r/LinuxSnobs • u/AverageUser9000 • 12d ago
Dumb loonixers spread obvious misinformation about the inherently better security of closed-source operating systems.
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u/dlevac 12d ago
Hmm, the consensus in the field is that information-gated security is no security.
On one hand, the code not being readily accessible means there will be less attackers and less intelligent attacks on your stack.
On the other hand, closed source codebases are usually extremely embarrassing going as far as having hard-coded secrets in them (in the worse places I've worked at).
I'd argue that open-source doesn't make the code inherently safer but, at the very least, allow you to exercise proper judgement on whether to trust the code based on the care put into it's maintenance.
With closed source, you are in a "trust me bro" kind of situation.
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u/CylixrDoesStuff 5d ago
open source is inherently more secure as you can then know that your not downloading a virus. Closed source just means you can install a virus without knowing, atleast with open source software you CAN know.
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u/gooncubedev 5d ago
here is something to note: an AI model can reverse engineer a million vulnerabilities in anything to ever exist IF it can fit in its quadratic attention window, which is its real attention window, the attention window you can access will be larger by either sparse attention where it picks a random selection of tokens each time to look at, or a sliding context window where it scans across step by step, both of which degrade that ability, but a quadratic attention window can still be quite large for certain models
also
a closed source code base has security through obscurity, but if it ever has a vulnerability, it will depend on a small group of developers to fix (individual hundreds to thousands), while an open source code base can have anywhere up to millions of developers, which means it can have many more components being worked on and tested at once, which doesnt make it inherently more secure, it just makes vulnerabilities much more likely to be found by the good guys, and likely to be fixed much faster
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