[Magazine…?] The Black Box

[Justin W. Flory]

Hi all,

This email is about a pitch idea I have, but I'm looking at identifying 
if the Fedora Magazine is the best audience for it, or if I should 
consider an alternative publishing source like OSDC.

The same student at the Rochester Institute of Technology who designed 
the laser interface software in the laser light show article a couple of 
months back also has another awesome project... introducing the Black Box.

He designed this for one of the courses in RIT's FOSS minor. The Black 
Box is a mysterious black box! What does it do? You don't know. It's 
locked. It's a mysterious black box. What the presenter will then tell 
you is that it's a service that offers a free encryption service. 
However, you can't know how it works. That is not allowed.

To make a longer (and very hilarious) story short, the presenter then 
shows you how the encryption method is actually backdoored and is 
arbitrary. But… what is inside the Black Box? After it is unlocked, it 
is revealed that the insides actually contain a small sample of 
radioactive material and a Geiger counter! The Black Box uses an 
open-source kernel module to generate a random number from the read of 
the Geiger counter. I was able to see it presented it live, and it was 
quite the show!

The lesson behind the Black Box is to show how with proprietary 
software, you don't actually know what's going on "behind closed doors". 
It's a very engaging, exciting, and maybe ever so slightly dangerous 
project that I think is a fantastic example of breaking down the 
difference between open and closed software development.

Links to his project are below:

     http://brendan-w.com/rng

     https://github.com/brendan-w/kRad

So, as mentioned earlier, my question is whether or not this would be 
appropriate for the Magazine. It doesn't have a specific tie into 
Fedora, which is why I'm wondering if it's relevant enough for us.

Curious to know your thoughts! Thanks.

-- 
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7 at gmail.com

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