Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

"We'll only ship proprietary unauditable software from huge companies with a history of backdoors." wasn't the Lenovo change we needed

— John Sullivan

"We as an industry need to fix this." is business-speak for "Magic stuff-fixing elves should come in at night while we sleep and fix this."

— Don Marti

I've found that hopping over on #samba-technical on Freenode is usually a good way to corner a team member to get a review on a small patch.

Although they might pretend to be an Eliza bot written in LISP if they're being lazy. Don't fall for playing the Turing Test game with them; they play to lose. :)

— Scott Lovenberg (thanks to Michael Wood)

to post comments

Sullivan's link not working?

Posted Mar 5, 2015 21:13 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd like to learn more about the context of John Sullivan's quote, but the link doesn't appear to be working (page never loads). Any other pointers to this topic? (Yes, I'm aware of the Lenovo Superfish Fiasco, but I want to learn more.)

Or, being a conspiracy theory "hobbyist", I propose that he rubbed a raw nerve of one of the "huge companies" he was disparaging, so they put the kibosh on his page... Something to consider... ;-)

Sullivan's link not working?

Posted Mar 6, 2015 15:26 UTC (Fri) by mmendez (subscriber, #81435) [Link]

Via google cache, though still not very informative :(

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vCy...

Sullivan's link not working?

Posted Mar 9, 2015 15:32 UTC (Mon) by johnsu01 (subscriber, #34757) [Link]

The context is just Lenovo announcing, as a solution to future Superfishes, that they will not ship any preinstalled add-on 3rd-party software. But of course they are still shipping Windows, which is proprietary and so unauditable, and has a history of backdoors.

Twitter as a frustrater

Posted Mar 13, 2015 21:16 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't use Twitter—pretty much my only interaction is a result of QsOTW. Similarly to pr1268, I want more context (or any context). This particularly applies to the Don Marti quote.

Is there any backtrace from a tweet?

Twitter as a frustrater

Posted Mar 14, 2015 1:27 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

There is, but I can't remember what to replace "status" in the URL with.

Twitter as a frustrater

Posted Mar 14, 2015 1:29 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah, nevermind. If it is in reply to something, the originals stack above. Seems this was just venting in response to some standard PR bullshit or some such.

Twitter as a frustrater

Posted Mar 14, 2015 1:35 UTC (Sat) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> Is there any backtrace from a tweet?

When the tweet is a reply, there's a link in the lower right corner ("Ver conversa" in pt-BR, don't know what's its label in other languages). Unfortunately, the one linked in this QoTW isn't a reply, the tweets in his timeline around this one are about other subjects, and there's no hashtag, so the context is probably "random thought that popped on my mind".