[machinelabo]

Huh? That's why we have regulations. Every country has one, in the US it is the FDA.

Please don't try to shoehorn open source principles everywhere in life. It becomes a chore and a burden for a common citizen to verify the hazards of Baked Beans. Citizens offload this to a regulatory agency. You don't have the time to verify a fucking can of baked beans like a million other things in life.

If you buy a measuring tape, do you ask for a NIST certificate? Where does the chain of trust end? Somewhere at the measurement standards in the pyramid of trust. Your personal role in this chain ends at the brand name "STANLEY", because you trust them to make a measuring tape that measures within specified tolerance.

The whole movement around "I don't trust unless the information is freely available" is a pipe dream. It grinds the society to a halt.

I urge you to look around 99% things in life that you just blindly trust. We need better mechanisms for building trust than "Don't trust unless verified". It is applicable in high risk situations, but the society pays a huge price for such an inefficient way to live.

[hutzlibu]

How do you know what things I trust blindly?

But I agree, it is not efficient to question everything. I do not want to question everything! But I do know enough, to question a lot of things.

Secrecy just allows bad things to stay hidden.

If the default would be openness, then people who do bad things would hesitate more, as it would be easier to detect those things, don't you think?

Whether it be government, food production or software.

[machinelabo]

I think one common theme we both can agree is that open available data only helps. It doesn't take away from anything. For those who want to verify, they can. They can look up FDA reports and inspection results.

Transparency builds trust overtime.

[hutzlibu]

"Transparency builds trust overtime."

Yep. This is what I mean.

I come from east germany, a former post sowjet state. A state which was build on blind trust on the state and no way for the common person to verify anything (or even dare to question anything openly). And big surprise: lots of dark things happened regulary.

Now things are still far from perfect in my opinion, but much, much better. And I think they can still improve a lot with even more transparency, because there are still lots of dark things happening behind closed doors. We probably just disagree on the degree of those things.

[tsimionescu]

> A state which was build on blind trust on the state

The former Soviet states and other USSR satellites were not built on trust, they were built on force. You had to act like you trusted the state to avoid the repressive force of the state.

But people did not trust the state at all, much more so than in today's world. Everyone assumed their telephones were listened to. Everyone assumed that the walls had ears. The lies of the state were often obvious, and often discussed with very close friends and close family, and anything that wasn't an obvious lie was thus considered a likely lie anyway.

[hutzlibu]

Yeah well, sure. Thats one ofmthe reasons, why I am highly sceptical when I have to trust authority blindly. Which goes back to the main point. I cannot really trust a closed encryption source, when I assume they are infiltrated by (western) intelligence agencies. And those agencies I do not trust. And I believe with the open information about them, rightfully so, even if they are not (yet) on par with the Stasi or KGB.

[Spooky23]

Fear and trust are not the same.