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ZhiHong Chua
ZhiHong Chua

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Riding on the Coattails of Open Source

Open Source, the spirit of sharing. Many things we use today are driven by open source. For one, did you know that VS Code's syntax highlighting feature was actually taken from an open-source repository CodeMirror? How much do you know about open source? Let's dive.

Disclaimer: This will be unstructured, take what you will.

Cybersecurity by Design

  • Disclaimer: Cybersecurity is never-ending, attackers can and will always find new ways to attack
  • (unless you create some self-morphing cyber defence systems that reset every few minutes, as seen in James Bond's movie Skyfall, but even then it got hacked lul)

James Bond, Skyfall cybersecurity

  • 80-20 rule. Defending against 80% most common threats is a good start, and maybe only 20% of effort is required.
  • To reduce that effort further, it may be good to consider it each step of the way.
  • Why?
  • Imagine if you only considered it in the last step of the development cycle...
It will cost you a lot to re-architect and re-code it.
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Be Honest

  • Attended with intention to expose myself to more diverse software work (eg. Backend / Cloud)
  • In the talk, organisers made a passing remark that quite accurately pointed out my (maybe others' too) motivations
  • People are probably easier to read than I thought?

ARPANet (TCP/IP/ports)

  • a defence project turned into something useful for the world
  • 4 minute summary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTNq4iCQC_w
  • TCP / IPv4 / IPv6 is provided today by the Internet Service Provider (ISP)
  • wow! just click connect to WiFi and you got it -- how much did they simplify it for users (i.e abstract it)

7-layer OSI model

All Devices run some Linux (OS)

Conclusion

Looks like there is a lot of useful things Open Source has been, and will continue to be a part of! What are some things that really excites you about open source?

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