NSA "helped" MS design Windows 7... do they help Linux too?

[Lobster]

I have found it necessary to use an extravagantly-patched gcc 4.4.3

Many thanks for keeping us informed.
What can be done with these exploits and what should Puppy be doing?

Some interesting forces at work.

Part of the push to Cloud computing will be on how secure it is.
In fact data will be open to those with access to the major servers.

Personally I won't be running OpenBSD for a level of security I don't need.
Or using any of these tips (some are quite fun)
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=359

However one day my secret stock of sardines
might need protecting . . .

Puppy Linux
Vigilant

[Sit Heel Speak]

What can be done with these exploits and what should Puppy be doing?

Dunno. Within the 238 separate modules in the gnome build sequence there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of these "invalid conversions," though, I noticed, the number was decreasing every time I built gnome (about eight times; it takes a week each time)...I presume because jhbuild is constantly comparing the local codebase with fresh source from git, and knowledge of proper coding practice for gcc-4.4+libc.so.6-2.10 is still steadily percolating into the individual coding repertoires of the gnome-module developer community. I was not watching the make on every single module for instances of an invalid conversion, because, on most of the modules, the compile breezes right through. On a few, -Werror is set, so the compile halts, but on most of these, manually editing the makefile to remove the -Werror switch is all it takes to get the compile to finish.

The first module in the gnome build sequence on which removing -Werror does not work to get the compile to succeed, is perl-net-dbus, followed in rapid succession by a cluster of non-finishers. This roadblock was what goaded me to google around, and presently chance upon the two posts linked above.

But it's really over my head at this point. Are all these instances of "invalid conversion" just innocent mistakes, i.e. never ascribe to Tonya Harding what is sufficiently explained by Lindsey Lohan, or is gnome in reality a hidden-in-plain-sight spooks' banquet of backdoor invocation opportunities? To answer that question, one would need to trace back every instance of a wrongly-returned constant type. Something which I am not quite qualified for, nor do I have the time.

The author of the second post cited above, probably knows the answer. The author of the 20100211 lookaside cache patch-set to Fedora gcc-4.4.3, probably could tell you, too. And probably a thousand others.

Not being so expert, I exercize caution. I don't Facebook, I don't Twitter, I only rarely Skype, I bank face-to-face with a live banker at my local credit union. Except for purchasing gasoline I do not use credit cards, only debit, and keep the account balances small. I keep my shrine to Bellatrix LeStrange, my Paul McCartney brownie recipes, and that map I won at poker from Mel Fisher, all on encrypted sticks. My addresses, passwords, and phone numbers are all still in a leather-bound pocket notebook given me by my grandma, thirty-eight years ago.

[Aitch]

For those who stayed focused on the 'how to secure my puppy box', I suggest looking, even if only briefly, at the NSA's 'lawful spying' data html & pdf's on the link provided by nooby

Spot on, nooby

Example: Lawful Intercepts, attached

Amplifies my information on many unreferenced suspicions, thanks

Aitch

[Lobster]

Not being so expert, I exercize caution.

A valid approach. I throw caution to the wind, use twitter, order things online and generally use all the services available.
Being hacked would be a form of social interactions for me

I keep my shrine to Bellatrix LeStrange

Secret 'Death Eater' eh?
I keep my muggle shrine here . . .
http://tmxxine.com/s4/

Maybe we can create some Puppy 'honey pot'
servers open for our erstwhile spooks, hackers
and malware practitioners?

[Sit Heel Speak]

...Secret 'Death Eater' eh?

Heh...just the first example that popped into mind. Yesterday I happened to see this photo gallery on the actress who plays her, Helena Carter. Just before posting that...I had woken up from a nap...from a dream, just before waking. I was in a small office; actresses were being sent in to me, one at a time, to read an audition line. Four or five walked in, they were only so-so, and then the last one was Ms. Carter in her wig and glasses. She stood all straight and jiggly, put her left wrist to her forehead palm out, looked up and to the left, and in a voluptuous comic despair belted out:

Apocalyse, calamity, and collapse!
Glibbon, oh glibbon, and glibbon again!

...and then I woke up. The most embarrassing part of this is, "glibbon" is not a real word. Although I see that someone has tried to pass it off as a Scrabble word meaning "a smart-assed primate."

[Aitch]

LOL Great dream, SHS

Haven't had one that good in ages

Aitch

[out_fisherman]

Back long ago, I worked for a company that made
"supercomputers", as they were called then. Some of
us on the test floor wondered what the Govt. could
possibly want with all this computer power. Then in the
early '90s I learned of a program called the 'eschelon
project' - a joint venture between the US, UK, and Australia
to intercept, 'listen to', and flag (based on software) any
transmission containing certain 'code-words', like 'bomb;,
'anthrax', etc. Given the secrecy used to ship these systems,
I came to believe it.......there were times we actually had
2 trucks leave the loading dock, but only one contained
the actual system. The other went the opposite direction -
Now, why make such effort to decieve satellites if there
was nothing to hide??? At one point in my naive early life,
I put my utmost trust in my govt. But, after 'being there'
and witnessing this.......WTF ???

[Sit Heel Speak]

The Pentagon's Cyber Command was inaugurated last year, headed by the then-Director of the National Security Agency:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/penta ... ort-meade/

And, the U.S. government is now entertaining bids to build a new 1-million-square-foot data center in Utah:
http://www.standard.net/topics/business ... enter-utah

It is a reasonably sure bet that, between Echelon and Tempest and similar programs, your government is already intercepting and archiving everything you download or transmit online. There is probably a copy being forwarded to Israel, too.

Charlie Smith, proprietor of http://www.softwar.net/, stated in interview recently, on the Jeff Rense show, that the phased-array radars on the F-22 Raptor and EA-18 Growler aircraft are capable of targeting individual computers. They can, he says, not only surveill screen content and keyboard strokes, and blow up the mainboard with a focussed pulse, but even can implant content with to-the-bit accuracy in both memory and on storage media, including the implanting of a virus in the running in-memory operating system.

[Flash]

From here:

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

If such an undetectable bug could make a car accelerate unintentionally, imagine the damage it could do to an automaker's competitor.

[out_fisherman]

Now, wait a minute S-H-S -

While I admit they might have great capabilities, I'm still
not buying into the 'tin-hat' stuff....yes, the "on-star"
stuff is real ( I remember hearing about '150+ cadillacs'
suddenly shutting down, back around 1994, in SE US....) .
However, what you are talking about, if it is true, means I
need to move up my timescale for my 'end-of-days shelter'.
and soon! .......

[Q5sys]

I've seen some of the Tin Foil Hat crowd in the US raving that MS works with the NSA, and left backdoors in Windows so the NSA could snoop on their computers. All I could say was "You wish you were important enough that anyone would bother to snoop on your machine! There are only so many people in the US government intelligence services that do that, and they all have much better uses of their time, thank you."

I agree with you 100%, some people have massive delusions of granduire when it comes to the government being after them. This whole thing reminds me of when the NSA was involved in DES. People swore left and right that the NSA introduced a backdoor into it. Until a few years later when Differential Cryptanalysis was discovered outside the agency and everyone went 'hey wow, the changes the NSA made to IBM's Lucifer cypher actually made DES impervious to this new attack we didnt know about before because we just discovered it.'

FYI, im not old enough to have been around when DES was released, but ive read enough stuff about it and what experts in the security field at the time said.

As for what the gov is doing now... I think they are far more interested in data mining and archiving so 'if' you become an issue they have enough to bury you. I seriously doubt they care about stealing my mothers chocolate chip cookie recipe that she keeps on her computer. But then again... Its the best cookie recipe in the world...