standards

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.

A Google I/O 2013 talk by Android audio engineers on why reliable, low-latency audio is hard on the platform. It covers problem areas across the stack, platform work underway and techniques apps can use.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Dylan Beattie's entertaining NDC talk imagines an alternate history of the web, asking what if different decisions had been made on operating systems, browsers and standards. It blends real history with humor.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

A HOPE conference talk by Howard Payne and Deviant Ollam on common keys, such as elevator and fire service keys, that open many buildings. It covers physical security weaknesses from shared key standards.

Hans Rosling's TED@Cannes talk uses boxes and animated data graphics to show how world population will grow to about 9 billion. He argues that raising living standards for the poorest is what reduces population growth.

Scott Arciszewski's DEF CON 26 Crypto and Privacy Village talk critiquing the JOSE standards (JWT, JWS, JWE) and showing how to design cryptographic tokens more safely.

Joel Spolsky's 2012 Google tech talk on the cultural anthropology of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. He explains how the software was designed to shape community norms and curation standards.