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Thwarting evil, one open-source security vulnerability at a time…
“Super Friends, unite!” was the call to bring Batman, Superman, and the rest of the world’s greatest heroes (and Aquaman (yes, I’m counting that dog and those weird twins among the greatest heroes)) together to fight the forces of evil. Well, we have our own modern day Super Friends in the form of tech giants Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the rest who are coming together to fight the next wave of “Heartbleed” vulnerabilities.
Tech giants hope to solve security vulnerabilities
Ok, if they are the Super Friends of Tech—and we should definitely refer to them as such from here on out—who gets to be Batman? Definitely Intel, right? It’s absolutely not Facebook. Google, maybe, but definitely not Facebook. I guess this isn’t important to the overall narrative, but it certainly needs to be addressed. Facebook is 100% Aquaman, though, for sure.
Anyways, here’s the story: Google, Facebook, VMWare, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, NetApp, the Linux Foundation and a bunch of others have put their super-secret tech decoder rings together and have teleported to the Super Friends of Tech HQ (located in Silicon Valley, obviously) and have decided to fight against the evil that is security vulnerabilities like Heartbleed in open source software. They call it the Core Infrastructure Initiative, and they are putting $3.6 million towards helping out the four developers (one full-time) that are currently working on the Open SSL software that was the focus of the Heartbleed security vulnerability.
Four people can’t be the only ones working on the largest security certificate on the web, so that’s why the Super Friends of Tech are helping. That, and to stop any future vulnerabilities that may emerge from the farthest reaches of evil to threaten all of mankind(!!!) on the web.
This isn’t the first major league team up between tech giants, as Facebook, Google and a few other collaborated on making an enterprise-level webscale database off the MySQL software.
The money that funds the ‘Heartbleed’ project will be put to good use, considering that the Open SSL project only got about $2,000 per year in donations before. They’ll be adding support, resources and code to the dedicated Open SSL team to stem the tide of cybersecurity threats in an effort to keep us safe. The money will also be used to lend support to other open source software around the web, adding to overall security to hopefully everything we do on the web.
How will this affect security down the road? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT! SAME TECH TIME, SAME TECH CHANNEL!
