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(a)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(a)gmail.com