Posts by jdzions

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

BASS SOLO

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Almost everything the main article had to say about POSIX is incorrect, to a moderate to immense degree.

I held multiple committee chair positions within IEEE-CS TCOS, the standards body which produced the POSIX family of standards, between 1988 and 1998. I wrote text, balloted on text, and chaired the management subcommittee that authorized projects under P1003. I was in the room when it happened. I know where the bodies are buried because I helped put many of them in the ground.

Take every mention of POSIX in the article (and in most of the comments) with a mountain of salt. Among other things: there are three programming language bindings to the POSIX base system APIs (C in 1003.1, Fortran in 1003.9, Ada in 1003.5). Shell and utilities were standardized in 1003.2 (not POSIX.1-anything). The rest of the article and comments are just as wrong in so many other ways...

Jason Zions

Past chair P1003.8, TCOS SEC PMC

Liquid cooling specialist snags Microsoft datacenter wizard as advisor

Itemized HVAC repair bill

One hammer whack on frozen valve: $5

Knowing which valve to whack and how hard to whack:$495

Christian Belady really is that smart, that focused, that concise. He and Mike Manos really changed the way the entire industry thinks about DC design. Changed it more than once.

CNCF boss talks 'irrational exuberance' in an AI-heavy Kubecon keynote

Well, that's not what usually delights an audience of readers of ElReg, anyway. We're just here for the explosions and other embarrassing failures.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Some of Lalo Schifrin's best work.

https://www.npr.org/2015/07/30/427731324/four-composers-one-nearly-impossible-mission-to-reinvent-a-classic-theme

Boffins devise 'universal backdoor' for image models to cause AI hallucinations

"Refereed", since we're criticizing spelling.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

This is The Register

Of course we're Microsoft bashing. Why did you even ask?

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

Re: Desktops must be multiplied beyond necessity

Ada on Linux is more complicated than "just use the language"; while there's a POSIX binding for Ada (developed by IEEE TCOS in the mid- to late-90s), it binds language features to OS capabilities, rather than exposing OS APIs to programs in the language. Ada tasks vs pthreads vs the way Linux things about threads are quite difficult to reconcile.

Beyond that, the Rust approach to enforcing memory ownership (borrow checker etc) is a substantial advance over how Ada handles memory allocation.

DOD contractors spent quite a bit of time building software in Ada, and it still has some uses. It's not fair to imply that it wasn't tried.

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

"The project" isn't some impersonal machine or device; it's people.

They wasted the time of every maintainer who read their submission. And since a very large number of patches have to be rolled back, clearly "the patches never got into the code base" is an inaccurate statement. Moreover, some of the suspect patches have had subsequent patches made on top of them, which makes rollback even more onerous.

The IRB at UMN screwed up. The experiment was aimed at human systems. This wasn't a probe at some toolchain; it was an attempt to see if people could be manipulated into approving the injection of subtle bugs that turned immature (not exploitable) issues into exploitable use-after-free bugs. "The project" isn't some black box, some machine; it's people. Manipulation of humans requires full review, not a waiver, and it required affirmative permission from the most senior person(s) involved in Linux kernel change approval.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Wheeled office chairs

Since there are no fans in the stands at the moment ('cause 'Murica is completely incompetent when it comes to stamping out COVID), they've actually done a race or two as true road courses with rain tires and all. Don't think they've actually raced in the wet, but they prepared for it. That's a change, and a good one as far as I'm concerned.

'Critical' security bugs dating back to 1987 found in X Window

Re: Use the tools, Jules!

You're seriously asking that? Ok...

"Looking for bugs is boring. Fixing obscure code issues gets me no cred with the Open Source Community - adding new features is way cooler. I'll go do that; some lame person can clean this crap up later, as if anyone cares."

Why build a cloud when you can get one ready made?

Re: Where's the real Trevor!

" I loathe Microsoft's licensing department with the burning passion of 10,000 suns. I think the endpoint people are the organised and led by the most arrogant, out of touch douchnozzles on the face of the earth."

You've never met an Oracle sales person, have you.

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

Re: The beauty of PDP-endian

Ah, yes, the classic "nuxi" endian-ness.