Stallman Was Right About Back Doors
Published yesterday: Envy is the #1 Enemy of Richard Stallman | Life is Sweeter When Less Means More
Published today: When it Comes to Firmware, the FSF and Its Founder RMS Won the Argument (But Not the Fight, Yet)
Dr. Stallman is no hero. He is a friend. He is an ally. Of you, not me... of all of us.
See, Stallman doesn't hoard money and never cared much about money. He doesn't suck up to billionaires and his words don't attempt to appease large, powerful corporations. Money doesn't control him. He only needed enough money to get by and do his advocacy. He could code, advise others on code, and generally guide a collective of coders ("hackers") towards some unified goal, following a common path.
I had some conversations with Dr. Stallman about security and back doors. We had some of these discussions a very long time ago and some got published in TechBytes. That was well before the Edward Snowden leaks (2013).
When it comes to firmware, Dr. Stallman correctly predicted what could happen and would, indeed, happen. Some of the Snowden leaks, for example, revealed how device drivers and firmware (some embedded inside peripherals) could be exploited for back-doors, covert surveillance.
When there is temptation to do something naughty and the prospects of getting caught are low (or the cost of backlash relatively low), there's a high probability it'll get done, eventually. Some HP drivers turned out to be keyloggers. It was no accident. How many similarly mischievous things have not been caught/unearthed yet?
Make fun of Richard Stallman all you want ("oh, he's fat!" "I don't like his voice!" "He looked at me funny!), but he's usually right. When somebody is quite consistently right there is a tendency not to attempt to rebuke and debunk and instead go ad hominem. █