software security

Karen Sandler, then Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, talks at OSCON 2011 about the risks of proprietary, closed-source software in implanted medical devices like her own pacemaker-defibrillator.

Richard Stallman's TEDxGeneva 2014 talk describing how nonfree programs give companies control over users and what users can do to regain control. It introduces the free software movement and the four freedoms.

Lock-picking YouTuber Bill Johnson (BosnianBill) explains how to choose a high-security lock and why, showing examples and comparing designs. It covers what makes some padlocks more pick-resistant than others.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

Asianometry examines why Japan's software industry has lagged despite its hardware strengths. It looks at dependence on US software and the low prestige of programming.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

A short clip of the Super Mario Bros 3 proof-of-concept PC port built by id Software's founders to pitch Nintendo on a PC version. Nintendo passed, and the same technology led to Commander Keen.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

CGP Grey explains the history of the US Social Security card and number, and why they became a de facto national ID despite never being meant for it. He also covers why America resists a proper identity card.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

LockPickingLawyer shows a Sentry fire safe being cut in half with a saw in a few minutes. It is a short demonstration that these safes offer little protection against a determined thief.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

ITS Tactical demonstrates how a ballpoint pen can open a zippered suitcase without leaving a trace, bypassing its lock, and suggests countermeasures.

The 1992 SIIA anti-piracy rap video Don't Copy That Floppy, warning kids against copying software, remastered and uploaded.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.

Computerphile interview with Prof. Ross Anderson on how Chip and PIN payment systems are being compromised, and the attacks researchers have seen.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

A 2018 tutorial explaining uBlock Origin's advanced user mode, including how to block scripts and use the dynamic filtering settings. It positions the extension as a replacement for tools like uMatrix.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

Gameplay footage of the original 1986 Macintosh version of Dark Castle by Silicon Beach Software. The uploader argues the original is a great game that was tarnished by inferior ports.

Deviant Ollam's DEF CON 17 talk explains how legally checking a firearm in luggage can be the most secure way to fly with valuable tech. It covers firearm transport rules and luggage locks.

A roughly 14-minute interview with OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt at ruBSD 2013. He talks about making painful changes, getting real feedback, mitigation techniques compared to other OSs, and virtualization.

Tantacrul tells the story of Audacity, the widely used free audio editor, and announces his involvement in the project. It includes an interview with the original developers and a look at the software's usability.

A former Microsoft SDET with 15 years on Windows gives his view on why Windows 10 updates keep shipping with bugs. He points to changes in how the company tests its software.

Audio-only recording of the first part of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2010 keynote, taken from G4TV. It covers id Software's work around that time, including Rage and platform topics such as PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, and includes his informal audience poll about paying for mobile apps.

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

WIRED's Andy Greenberg drives a Jeep on a highway while two hackers take control of it remotely over the internet. They manipulate the car and then cut the engine. The video accompanies the 2015 article on the Jeep Cherokee hack.

A WSJ interview in which Apple's Craig Federighi explains Apple's CSAM scanning and child-safety features, including neural hashes and safety vouchers, and defends them against backlash.

A short demo of real-time sparse voxel octree rendering, shown by Jon Olick at Siggraph 2008. It shows a detailed model rendered by ray casting through the octree.