That doesnt change anything about my original point. They are conflicting missions, whether you add certain or not.

And no matter what you call it, backdooring ghidra defeats the point of both, it means no one will use it, which allows malware to run rampant. (Ghidra was released during the height of the cryptolocker craze, it allowed reversing those crypto lockers to be done by anyone, effectively neutering many of them).

And when it gets caught its immediately attributable to the malware division, which they dont want either.

There is zero point backdooring ghidra. Now XZ? *sshole? Thats the level of sophisticated backdoor I would expect from the NSA.

o7 what hero.

Only true if they can abuse the backdoor, if its tied to NSA infrastructure (which a competent backdoor would be), they couldn't use it. There is also precedence, the Germans didnt hesitate to publicise that Angela Merkel's phone was hacked, they could have used the malware to feed false information instead. Stuxnet was exposed to embarrass the US/Israel.

Cyber security companies would also have no qualms about publicising it. Finding a NSA backdoor would put them on the map, and they have no use for a backdoor.

Even if we take your definitions, they are still conflicting.

Attacking humans means developing malware.

Defending capital means protecting that capital from others malware.

If either of them do their job too well, the other will be failed. That is by definition conflicting.

Go to any cyber security conference. Check out the CTF teams, Ghidra is used everywhere.

Can you prove that there is a backdoor? Remember that it is freely available, and if China, Russia, NK or any other nation state could find a backdoor, they would be shouting it from the rooftops to shame the US.

I dont doubt that the NSA could have seeded a backdoor in an open source project, but I very much doubt they would sign their name to it...

Dont forget the instance operators who actually keep the servers running. Donations keep instances up.

Just generally it waffled on, and didnt get to a point.

That makes this a useful comparison, not a verdict

Thats the "its not X, its Y" pattern.

Not so fast.

LLM writing, just infuriating to read.

That does sound beginner friendly. I'll have a play with that sometime.

I dont know what you mean by that. Do you mean that the NSA would leave a bug in accidentally? Or intentionally?

Accidentally is definitely plausible, they are only human after all.

Intentionally would be incredibly stupid. The offensive side of the NSA spends billions developing malware that can't be easily found and attributed to them. Inserting one of those malwares into a piece of software they have publically claimed ownership off completely defeats the point. If they wanted to backdoor an open source software, why wouldn't they do it anonymously...

Ghidra is used by the best and brightest malware inspectors. If it was backdoored, it would have been discovered almost immediately.

The NSA has two conflicting missions, one is to hack everyone, and the other is to protect American networks and interests. Ghidra is from the later, its goal was to make malware analysis cheap and accessible so that more people can investigate and defeat malware.

I get that, and its a pretty strong selling point, but I dont think that makes them beginner friendly.

Dunno, pretty sure there are multiple top positions?

Kama Sutra.

I have no experience with immutable distros, but aren't they pretty config file heavy? Are they that nice to operate as a brand new user?

Linux is a spectrum, from super hard to very easy. Sounds like you hit a not-easy one.

If you want an easy time, stick with the major distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc), and avoid any complex setups. Use that for a while to get familiarity, and then build up from there.

You know what, if meta employees are jerking off to stolen porn, thats probably better for humanity than if they were doing their actual jobs. Jerk away you degenerates!

On the AI for fixing up non-native text, I would 100% prefer that people write in their native language or broken English and leave the translation to me. Even the slightest wiff of LLMisms are enough to completely turn me off. Just dont do it.

Even if it isn't written by AI, it's certainly written by someone with very little experience on the subject.

Which is worse, because its polluting up the search results. Infuriating.

Unreadable AI slop.

Did the author actually test 5v into the microcontroller? The signal values might be intended to be 3.3v, but I have a bunch of esp32 boards reading 5v signals on their pins, and they have been doing that for years now. At the time I did some research and found posts from the espressif designer that claimed that the pins were okay with 5v.