2015-10-12 Commented on an article about the security of open vs. closed source in freiesMagazin 2015-10. [0] Besides two smaller notes, the main reason I commented was that I was reminded of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture ``Reflections on Trusting Trust''. [1] It shows how to build a compiler that inserts backdoors into sane code it compiles, and even generates a fresh evil compiler if it compiles a sane version of it's own source code. The paper is short and easy to read. While reading some background, I came across this explanation by the Turing Award selection committee for why Thompson and Ritchie deserved this award: The success of the UNIX system stems from its tasteful selection of a few key ideas and their elegant imple- mentation. The model of the Unix system has led a gen- eration of software designers to new ways of thinking about programming. The genius of the Unix system is its framework, which enables programmers to stand on the work of others. These words just nail it to the point! [0] http://www.freiesmagazin.de/20151011-oktoberausgabe- erschienen [1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke