Taz Brown writes about the challenges of a career in IT and her goals of helping to increase diversity in the field and bring Linux to urban education. The year is now 2018, and the world has changed tremendously in so many ways. One thing that's changed significantly is the way we learn and the way we demonstrate that knowledge. No longer is a college degree enough, particularly in the area of Information Technology (IT). Speak to two technologists about how they paved their way in the field, and you will get, oftentimes, completely different stories.

Summary: We solved privacy in the natural world with clothing, shelter, manners and laws. So far in the digital world, we have invisibility cloaks and the GDPR. The fastest way to get the rest of what we need is to recognize that privacy isn't a grace of platforms or governments. It starts as a grace of our own agency and the tech we use to express it.

Dave wraps up the shell-script L33t generator Last time, I talked about what's known informally as l33t-speak, a series of letter and letter-pair substitutions that marks the jargon of the hacker elite (or some subset of hacker elite, because I'm pretty sure that real computer security experts don't need to substitute vowels with digits to sound cool and hip).

An open-source battle is being waged for the soul of artificial intelligence. It is being fought by industry titans, universities and communities of machine-learning researchers world-wide. This article chronicles one small skirmish in that fight: a standardized file format for neural networks. At stake is the open exchange of data among a multitude of tools instead of competing monolithic frameworks.

Networking is one of Linux's strengths and a popular topic for our subscribers. For your weekend reading, we've curated some of Linux Journal's most popular networking articles.    NTPsec: a Secure, Hardened NTP Implementation by Eric S. Raymond

Ravada is an open-source project that allows users to connect to a virtual desktop. Currently, it supports KVM, but its back end has been designed and implemented in order to allow future hypervisors to be added to the framework. The client's only requirements are a web-browser and a remote viewer supporting the spice protocol. Ravada's main features include:

With an eye on the future, the Open Source Initiative's president sits down and talks with Linux Journal about the organization's 20-year history.

Surprise—Python wins again! Here's the breakdown (the contenders listed below were nominated by LJ readers via Twitter):

How to script a l33t-speak translator. My daughter and I were bantering with each other via text message this morning as we often do, and I dropped into a sort of mock "leet speak". She wasn't impressed, but it got me thinking about formulaic substitutions in language and how they represent interesting programming challenges.

First we invented a world where everyone could be free. Then we helped build feudal castles on it, where everyone now lives. Now it's time to blow up those castles by giving everybody much better ways to use their freedom than they ever would enjoy in a castle. I'm going to mix movie metaphors here. You'll see why.