Interview with Gordon Lyon
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
I’ve known Gordon Lyon, as Fyodor Vaskovich, for over 15 years. Most of our meetings have been online, but we’ve also attended some meetups in between BlackHat and DefCon.
Fyodor’s claim to fame is that he has been working on a network scanning tool, Nmap (nmap.org) longer than I’ve known him. What began as improvements on the handful of scanning tools available in the ’90s has become an open source project as well as a successfully funded business. If you’ve never used Nmap, it is both a security tool and one useful to network and system admins: Nmap quickly scans networks in a long list of different ways.
There really isn’t much on the Web about Fyodor, and we are fortunate that he has taken the time to tell us a bit more about his background and how various parts of Nmap came to be.