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AFTER THE DISCOVERY of Heartbleed earlier this month, a flaw in OpenSSL which affected two-thirds of the web, a number of major tech companies are teaming up to help prevent a similar situation from happening again.
The Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was formed by the Linux Foundation, is a new project which will fund open source projects that are critical for core computing and internet functions.
One of the problems it will address is how a large number of crucial open source software projects are under-funded and under-resourced. OpenSSL, which is used by two-thirds of the web, has only received $2,000 per year in donations despite playing a major role in web encryption.
Twelve companies have backed the initiative including Dell, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Intel, Amazon Web Services, HP, and IBM. Each company have each pledged $100,000 a year over the next three years to the initiative, meaning it has $3.6 million to pledge to projects during this period.
Support from the initiative will include funding for fellowships for key developers to work full-time on open source projects, security audits, computing and test infrastructure, travel, face-to-face meeting coordination and other support.
Funds will be administered by The Linux Foundation and a steering group comprised of backers of the project as well as key open source developers and other industry stakeholders.
The first project under consideration to receive funds from the initiative will be OpenSSL, the encryption tool at the centre of Heartbleed, and will consider other open source projects over time.
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Where’s Flesh Gordon?
Ha – that was a classic.
My dad rented it out for me and my brother when we were kids…. he thought it was flash gorden 2 lol
Good article. A lot of work. I’ll be lining up bittorent before I go to work tonight.
The Star Wars prequels are some of the sh*ttest films ever made. Can anyone quote a character from them? I bet you can’t, because they have some of the worst convoluted writing ever.
I’ll agree with you on the first two (aimed at kids to sell toys) but the third one was probably the best of all the films.
Have you forgotten about jar jar?
“May the force be with you”
3rd film was the worst of them.
Are we alone in the universe? One of those great questions. I think it was Stephen Hawkins who said it it both equally terrifying to think we either are alone or not.
The universe is full of intelligent life. They are just too intelligent to come here. Arthur C Clarke
No Wall-e? I think that will come to be seen as a real inspiration to kids to get into science.
Sandra Bullock defies gravity
‘Moon’ should have been given more attention, definitely over Sunshine for 2000s. Sam Rockwell is an amazing actor!
70s a golden generation for the genre. I thought moon was a good story and more recently oblivion looked good on the silver screen.
I thought Dune was terrible. Even Captain Picard couldn’t save it.
Good article – should do one on TV and outer space
If this shows anything it’s that some brilliant science fiction books were bastardised in to some god awful movies. I’m especially thinking of Dune and Starship Troopers.
Noting on Enders game nah
have your say