"There is no Commons. You're just DoS-ing someone else's infrastructure."
Remote
Stefano Zacchiroli
@zacchiro@mastodon.xyz
mastodon 4.5.19Full professor of computer science at Polytechnic Institute of Paris. Co-founder & CSO Software Heritage. Free Software activist. Previously: Debian leader, Open Source Initiative board.
2223 Followers
663 Following
24 Posts
Joined June 26, 2017
Homepage:
Languages:
en, fr, it
At #FOSDEM, 40% of attendees at the opening talk (in a full room with 1200 seats) raised their hand to signal this is the first time they attend.
This is super exciting for an old fart like me, who has been attending for 25 years.
There is hope for the future!
Welcome fellow hackers, and have a blast.
Repeat after me: if #Firefox stops being maintained, #LibreWolf is not a viable long-term alternative (nor is any other Firefox-based web browser).
The « Software Source Code Exhbition », co-curated by Mathilde Fichen from @swheritage@mstdn.social, is now on display at Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, the most prominent science museum in #Paris, France.
It's until March 25th, 2026 and in the free part of the museum, no ticket needed.
If you are around and into software, I recommend visiting it, as it's super super fascinating.
Replying to
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net I have recently started unfollowing many accounts due to this.
I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to work at Polytechnic Institute of Paris for 30 months, in the fields of #SoftwareEngineering and #Cybersecurity The recruited person will work on leveraging @swheritage@mstdn.social as a knowledge base to improve the state of the art of (binary) software composition analysis (SCA), to detect the presence and details of #OpenSource software shipped within IT products. See https://institutminestelecom.recruitee.com/l/en/o/post-doctorante-ou-post-doctorant-en-genie-logiciel-et-cybersecurite-cdd-de-30-mois-2-5 for details and application instructions. #getfedihired
Welcoming @benhermann@mastodon.social at #SoftwareHeritage headquarters today, to talk about « What We Learned in 15 Years of #ArtifactEvaluation » #research #digitalpreservation #softwareEngineering
Replying to
@troed @chris_evelyn @mjg59 last time I checked, Mistral models were merely open weight, with no training dataset available nor training pipeline released as FOSS. Has that changed?
Just noticed that the national recruitment platform for teachers/researchers civil servants in #France is now called "Odyssée".
10/10 for not missing a good joke opportunity.
WOW! Full #security devroom at #FOSDEM, for the presentation of "ROSA: finding #backdoors with #fuzzing" by my fellow co-authors @plumtrie@mastodon.social and M. Marcozzi.
More about this work in the full paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08544 (#openaccess, of course)
Replying to
@troed I see. I don't know either what @chris_evelyn had in mind, so I'll leave it to them. But for what is worth the EU AI Act equally applies to all companies having access to the EU market. Mistral is not be special in that respect, unless the other players decide to leave the EU market (which is unlikely). @mjg59
Replying to
@bzg @andrewnez BTW, I think we can do better than "fetch one git object at at a time". For instance, for everything already cooked in the SWH Vault cache https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/#batch-download , we could return a larger bundle, possibly even as a packfile.
Replying to
Ironically, the (wrong) term of art is very popular in ACM conferences, which precisely define the terms in its artifact review and badging guidelines (version 1.1, current): https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-and-badging-current
(Yes, I know this comes from the historical mistake ACM did with version 1.0, where the definitions were wrong. But it has been fixed 6 years ago, in 2020.)
In « Promises, Perils, and (Timely) Heuristics for Mining Coding Agent Activity » (#openaccess preprint at: https://hal.science/hal-05487636) we review the potential and risks of mining agent-based coding activities in empirical #SoftwareEngineering #research. To be presented at the #MSR2026 conference this summer.
Is there a good URL scheme to use as href link when publishing Matrix account info on the web?
Ideally it should be something that automatically open a chat to you if you are already on Matrix somehow, or explains how to create an account (on whatever server one likes) if not.
"If you have a buggy program, you can fix it or call it AI" - David Parnas, #ICSE2025
Congrats to my coauthors @plumtrie@mastodon.social, E. Decoux, and M. Marcozzi for the best artifact #award at #ICSE2025. 99% of the merit for this goes to Dimitri (in the picture), who did all the heavy lifting, chapeau.
The artifact itself is worth looking at as blueprint/example for students and colleagues working on replication packages in complex contexts (like ours here, having to replicate long running fuzzing experiments).
My colleagues at CEA in #Paris, France, are hiring a 2-year #postdoc to work on the joint research project #SECUBIC about #fuzzing binaries to identify #backdoors. (See this recently joint work at #ICSE2025 for previous results: https://upsilon.cc/~zack/research/publications/icse-2025-rosa-fuzzing.pdf )
If you're interested, or know interested candidates, head to: https://secubic-ptcc.github.io/jobs/open/2025/04/02/postdoc-supply-chain-binary-fuzzing.html for details.
Advice to young colleagues when preparing rebuttals for papers submitted to major academic conferences or journals. When there is a soft limit (e.g., 1000 words) it is in your best interest to make your key rebuttal arguments fit that limit. And only later, if you really have to, add additional arguments/details after that limit, clearly marking the separation between the two. What you should not do, is just ignore the limit and submit a free-flow long text. It will not serve your cause.
Replying to
@AFRO@social.treehouse.systems @swheritage@mstdn.social @simi_kc@mastodon.social even though that is not the primary use case here, binary software composition analysis can help with that too
Replying to
@phooky@hexa.club @mjog@eigenmagic.net @Edent@mastodon.social This. It was the most surprising thing for me in this thread. (Google shitty behavior not at all.)