeing further discussion about; to that end I
> would much rather fork this thread into a different title than see it
> be killed totally.
>
> -dan
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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2009/1/25 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:

> Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and
> enhancements? It'd be worth asking.

We don't know much about what they have done but most of their
developments are more likely to be of interest to corporate wikis than
wikipedia.

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2009/1/25 geni <geniice@gmail.com>:
> 2009/1/25 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:

>> Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and
>> enhancements? It'd be worth asking.

> We don't know much about what they have done but most of their
> developments are more likely to be of interest to corporate wikis than
> wikipedia.


That'd still be damn fine for MediaWiki and its adoption.


- d.

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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 9:19 PM, David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/1/25 geni <geniice@gmail.com>:
> > 2009/1/25 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:
>
> >> Has anyone actually asked the CIA for MediaWiki extensions and
> >> enhancements? It'd be worth asking.
>
>
I suspect any significant changes they have made will not be made available
for release until long past the time they are useful to the MediaWiki
developers. Keep in mind that Intellipedia is designed to contain,
distribute in a limited manner and facilitate the analysis of classified
information. Details on how it does that are unlikely to be forthcoming,
right?

What I'd be most interested in is the improvements they've made to the many
en.wp articles included in Intellipedia.

Nathan


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This is a fairly silly topic, but I'll say two things:

1) If the CIA or NSA or whoever contributed source code, we would
review them like any other patches. Period. If they're committing
illegal activities or whatever, that's something for the courts to
rule on, and is no business of ours. Our goal (of MediaWiki
developers) is to make good software, nothing else. Someone working
for Microsoft was trying to get commit access to work on MSSQL a while
back, too, and we weren't going to hold it against him. As for adding
subtle "tell the NSA about Wikipedians' browsing habits" stuff, I very
much believe that anyone who would review the patches would be
competent enough to spot deliberately malicious or obfuscated source
code before committing it.

2) If the CIA or NSA were hypothetically distributing modified
MediaWiki binaries to third parties (PHP compilers do exist), that
would be illegal, since MediaWiki is only licensed under the GPL, and
so they would have no legal right to distribute binaries without full
accompanying source code. I'm sure they would immediately stop once
this was pointed out to them, and either stop distributing the stuff
outside their own organizations or provide the source code. Of course
if you believe that they're illegally infringing everyone's rights
left and right with no oversight, you might think they wouldn't stop
and we would all disappear in the middle of the night if we tried to
formally complain. I guess we'll see if it happens.

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2009/1/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com>:
> This is a fairly silly topic, but I'll say two things:
>
> 1) If the CIA or NSA or whoever contributed source code, we would
> review them like any other patches. Period. If they're committing
> illegal activities or whatever, that's something for the courts to
> rule on, and is no business of ours. Our goal (of MediaWiki
> developers) is to make good software, nothing else. Someone working
> for Microsoft was trying to get commit access to work on MSSQL a while
> back, too, and we weren't going to hold it against him. As for adding
> subtle "tell the NSA about Wikipedians' browsing habits" stuff, I very
> much believe that anyone who would review the patches would be
> competent enough to spot deliberately malicious or obfuscated source
> code before committing it.

I wouldn't bet on that but that wasn't the case being originally considered.

The case was the wikia case with the CIA replacing wikia. How close
would we be prepared to let WMF people get to the CIA. In theory as
long as the people in question don't have direct access to the WMF
servers there can't be any issues but that is somewhat questionable.


--
geni

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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:27 PM, geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wouldn't bet on that

No offense intended, but I'm curious: do you do any software development?

> The case was the wikia case with the CIA replacing wikia. How close
> would we be prepared to let WMF people get to the CIA. In theory as
> long as the people in question don't have direct access to the WMF
> servers there can't be any issues but that is somewhat questionable.

Personally I would see no problem with any degree of association
between Wikimedia and the CIA, as long as it didn't compromise
transparency or anything. Then again, I'm a neocon and have no
objections to the CIA whatsoever. I'm not sure if the CIA was meant
to be an example of an indisputably evil organization, because it
doesn't work for me.

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2009/1/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:27 PM, geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I wouldn't bet on that
>
> No offense intended, but I'm curious: do you do any software development?

No. But we know that accidental security issues slip through. Betting
you can beat the NSA's ability to hide deliberate flaws is not the
safest of options. That said I doubt they would take the risk.


> Personally I would see no problem with any degree of association
> between Wikimedia and the CIA, as long as it didn't compromise
> transparency or anything. Then again, I'm a neocon and have no
> objections to the CIA whatsoever. I'm not sure if the CIA was meant
> to be an example of an indisputably evil organization, because it
> doesn't work for me.

The CIA were meant as an example of an organisation who used mediawiki
on a large scale that some people would be less than happy having
dealings with.

We know that various governments are looking to influence wikipedia
content (heh we've also been told that there is at least one article
in wikipedia that one bit of the CIA thinks another bit of the CIA
shouldn't know about). For the moment I have no reason to believe any
of these attempts go beyond normal PR methods (oh with the exception
of part of the US government dealing with illegal drugs but I don't
think they realised what they were doing). We would like it to stay
that way. It is understandable that people would be concerned if an
organisation with influencing non US opinion as one of it's goals
started getting too close to the WMF.

However this hasn't happened so not too many worries.


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Mr. Plourde,

I appreciate your interest in this topic, but did you really have to
reply to ten different messages with individual one-line replies?

Love,

Your list administrator

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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 7:51 PM, geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/1/25 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com>
> >:
> > On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:27 PM, geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I wouldn't bet on that
> >
> > No offense intended, but I'm curious: do you do any software development?
>
> No. But we know that accidental security issues slip through. Betting
> you can beat the NSA's ability to hide deliberate flaws is not the
> safest of options. That said I doubt they would take the risk.
>
> geni
>

But the code is right there!

You'll see something like:

--safeMethodforDoingStuff():
++secretUnsafeCIAversionSHHHH():

--Falcorian
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Gregory Kohs responds:
>
> I am of the understanding that none of the members of the WMF Board or staff are
> related by blood or marriage to any of the owners or staff of Wikia,
> Inc.

Well, my understanding is otherwise, but I don't think that such
difference makes a difference here.


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*Kohser wrote:

I might be able to give a better answer if you could tell us whether
it is Taco Stand A or it is Taco Stand B in your analogy that is the
non-profit charity, funded with tax-deductible dollars, whose donors
probably fully expected that their money would NOT be used to pay rent
to the other, decidedly *for-profit* taco stand.*

---

Wow, really? Personally, I had no expectation that the Foundation would
decline
to do business with for profit entities when I made my donation. If they
need more
space, then they will probably have to pay to rent it (not paying presents
much
more serious problems, I'm sure you'd agree). Favoring a non-profit
landlord
makes no sense to me. All the other reasons cited in this thread for
favoring an average bid from Wikia over others apply. I do know that some
posters to this list have a strong aversion to anything that makes money,
but that sort of fanaticism is safely ignored.

Also, the Foundation has a lawyer. You are not a lawyer. It would be an
error to take your legal analysis as authoritative.

Nathan
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Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> You are beating on a dead horse. Mr. Vibber has brought forth a list of perfectly valid reasons why this space was taken. LET ME REITERATE THE COST OF REWIRING/RECONFIGURING SPACE IN CALIFORNIA. Why should a taco stand use a dry cleaning shop when it can get another taco shop?
>
What would people say if Coke and Pepsi had an agreement to share
bottling plants? That might make perfect business sense, but rumours of
a merger would be rampant. The food court area of a shopping mall would
not have two taco stands because each would see the other as unfair
competition. Given the kinds of chemicals used in dry cleaning, I'm
sure that health authorities would have some say if someone tried to mix
those two kinds of establishments.

Conflict of interest and the appearance of conflict of interest are very
different beasts. The former is easily overcome by objective criteria
and standards, as has been done in the present case. The latter is what
sets tongues to wagging, most often the tongues of the usual suspects.
Those of us who have a passing familiarity with the persons involved
soon recognize when Chicken Little is crying "wolf" again. Once the
alarm is raised merely being alone in the same room with the door closed
is enough to condemn Bill and Monica; all the protestations of innocence
will not overcome the closed door.

When the alarm is raised by the usual suspects there are as many
opposing suspects prone to unflattering comments about those who raised
the alarm. The danger is that when there is a real beast at the door it
will be too late when it is finally seen for what it is. That's what
makes appearances so insidious.

Ec

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