Jon Ericson
TaggartI see it's once again time to post this: https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives
Jon Ericson
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- 129 Posts
Communities Manager at the OpenSSL Foundation.
The big deal for OpenSSL 4.0 is that it will remove features. This is always a risk for low-level libraries because it means people might see build failures with the latest version and just give up on upgrading. But extra complexity, especially for software designed to secure data and network connections, comes at a cost. Removing code that ought not be used anymore is a feature.
The video from my @fosdem talk, How the OpenSSL community was built on Heartbleed, is now up! I had a great time presenting it and the questions I got in the session were interesting. Happy to answer (or at least ponder) and questions you might have here.
Strange what brings me out of lurk mode: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434509/can-we-not-do-over-a-year-ago-please/438041#438041
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/115852927913242505
One eye-opening thing I discovered when I started working at Stack Overflow was how many junk questions were filtered out automatically by the software. Then even more questions are rejected by the community. Finally questions are just left unanswered, which might be the most discouraging thing of all. The "Optimizing for pearls" philosophy suggests that aggressive filtering of questions encourages great answers.
And yet, when answer rates started to fall off there didn't seem to be much concern either in the community or at the company. Ultimately the culture of Stack Overflow assumed questions would continue flooding in. Now they are not and that means fewer great answers.
I'm going to speak at FOSDEM about how the biggest disaster to hit OpenSSL revived the community. We don't wish for calamity but it often clarifies latent problems in a system.
It appears my favorite source for the shrug emoticon has gone out of business. (See the Wayback Machine for it's full glory.) I'm proud to offer my cheap knockoff alternative: https://jlericson.com/shrug
In my State of the OpenSSL Community talk, I compared the popularity of Taylor Swift when measured by Google search trends to Heartbleed. I did not know about this @SwiftOnSecurity joke or I would have included it in my slides. Next time!
The screenshot is from SecMeme and my talk can be found on YouTube.
I gave a talk about the state of the OpenSSL community. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the history of an often unseen open source project that allows everyone to communicate over the internet without worrying that our private data will be intercepted.
OpenSSL Conference 2025 - Jon Ericson - State of the OpenSSL Community as of 3.6
ClemensHad a lovely evening while playing an experimental board game on post-quantum #cryptography with people from Tampere University, the OpenSSL Foundation and Cybernetica.
A fitting end for the 2025 #OpenSSL Conference.
A fitting end for the 2025 #OpenSSL Conference.
