Applied Miscellany

OSCON 2006 Session Report
Title: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)
Speakers: Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman — Google, Inc.
The central theme of this talk is that attention and focus are the currency of an open source project and which must be protected. Poisonous people can erode both of these attributes. [...]

Last week, I attended a part of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2006) in Portland, Oregon. The next few posts will be a recap of my notes for some of the sessions I attended.

The CNNMoney.com article “e-Passports: Ready or not here they come” reports on the security and personal safety risks associated with the RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that will be embedded in U.S. passports by August 2006. These tags are meant to be read via radio waves from a “short” distance by a passport reader; [...]

Ed Felten has posted a paper called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It provides just enough technical details of the Internet to nicely cover the policy issues of network neutrality.