jym@AI.MIT.EDU (Jym Dyer) (01/26/91)
___
__ Think how silly this rumor is. GNU Emacs is distributed with
_ source. If there was a backdoor, it would be discovered right
away.
___
__ There is no greater security than having the source!
_ <_Jym_>worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (01/30/91)
From: jym@AI.MIT.EDU (Jym Dyer) Think how silly this rumor is. GNU Emacs is distributed with source. If there was a backdoor, it would be discovered right away. There is no greater security than having the source! Oh, please! This would be true only if all properties of a program could be determined easily by looking at the source. In computability theory there is a theorem that says that *no* interesting property of a program can always be determined by looking at the source. In reality, the existence of bugs shows that nothing can be determined easily by looking at the source. Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com -- You CAN be what you WON'T! -- "Bob"
rms@AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) (02/05/91)
It's true that you can never be sure a program as big as Emacs is correct. (Not with today's technology, at least.) However, there has never been a backdoor in Emacs, that I know of; what The Cuckoo's Egg says about this is misleading. LBL created a backdoor by making movemail setuid root. movemail at that time wasn't designed for such use. (Now it is--just in case.)