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greengorcer
greengorcer

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US government agencies' opensource projects

1st OSDC pull request

I have been interested in the US government opensource activities since around 2016, so all my OSDC homework entries of the open source projects are in the governments section.

The most interesting project would be ghidra.

Back in 2018 I was looking for a reverse compiling tool to look at the binary of Dominions 5 (it is a play by email 4X game. lots of fun!). IDA pro is really nice but I do not have the budget to purchase a license.

NSA opensourced ghidra right at that moment. It works like a charm on x64 ELF.

NSA's rationale is simple. They do not have the budget to keep the tool up to date either, so it is better to opensource the tool and gain support from the community. 5 years later I would say their strategy worked.

There are joke/parody projects of US government agencies on github

Here is an example of CIA.

Considering CIA started a podcast in 2022, we might see an official CIA github account in 2023. After all, CIA does have a large amount of internal software tooling projects.

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