On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 1:03 AM, Bill Oliver <vendor@billoblog.com> wrote:

Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been a variant of linux developed for areas with intrusive government surveillance. I recently noticed that the government of Venezuela has a government-developed distro (Canaima); think there's some back doors in that? One would think that there would be a movement to provide anti-governmental variants.

I lived in Venezuela for over 30 years until about 6 months ago, so I know a few of the people involved in the Canaima distro. AFAIK it's basically Debian with a few localization changes. The reason for its development is largely political but I seriously doubt that it has deliberate backdoors (the people I know would not be party to that), though of course you can never be sure. Most users even within the government are still on Windows, in fact at least until recently some government websites still only worked properly with Internet Exploder :-)

poc