The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth (MITTechnology Review)

Posted Jul 14, 2022 18:00 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
Parent article: The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth (MIT Technology Review)

Hmm... So, this will make more "lists" I can be on that I have no ability to contest? Now, the United States has 'no-fly' lists, will we soon have a 'no-code' list? And will the Pentagon decide if a developer can submit code to the Kernel, rather than the Kernel devs?

Of course, they probably won't address one of the biggest threats to 'open source code', namely, large corporations and governments who add "negative and destructive" friction onto individuals who are participating, or would like to participate, in Open Source development and communities. Can forcing engineers to run a locked-down Windows environment for 8-10 hours a day be seen as such a threat? ;) Call the Pentagon! :D

The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth (MITTechnology Review)

Posted Jul 17, 2022 5:41 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

In 2019, the US Air Force announced that it had just figured out how to launch a nuclear missile without using 8-inch floppy disks. My assumption, therefore, is that the word "understand" in the headline is, perhaps, an exaggeration, and the Pentagon actually just wants to verify that their dependencies are not full of random crap. Which is a legitimate concern, because everyone's dependencies seem to be full of random crap these days. They're couching it in terms of "threats" because that is how you get the US military to sit up and pay attention to you, not necessarily because they actually plan to put individual humans on a list or anything of that nature. I'm also rather skeptical that they'll get anything useful out of their buzzword bingo of machine learning keywords, but at least it's slightly less dumb than web3.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-flo...