Comment by ☕️ dce

Re: "So, I am a committee member in an infosec-focused student…"

In: u/dce

@jprjr That's excellent

☕️ dce [OP]

Mar 17 · 7 weeks ago

5 Later Comments ↓

🎲 lab6 · Mar 17 at 14:05:

In our world of increasingly complex and opaque supply chains, Ken Thompson’s Reflections On Trusting Trust has never been more relevant:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

Not entertaining in a fun sense, but perhaps an entertaining thought experiment about how even fully open source code sometimes isn’t enough.

🗡️ The_Jackal · Mar 17 at 15:52:

@drh3xx At the very least, graphene might be coming to Motorola phones. It is unfortunate that that does seem to be the case with tor, but it does look like it can still help 'buy time' or throw an adversary off a little, at least.

🎮 jprjr · Mar 17 at 16:39:

I guess you could work in how themes from Brave New World are basically happening today and how to break out.

I feel like there's parallels to endless scrolling and soma. Or... something.

I'll be honest I've not read the novel in a while but - it often feels like we're being tricked into complacency and I think that was a theme of the book.

🚀 stack · Mar 17 at 19:51:

I've been fascinated by the interactions of free software with the corporate world. Also the sociological interactions with funding entities and influence of political and demographic pressures.

🐑 zipsegv · Mar 22 at 17:44:

@lab6 while we're on the topic, I think this fiction story about it is kind of fun

— Coding Machines

Original Post

☕️ dce

So, I am a committee member in an infosec-focused student society, and I am going to be doing a talk next Wednesday. This is to be called "Brave GNU World" and (as the name suggests) it's about FOSS and the free software movement. We've had some great talks recently, and I want this to be engaging (my previous attempts have been successful). I plan to focus on some of the more entertaining details of FOSS, while also conveying the whole picture. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?

💬 9 comments · Mar 17 · 7 weeks ago