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The Other Players Who Helped (Almost) Make the World’s Biggest Backdoor Hack
(theintercept.com)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Ken Thompson talked about this back in 1984, his talk/article "Reflections on trusting trust" is a short but scary read.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
In the end, what can we trust?
Ultimately, nothing, unless you built everything yourself from scratch, just about from the silicon up.
Everything is risk management.