No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Earlier this year I notified The Apperta Foundation - an NHS funded technology spin-out - that they had spilled usernames, passwords, and financial data on the internet. This is not, however, a post to recount subsequent events. I made a site just for that, and tweeted and posted updates to the Go Fund Me as things happened. Today I’m posting about just how punishing this has been for me, to my mental health, to my significant relationships....

August 20, 2021 · 2 min · Rob Dyke

Responsible Disclosure

How it started Late February I discovered a public repository on github with a similar name to an Organisation I follow. Intrigued, I forked the repo and cloned it. I took a look at the git log. There were approximately 2 years of commits from three authors to two branches (master and ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️). Although I didn’t recognise the github user that published the repo, the email address of the Authors were familiar....

March 30, 2021 · 2 min · Rob Dyke

Lockdown Mix 1

April 12, 2020 · 0 min · Rob Dyke

Hackdays - Leveling the Playing Field

This short note was produced in response to a request from Liam Maxwell made at EHI Live 2012, to investigate how hackdays could help procurement. Reposting here as the PDF is locked behind a paywall. Contributors Malcolm Newbury, Guildfoss, Consultant Mahendra Mahey, University of Bath, Project Manager of the DevCSI Project John Pyle, Independent Procurement Consultant Ewan Davis, Woodcote Consulting, Consultant Rob Dyke, Technical Director, Tactix4 Scott Wilson, Service Manager, OSS Watch and Assistant Director, CETIS Eckhard Schwarzat, ValueDecision, Consultant A “hackday” or “modding” (modification) day is an event where a group of people extractedfrom their normal day to day jobs and are brought together typically to deliver solutions touser problems....

April 8, 2020 · 16 min · Rob Dyke

Hacking the Networked Society.

Introduction. The dynamic between free-software and open-source is often misunderstood by social and political theorists. As a consequence it is also under-theorised within socio-political theory. In this paper, I show how philosophies of free/libre, open-source and commons regimes have engendered new forms of sociopolitical consumption and new political economies of meaning. My emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global/structure and agency, shows new ways of ‘thinking’ the cosmopolitan, sedimented in the interconnected networks of the technical age....

March 30, 2020 · 54 min · Rob Dyke