Suggested readings week 45/2023

The Cyber Resilience Act for dummies, and Everyone involved in Open Source Development

The Cyber Resilience Act was introduced by the European Parliament in September 2022. It will establish cybersecurity requirements for devices and software sold inside the European Union market.

Which means that anybody who places digital products in this market will be responsible for security related obligations, such as fixing vulnerabilities, providing software updates, and auditing and certifying the products.

The implications for Open Source development are not clear at this point, but must be taken care of.

The CT Scanner was invented in a Record (Music) Company

The computed tomography (CT) technology was born after a casual conversation between a medical doctor and a research engineer while on vacation in the 1960s. The research engineer worked at Electrical and Musical Industries in Hayes, England at that time: the same EMI best known for producing and selling Beatles records, but also electronics devices.

How to fix conversations over the Internet

Every other week, someone discovers that the Internet is broken. Very few of them explain in a detailed essay why and how to react.

This is one of those few.

A mathematical advancement on Shor's algorithm could break public cryptography very soon

Peter Shor in the mid-1990 developed an algorithm set to threaten security on the Internet (and not only).

In his paper Shor showed how a (then hypothetical) quantum physics computer could break large numbers into their prime factors very fast. For those not into cryptography, this is a classical way for breaking very robust and largely in use security mechanisms. An example would be making it possible to sniff your conversations over any communication channel, unless upgraded to future-proof algorithms.

A new variant of Shor's algorithm recently published is faster in a fundamentally new sense.

2023: tenth consecutive year at above 1°C

This was the prediction by the Met Office (UK) at the end of 2022, and was surpassed by reality.