Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2021-07-05 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by bds. In attendance were Student keyholder: bds, cjq, jeffery, asahteck, and huydai Associate keyholders: quentin | kenta Members: eeshan Guests: '() Administrivia: bds: Kelly and Shayna are both gone today, so I'll be taking over with starting the meeting. huydai: As a follow-up to the Summer Mentorship Summit kickoff meeting, I've sent out an e-mail where new members can sign up on a Google Form to get help on projects and SIPB-related things (link: https://forms.gle/5tpqgcDr4UNmFPAk8). There's also another form where more experienced members can also sign up to help answer questions for newer members (link: https://forms.gle/UdrPg1pJ64QSbdnMA). If you guys are interested, be sure to sign up by this Thursday night! Project Reports: *silence* huydai: We're all very talkative today. Other: kenta: When you buy a Raspberry Pi, you get a free version of Mathematica to go with it. Sometime in the past week or so the version of Mathematica got upgraded. If you are running Raspian, you can now get the latest version of Mathematica. Unfortunately for me I've done weird things with partionining on my Raspberry Pi so I don't have enough disk space for the upgrade. :( bds: Github has recently released a tool called Copilot, which is a machine learning model that was trained on a bunch of open source which supposedly acts as your copilot as you are programming. There are some people on Twitter who've been able to get it to spit out fully-formed fragments of GPL licensed code. The legal aspects of that are quite interesting. Probably won't comment on that, though you can look up online to see heated discussions about this and stay tuned to more machine learning sheningans. quentin: I think this was the week that McAfee died, so we'll never know how to uninstall McAfee. Also there's question about his death in prison cjq: Something something, McAfee didn't kill himself? bds: Interesting man quentin: That's an understatement. kenta: Didn't McAfee sell the antivirus software to Microsoft? quentin: John McAfee didn't have anything to do with current McAfee antivirus program, yes huydai: Is that a bad thing or a good thing? *people shrugs* cjq: ***yes*** quentin: Microsoft has their own antivirus, there's no point in installing any other antivirus programs huydai: So I've heard people talked about how Microsoft Defender/ antivirus is generally a good-enough solution for protecting your computer against malware, though I've also seen video demonstrations where paid antivirus programs have also been shown to detect more malware than Microsoft built-in antivirus program. Is it really safe / safer to just use Microsoft antivirus? quentin: I think that there is a long history of antivirus programs being attack vectors, so the net win of a program that could detect more malware is outweighed by the general poor code quality by the 3rd-party antivirus programs. bds: I remember in the past there would be antiviruses that would attempt to scan the inside of a zip file, and so if you downloaded a special and compact file called Zip bomb on the computer it would cause your computer to crash as the antivirus attempts to unzip terabytes of data at once. So lots of poor decisions all around for many antivirus softwares. kenta: That ZipBomb is actually a theoretical computer science point of interest. You can write computer programs that print itself in the standard output, and ZipBomb is an example of that. If you study the appropriate branch of computer science you'll find that is a standard trick bds: Seems like Shayna is back, so I'll be transferring the host powers back to Shayna. asahteck: Thank you for running the meeting bds! Other Other: quentin: Happy fourth of July! asahteck: Observed quentin: There were fireworks Wednesday through Sunday, most of which were wrekt/shrekt/cancelled by unannounced rain. kenta: Did the fireworks last night happen on the Charles as normal? quentin: It was in Boston Commons last night and was a sad shadow of the previous year's fireworks. That said, after last year any vague sense of normalcy is worth it asatechk: Here's to wishing that everything will go back to normal soon, hopefully. The meeting was adjourned at 19:39. Minutes taken and submitted by huydai.