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JS Party: JavaScript, CSS, Web Development

Tobie Langel, Open source strategist and Principal at UnlockOpen, joins Chris, Feross, and Amal to discuss recent widespread incidents affecting the JavaScript community (and breaking CI builds) around the globe. Two widely used npm libraries were self-sabotaged by their single maintainer, yet again, highlighting the many gaps in our OSS supply chain security, sustainability and overall practices. We explore all these topics and solution on what our ecosystem needs to be more resilient to these types of attacks in the future.

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Featuring:

• Tobie Langel – Website, GitHub, X
• Amal Hussein – GitHub, X
• Feross Aboukhadijeh – Website, GitHub, X
• Christopher Hiller – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects - The Verge
• Tobie’s tweet thread on this self-sabotage
• Tobie’s talk on OSS Sustainability
• Working in Public | A book by Nadia Eghbal
• Four types of OSS projects mentioned in Nadia’s book
• Renovate | A Dependency Management Bot
• Dependabot | Another OSS Dependency Bot
• Sustain OSS | A space for conversations about sustaining open source
• Tidelift
• SBOM - Software Bill of Materials (official US Government Site & Docs)
• Software Bill of Materials’ — Not just good for security, good for business | The Hill
• Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity
• Tidelift’s SBOM generation service
• Popular NPM package UA-Parser-JS poisoned with cryptomining, password-stealing malware | The Daily Swig
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure / Ford Foundation
• Socket (Security project that Feross is working on)
• Does open source need its own Priority of Constituencies?
• Unlock Open
• who accused me of co-founding npm

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!