Sebastopol, CA—As we speak, Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist at White Ops, is pulling together an adroit group of white-hat hackers to help make the Internet safer. It's a simple premise, but a difficult challenge: If we want things to be secure, it's got to be a lot easier to build things the right way, and deploy them simply.
The goal of this hackathon is to make TLS/HTTPS trivial to deploy. This would make strong isolation of insecure code a smooth experience, allowing people to find and fix bigger things faster. It would make security easier.
Dan says they're 75% there. He's an internationally respected technologist who has spent almost two decades protecting the Internet. He is one of the seven key shareholders able to restore the Internet's Domain Name System if necessary. An invited expert to the W3C, the guiding organization for the Web, Dan is known for his work in finding a core flaw in the Internet and then leading the charge to repair it.
The hackathon is happening in the Code for America office in San Francisco, and runs through Saturday Oct. 29. Their results will be fully open, BSD licensed, and announced at the O'Reilly Security Conference in New York next week.
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