When this project was first published, the name of the company that published it was AOL. Before that, the company was called America Online. Subsequently it was named Oath, and now it's Verizon Media.
Names change. The common theme: names are not easy, sometimes they are beloved brands, sometimes they fall out of favor. Sometimes they were just bad ideas from the start, but happened anyway.
This gives rise to an interesting challenge for open source projects when you have an open source project in a github org, and the name of your company changes (or your company gets acquired), should you move the project? The problem is real since you don't want to lose your community, but you don't want to be stuck in the past.
Moloch is a serious open source project, run by serious people who care about network security. They published their code under an open source license, showing off just how confident they are that it is solid. You can use this project to inspect packets on your network, you can learn how they built it and become a valuable network security engineer with a job somewhere finding people trying to hack in to your site. You can propose modifications to make this even better (and if your code is good enough, it will get accepted and used by security teams around the world). Or you could focus on the name they chose and the name of the company at the time this was published.
I'd seize the opportunity to talk tech and focus on network security. Infosec jobs pay better than brand marketing jobs.
The fact we have access to tools like this (and many, many others) is so damn motivating. I am working through some structured course material in preparation for net-sec baseline `$vendor-$certification` exams, and there are so many complexities and rabbit holes that it's easy to be overwhelmed. Some nights are harder than others to see forest for the trees when it feels I'm trying to understand how to pick up a single pine cone to study.
Then I see projects like this, or Jaeger/OpenZipkin, or Chaos Monkey, and I'm simply inspired. Much like listening to a killer record.
I don't spend time feeling sorry for myself because an ancient, somewhat esoteric proper noun was used to describe the project.
Yep! As far as I'm aware, a number of military services (I think the USAF) have been public about using Moloch on their networks. It was money well spent by DARPA.
Naming open source projects is a challenging task. The team hears this all the time, but hey, open source is about code you can use, a community you can join to make the code better, and the pride that people around the world want to use your code. If you are on a blue-team, you'll want to look at this project. If you are making lists of names that distract attention this goes on it.
If someone names their CLI JDahmer which then requires me to use it jdahmer <command> <options>, it is going to cringe me out.
That said, I totally respect the project's decision to name it so. I'm sorry if it comes off as an outrage or an unnecessary rant. I understand it takes away the energy which is otherwise better spent on a constructive discussion of this excellent project, which is also surprisingly well-maintained. But, I hope you realise why the name is controversial, especially since everyone that has to use the project has to get used to seeing/reading/using/typing Moloch everywhere from the docs, to the CLI, to the FAQ pages, and what-not.
May be the project can explain their rationale in a separate webpage (if they want to) and that might help?
Sorta like https://www.wireshark.org/. But Moloch is a very active project, used by many, and used internally at Verizon Media. Aol is part of Verizon Media (which brought AOL and Yahoo together). Open source is very active here. ;-)
Oh woah cool! I love the Verizon dashboard, looks very polished for an internal tool! I have a friend who did some network security work for Comcast, interesting stuff it is.
You can see https://www.verizonmedia.com/our-brands to see the collection of online brands in the family. You might use lots of these brands today without really noticing. There's a lot of internet content you get via https://www.verizondigitalmedia.com/ which is also part of the same company. Aol is still a thing, people do use it. Many people use lots of these brands as part of their internet experience.
You might even be looking for a job as an information security professional. You can join "The Paranoids" team (now that's a good name, don't you think!) by checking out some of their jobs. https://www.verizonmedia.com/careers/search.html?q=paranoids
Digital Programmatic Ad Buying Platforms for Brands by Verizon, formerly Oath Ads Platforms formerly BrightRoll, ONE by AOL (formerly Millennial Media) and Yahoo Gemini, which themselves have other ad tech acquisitions burred in them (Gravity, Adap.tv, Convertro among others come to mind) is the fifth largest digital marketing provider behind Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Verizon Media (Engadget, Huffpost, TechCrunch, Yahoo Finance, News Sports etc) are the other big component of the company.
FWIW, there was a research team at Yahoo who would actually get insights about the way people used language (relevant for contextual search) from Yahoo Answers. They were more active during the earlier years when the content quality was much higher. I don't know if they used Vespa in their mining process, but it would not surprise me if they did. Vespa is used in many projects because it's just that good. So if you are thinking of using it -- for Yahoo Answers, for Quora, whatever, go for it. I know a cancer researcher/engineer who wants to use Vespa for serving clinical reports and trial outcomes.
As for the current Answers site, well, we'll see what happens. I know the PM, a delightful person. I don't know the plan. But if there is a plan to make something useful from it, apply. It apparently makes money (otherwise it would have been killed long ago), and that means there's something to work with. When I started at Yahoo I was hoping to get onto the Groups team for the same reason -- a huge challenge to fix something that could be made cool again.
"Vespa is the single greatest piece of software Yahoo ever built. It's like ElasticSearch but a hundred times better. I am so happy."
Laurie Voss Co-founder/COO of @npmjs
https://twitter.com/seldo/status/912876700542787585
TensorFlow on Spark is for learning, Vespa is for serving.
Where Vespa excels is in evaluating a learned model very quickly over lots of documents. We're working on providing support for running models learned with TensorFlow directly. For now people make the translation on their own.
I don't want to trigger any bot detection by voting all your comments up in a short amount of time. So, I will say thank you and mention that is is contributions from people like you that keep me coming back.
