cyberstorm.mu — A new adventure
“Is it possible to go even further ?” This thought has been in my mind since January of 2018. After working with a group for a while you start to realize the limitations of the structure in place. At one point, you start thinking about what It would be like to start a totally new group and walk a different path.
I am not the only one who thinks that we can go further. Codarren Velvindron, Nitin Mutkawoa, Kifah Meeran, Heervesh Lallbahadur, and Nigel Yong have also embraced a new vision. On top of this, new people include: Jagveer Loky, Nathan Sunil Mangar, Jeremie Daniel and Veegish Ramdani. The name cyberstorm.mu is an interesting one. It’s about change coming. Don’t get me wrong: I still love hacking. For me, hacking is about finding clever solutions to problems. It’s not about breaking into someone’s facebook account or any similar wrongful acts. Hackathons are still the primary venue for getting motivated people together to work on fun problems. Cyberstorm.mu has all of those activities: IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) hackathons and mentorship for both Google Code-in and Google SoC. However, we can go further.
Instead of focusing only on those, we are exploring other areas. We are living in interesting times where Linux and Open Source software is finding its way inside space shuttles and critical infrastructure of a country such as energy plants. FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) needs to expand to meet those challenges. This implies that it needs more people who can work on those problems. So on one hand there is a huge demand for talents to work on improving FOSS, but Mauritians make up a tiny percentage as those contributors. We believe that cyberstorm.mu is a good example of a group that can contribute towards this goal while promoting Mauritius as an IT hub in the African region.
Now here goes the technical details. If you’re not a geek feel free to skip the geek part.
**Geek part** :
For TLS 1.3, Codarren Velvindron and myself have been looking at GnuTLS 1.3 support. It’s been added to curl ahead of the IETF 103 hackathon: https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/9bdadbbdee61c1726c2f5ee9452fd4cd6a933128. Other members of cyberstorm.mu (Jagveer, Nathan, Nigel, Heervesh, Jeremie) are working to bring you more TLS 1.3 goodies !
Here’s a preview of the growing patchset:
$ git diff | wc -l
91
HTTP 451 fans will not be disappointed with Veegish Ramdani’s work on a Drupal module for handling legal requests.
**End of geek section.**
What about Google Code-in ? cyberstorm.mu is organizing Google Code-in training with Kifah Meeran acting as official mentor for this year. Kifah Meeran won Google Code-in in 2017 as the Grand Prize Winner. Aside from Kifah, qualified teachers and experienced past GCI students will also work together with him to support new participants.
Google Summer of Code has not seen a Mauritian participant since 2012. This is going to change starting from 2019 onward. With official mentors, it’s going to be a less daunting task for prospective students to participate.
There is more coming up. If you interested to follow us, you can join us on our facebook group here (https://www.facebook.com/groups/334512603778198/) and twitter (https://twitter.com/CyberstormMu).
Members have written about cyberstorm.mu:
Jeremie: https://medium.com/@jeremiedaniel48/a-new-start-for-a-new-group-cyberstorm-mu-b3a95e8da78e
Jagveer: https://medium.com/@jagveer.loky/cyberstorm-mu-new-story-begins-6f90c38f0a25
Veegish: https://veegish.com/blog/cyberstorm-mu-the-beginning-of-a-new-journey/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Loganaden Velvindron, cyberstorm.mu member.
logan@cyberstorm.mu.
