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So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E's submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher. My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I'm certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain't going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.) I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

"This system of burners, pipes, flasks and gauges looks like it came straight out of a laboratory. In fact, though, it's a prototype coffee machine-and it could satisfy the technical desires of even the biggest coffee nerd. The Laboratory Espresso Machine was dreamt up by israeli designers David Budzik and Adi Schlesinger. Its design aesthetic is clearly inspired by the contents of a chemistry lab, but it also uses science in the coffee-making process, too: it uses the Venturi effect to adjust pressures and relies on a bunch of complex thermodynamics to ensure water temperature and pressure are consistent."

This honor goes to Dr. Ronald Breslow of Columbia University, who ended his recent paper "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society with an ominous editorial. After an otherwise technical paper about the prehistoric origins of amino acids, the conclusion takes a turn for the extremely sinister. Emphasis is ours:

This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data.

The primary role that productivity plays in the network economy is to disperse technologies. A technical advance cannot leverage future opportunities if it is hoarded by a few. Increased productivity lowers the cost of acquisition of knowledge, techniques, or artifacts, allowing more people to have them. When transistors were expensive they were rare, and thus the opportunities built upon them were rare. As the productivity curve kicked in, transistors eventually became so cheap and omnipresent that anyone could explore their opportunities. When ball bearings were dear, opportunities sired by them were dear. As communication becomes everywhere dirt cheap and ubiquitous, the opportunities it kindles will likewise become unlimited.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, a shit storm of epic proportions has just gone down. Something which had the potential to affect practically every coder. (Top four stories on HackerNews all related to this crisis).    Every GitHub repository was vulnerable to attack and absolutely nothing was safe.  If you are one of those strange coders that don't use GitHub and think you are in the clear because you use SVN, well the potential damage from the ripples of this vulnerability would of eventually reached you. When the large portion of the technical world all depends on a single service, and that service is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, that makes *anyone* who consumes these services also vulnerable.