Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's activities and surveillance programs have, as expected, shaken user confidence, as the world now knows that the NSA has the ability to penetrate every electronic device, the internet, and global communications.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the software and services we use on the internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals can spy on us without our knowledge”.
JavaScript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich said in a blog post that the NSA not only uses high-tech exploits to monitor users, but also inserts secret backdoors into legitimate software.
“For effective protection we must use only open source software, and we must not blindly trust any software vendor offering products that are not open source”, emphasized Brendan.
“Mozilla has a significant advantage over all other browser manufacturers. Our products are truly open source”. This means that the source code is available to everyone and anyone can examine and access it.
Conversely, Microsoft Internet Explorer is a fully closed-source software while Safari and Chrome browsers use open-source rendering engines or WebKits, but they are not yet fully open-source, as they contain significant closed-source components.
