Comment by 🐐 drh3xx
Re: "So, I am a committee member in an infosec-focused student…"
How about the irony of GrapheneOS only running on Pixel devices and three letter agencies operating a significant number of TOR nodes? Do most students consider irony entertaining?
Mar 17 · 7 weeks ago
7 Later Comments ↓
As far as fun stuff - we can thank printers for being so shitty. That helped start the free software foundation.
— https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
The summary is MIT had this printer that would jam, and they patched the code so the printer could alert people about the jam and somebody could go fix it. Otherwise it might be hours before people check their printouts only to find nothing is there.
Then they got a new printer, but the code to use it was closed source, so they couldn't add get it to send out alerts.
Richard Stallman got so pissed he started the free software foundation.
☕️ dce [OP] · Mar 17 at 13:13:
@jprjr That's excellent
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.
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.
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.
@lab6 while we're on the topic, I think this fiction story about it is kind of fun
Original Post
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?