Re: [Magazine…?] The Black Box

[Sylvia Sánchez]

I love the idea and it's about open software. But isn't specifically
Fedora.
I'm afraid it should be more for a personal blog rather than Fedora
Magazine.


My thoughts,
Sylvia



On Friday, 12 February 2016, Justin W. Flory <jflory7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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