Remember When We Broke the Internet?
summary
A sequence of concrete incidents shows how open source behaves as a socio-technical system: the Morris worm infects ~10% of the global Internet, Heartbleed leaves ~66% of the Internet vulnerable because OpenSSL is effectively maintained by one volunteer, and the npm left-pad removal crashes popular sites until the registry force-restores a package. The claim is that these events reveal transitive dependency fragility, maintainer scarcity, and supply‑chain risk, and that practical mitigations—transparency, funding glue work, and dependency auditing—actually reduce systemic surprise.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:40Welcome
- 2:00Introductions
- 2:30Amanda Casari
- 2:57What is Open Source
- 5:10Framework
- 5:30Complexity Theory
- 6:32Complex Systems
- 6:48SocioTechnical Systems
- 8:13Open Source is a SocioTechnical System
- 9:04Black Swan Events
- 9:41Amateur Historian
- 10:35Disruption of norms
- 12:38Morris Worm
- 16:00We Didnt Start the Fire
- 17:00Heartbleed
- 21:19We didnt light it
- 21:46LeftPad
- 26:02The Legal Side
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