I like to imagine the following nightmare scenario: we write a compiler from scratch that it can bootstrap itself (like this one, or Stage0), then we do the same bootstrapping process for hardware - eg. write a FPGA that for a simple CPU that can run the compiler and build other stuff, we do all of this and then start building reproducible builds of everything we use today - gcc, clang, Linux, etc. Eventually we build an 100% open source machine where to run everything. After this step is done, we start running in parallel all the tools and compare the outputs between the reproducible builds on the open source stack and semi-open one. And we discover slight differences ...
It's a near-future SF, written in 2009. Sort of a riff on Ken Thompson's classic Reflections on Trusting Trust [0]
(spoilers)
Some programmers spot a bug that after a lot of investigation seems to be a case of a rogue machine intelligence inserting its own code into software used by humans.
There was some children's (as in teen-targeted) book I read back in the late 90's or early 00's where the main informant was a dude who got a backdoor, via a supply chain attack, into the generic mouse drivers installed on almost every machine.
