Episode 876 transcript

FLOSS-867 Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 867, recorded Tuesday, March the 24th. Pangolin, people can lie. Hey folks, it's Time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're going to talk well. A little bit of IO ot. We're gonna talk security, we're gonna talk about something that claims to be a replacement for A VPN. Among other things we're gonna talk Pangolin, the open source solution for connectivity and updates and all sorts of, all sorts of other things. Um, I am not the expert on this. I don't know a whole lot about it yet, but I've got the guy I know, I know a guy, and I've got the guy here. Uh, we've got Milo Schwartz and he is the co-founder of a company called Faial and also behind Pangolin, software engineer by trade. He's done IOT and ot. I'm not sure what OT means in this instance. Anyway, we've got Milo here. Let's bring him on the show. Hey, welcome. Welcome. Milo: Hi, Jonathan. Jonathan: Hey, how's it Milo: going? Jonathan: Hey, it's great. Excited to here. It's great. It's good to have you here. Okay, so first off, I know what iot, the Internet of Things is. What's the OT sector? Milo: Yeah, that's a good question. Um, it's operational technologies. Oh, okay. Right. So it is informational technologies, OTs, operational technologies. Uh, and that tends to mean there's some physical thing out in the world, like, uh, maybe it's a, you know, camera, right? Mm-hmm. And you're connecting to it and then providing digital services on top of it. Jonathan: Gotcha. Milo: Yeah. Jonathan: Alright. So what, tell us the story starting, I guess, with Al Well, how, how did all of this come to be? Uh, what is this that came to be that we're talking about? Milo: Okay, so yeah. So it all started without a name, right? I think most, um. Uh, projects, um, uh, that start as a hobby, right? You like the name is the last thing you're worried about. Like, lemme build the thing first, lemme get it out there. Uh, so, Jonathan: or, or you pick the name first and you realize five years later that it was a terrible choice, but you're stuck with it. Milo: Exactly. That hurts a little little. That hits a Jonathan: little close to home. Yes, I know. Milo: Um, anyway, yeah. So I actually started this, um, project, this tunneling project, uh, about a year, a little over a year ago at this point, like maybe a year and a half ago. Okay. The fall of 2020, uh, excuse me, four. Um, I was just kind of looking at open source projects to build, uh, in the connectivity space. Um, and, uh. With Pangolin, um, we're like trying to find names, right? We wanted to, the one thing you do is you try to find a domain, right? What, what domain can I get that has a nice tld, like a.com or a.net, right? And there are very few like nouns available, unsurprisingly. Jonathan: Yeah. Milo: Yeah. So, uh, we, we were looking at just like what different, um. What's affordable, and then what can we use that gives us a nice space of names to name all of our products, because we wanted to be able to say, okay, this is the company name, and then the product name is X, Y, Z, and Fal is a, uh, classification of animals. It's any animal that tunnels is a, is a faial animal. Jonathan: Oh, nice. Milo: Yeah. So, Jonathan: oh, that's really, I like that. That's really clever. And you've also got the, the Foss as the beginning that everybody's gonna recognize Milo: e Exactly. It kind of was too good to be true. Um, so it, and the domain was like 2K, so it was within reach, you know, if, if we started to make some money from, uh, the, the project. Uh, so we, we were just like, let's, let's do it. Um, and we, it allowed us to pick cool names like Pangolin or Newt, uh, or Om, which are all different types of Faso animals for our products. Jonathan: I like it. You know, I've, I've been told that whenever you go to name an open