Leftovers: OSS
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The legacy of Pieter Hintjens
When I watched Chad Fowler’s GOTO Amsterdam 2014 Keynote it got me thinking about what our aims should be in life.
He mentions Joel Spolsky’s post from 2001: Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It, and says software typically only lasts five years so rarely gets to be very good.
He asks, what does it take create legacy software with a positive meaning, that is software so good that you are fondly remembered for it for many years to come.
How many very famous developers, or ex-developers are there in the world. You may disagree, but I would argue that Bill Gates is the only living person with worldwide fame partly associated with writing code.
Only big company CEOs have any chance of becoming a household name. Even Sir Tim Berners Lee has only about half as many Twitter followers as Grumpy Cat.
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AT&T Will Launch ECOMP Into Open Source in 2017
A top AT&T executive said the company will launch its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform into open source by the first quarter of 2017. And the Linux Foundation will be the host of the open source project.
In a blog post, Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design, said that after the company developed ECOMP, it received a tremendous amount of feedback from service providers and virtual network function (VNF) providers that wanted more details about the platform. He also said the companies wanted AT&T to publicly state that it was going to open source the project.
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What to Expect from OSCON London 2016
It’s autumn/fall technology conference season… but you already knew that, so what’s coming next? O’Reilly’s OSCON event is just around the corner and the conference itself has seen the launch of many new projects from OpenOffice.org to OpenStack.
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8 Years Later: Saeed Malekpour Is Still In An Iranian Prison Simply For Writing Open Source Software
We talk a great deal on Techdirt about the importance of free speech alongside the importance of not damning technological tools for the way third parties choose to use them. These matters can delve into minutiae in the American and Western forms of this conversation, with discussions about Section 230 protections and the like. But in other parts of the world, the conversation is much different.
Back in 2008 in Iran, for instance, the government there elected to imprison a Canadian resident of Iranian lineage, initially under a death sentence, but later commuting that sentence to mere life imprisonment. His crime? Saeed Malekpour created some open source code for sharing photos on the internet that others within Iran used for pornography.
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Why Implanted Medical Devices Should Have Open Source Code
As medical implants become more common, sophisticated and versatile, understanding the code that runs them is vital. A pacemaker or insulin-releasing implant can be lifesaving, but they are also vulnerable not just to malicious attacks, but also to faulty code. For commercial reasons, companies have been reluctant to open up their code to researchers. But with lives at stake, we need to be allowed to take a peek under the hood.
Over the past few years several researchers have revealed lethal vulnerabilities in the code that runs some medical implants. The late Barnaby Jack, for example, showed that pacemakers could be “hacked” to deliver lethal electric shocks. Jay Radcliffe demonstrated a way of wirelessly making an implanted insulin pump deliver a lethal dose of insulin.
But “bugs” in the code are also an issue. Researcher Marie Moe recently discovered this first-hand, when her Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) unexpectedly went into “safe mode”. This caused her heart rate to drop by half, with drastic consequences.
It took months for Moe to figure out what went wrong with her implant, and this was made harder because the code running in the ICD was proprietary, or closed-source. The reason? Reverse-engineering closed-source code is a crime under various laws, including the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. It is a violation of copyright, theft of intellectual property, and may be an infringement of patent law.
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Google releases open-source Cartographer 3D mapping library
Google has released open-sourced Cartographer, a real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) library in 2D and 3D with ROS (Robot Operating System) support. This technology which works with the open source ROS can be used by developers for many things, such as robots, drones and self-driving cars.
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Reverse lookups in GNS
DNS allows to resolve the name of an IP address. This is sometimes called "reverse lookup". In fact, it is actually "normal" resolution of a PTR record. The name of such a record would be, for example, 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa. The .arpa TLD is managed by IANA.
This blogpost is meant to spread ideas that have been exchanged via private email and might be interesting for a broader audience. If you feel like you have useful comments, don't hesitate to do so.
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California launches nation's first state data portal built on open source
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