Slashdot Mirror

But now I suspect that my nice secure file system can be nastily compromized by generating hash-equivalent blocks. Not a huge worry, but sad to see.

• Overview of an argument that concatenation of common hash functions won't produce a more secure hash functions (page 3)
  
• Applying a similar argument to a broader class of hash functions (I haven't read this yet, but the abstract sound neat...)
  
• Discussion about working around Joux's attack
  

My first summer job in high school was at the Warren AT&T archives. I wound up staying on for 4 years

The archive is a treasure trove of hardware for sure, but there are an incredible number of technical papers and photographs as well; Bell and Watson's lab notes while developing the phone, research notes on the development of the transistor and the Lab's UNIX flavor and more. David Korn's research notes on Ksh development or Arno Penzias' reports of his accidential verification of cosmic background radiation might be of interest to some /. collectors should the whole lot end up on the auction block.

The place is crazy. It's not just the History of AT&T, it's the Great Library of information technology. Hopefully SBC will see it that way too. Last I heard, they had completed indexing and uncrating over 9 miles of paper case files (researcher's project notes) from the 1890's to 1980's. The number of talented scientists who spent their lives at the Labs helping create the IT infrastructure you're soaking in is astounding. As a research lab supported by a monopoly utility, they had unprecedented resources to explore all kinds of ideas. It's all there. Neat stuff.

One of my favourite pieces was a 1960's prototype for an operator's uniform. Very Star Trek:TOS. Ohura's uniform in gold lamee. Some Suit thought it might be a good idea to have all the operators (almost entirely female at the time) wear uniforms, and this is what they came up with.

But I'm waxing philosophic. SBC will save the tech documents at least, to protect the intellectual property they're buying with the hard assets. As for the old phone booths, recording equipment and videophone prototypes, maybe they'll end up in private collections or museums. Either way, hopefully more people will get to see and appreciate them.

My first summer job in high school was at the Warren AT&T archives. I wound up staying on for 4 years

The archive is a treasure trove of hardware for sure, but there are an incredible number of technical papers and photographs as well; Bell and Watson's lab notes while developing the phone, research notes on the development of the transistor and the Lab's UNIX flavor and more. David Korn's research notes on Ksh development or Arno Penzias' reports of his accidential verification of cosmic background radiation might be of interest to some /. collectors should the whole lot end up on the auction block.

The place is crazy. It's not just the History of AT&T, it's the Great Library of information technology. Hopefully SBC will see it that way too. Last I heard, they had completed indexing and uncrating over 9 miles of paper case files (researcher's project notes) from the 1890's to 1980's. The number of talented scientists who spent their lives at the Labs helping create the IT infrastructure you're soaking in is astounding. As a research lab supported by a monopoly utility, they had unprecedented resources to explore all kinds of ideas. It's all there. Neat stuff.

One of my favourite pieces was a 1960's prototype for an operator's uniform. Very Star Trek:TOS. Ohura's uniform in gold lamee. Some Suit thought it might be a good idea to have all the operators (almost entirely female at the time) wear uniforms, and this is what they came up with.

But I'm waxing philosophic. SBC will save the tech documents at least, to protect the intellectual property they're buying with the hard assets. As for the old phone booths, recording equipment and videophone prototypes, maybe they'll end up in private collections or museums. Either way, hopefully more people will get to see and appreciate them.

My first summer job in high school was at the Warren AT&T archives. I wound up staying on for 4 years

The archive is a treasure trove of hardware for sure, but there are an incredible number of technical papers and photographs as well; Bell and Watson's lab notes while developing the phone, research notes on the development of the transistor and the Lab's UNIX flavor and more. David Korn's research notes on Ksh development or Arno Penzias' reports of his accidential verification of cosmic background radiation might be of interest to some /. collectors should the whole lot end up on the auction block.

The place is crazy. It's not just the History of AT&T, it's the Great Library of information technology. Hopefully SBC will see it that way too. Last I heard, they had completed indexing and uncrating over 9 miles of paper case files (researcher's project notes) from the 1890's to 1980's. The number of talented scientists who spent their lives at the Labs helping create the IT infrastructure you're soaking in is astounding. As a research lab supported by a monopoly utility, they had unprecedented resources to explore all kinds of ideas. It's all there. Neat stuff.

One of my favourite pieces was a 1960's prototype for an operator's uniform. Very Star Trek:TOS. Ohura's uniform in gold lamee. Some Suit thought it might be a good idea to have all the operators (almost entirely female at the time) wear uniforms, and this is what they came up with.

But I'm waxing philosophic. SBC will save the tech documents at least, to protect the intellectual property they're buying with the hard assets. As for the old phone booths, recording equipment and videophone prototypes, maybe they'll end up in private collections or museums. Either way, hopefully more people will get to see and appreciate them.

While Sean Quinlan and Sean Dorward were at Bell Labs the developed a block level file system Venti.

Multiple saves of indentical blocks of data are aggregated in the file system such that there is no replication of the actual bytes on the disk, a look up system is employed.

It is currently only available for plan9, though ports are in progress through the plan9ports project.

You are not expected to understand this.

Well that's a little out of context, but there is a short page about "odd" comments in UNIX which includes an explaination of the abovehere.

What's innovative about that ? It's a browser. People have done browsers
for a long time, and firefox didn't invent the web, nothing new. Sure Firefox has some nice bits here and there, by all means, but very innovative ? No.

Bittorrent, that's somewhat innovative.
So is perhaps the Speex codec.

In the somewhat same area
This
and that

are interresting reads :)

You almost have a point, and indeed the wording was previously different but with enough pressure from users and developers enough changes have occured that the now OSI Certified Lucent Public License Version 1.02 clearly states :

----

7. EXPORT CONTROL

Recipient agrees that Recipient alone is responsible for compliance with the United States export administration regulations (and the export control laws and regulation of any other countries).

----

On 9th Jan the GNU foundation and in particular RMS. changed their stance and agreed that :

The current license of Plan 9 does qualify as free software (and also as open source).

If you feel like trying it out, it boots from CD anyway, no need for a special LiveCD

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

I use secstore, I don't have to remember my passwords and they can be as long and as random as I like.

All I need is the password to secstore, which, in my case, is on the LAN.

secstore client - man page - for non-plan9 systems is now available as part of the Plan 9 from User Space project.

A browser is one thing and apparently the only thing the evidence supports. Why the jump to a Google OS?
Because Rob Pike was the developer of Plan 9 at Bell Labs. His hiring by Google would imply they are looking to develop their own OS. Microsoft is trying to push in on Google's territory, so it makes perfect sense for Google to push in on Microsoft's territory.

If you're mostly looking for new experiences, you might also give something like Plan 9 a try. And if you're really looking for adventure, there is alway the Hurd.

All the free tts systems sound the same as they did since the early 80s. Because they all use the same algorithms and data generated by the Navy. The nicer sounding ones that have more complete data sets, improved algorithms and are computationally more intensive are only available through special licensing. (the algorithms have multiple patents, the data has copyrights, etc).

Compare a public domain TTS like rsynth to a free, but commercial quality TTS like festival or Bell Lab's. It's funny how rsynth sounds a lot like the mac (although rsynth doesn't have a bunch of predefined settings to do different voices, you have to set all the parameters yourself to make it sound exactly like Bruce).

TTS technology doesn't move terribly fast. the TTS that was in the Mac 21 years ago is basically the same technology 30 years ago. But that's no excuse for Apple not to have moved on to using diphonemes or triphonemes like other systems. Apple is behind, but in the TTS world, 20 years behind is not all that far behind. (unlike say the harddrive world, where 20 years behind is the difference between 100s of gigabytes to 10s of megabytes. ouch)

One shouldn't use poor quality software like Linux and it's ilk as a benchmark for portability.

try plan9 or NetBSD where CPU portbility is a design goal.

No. True one time pads are informational theoretically secure. If you don't know the key, any given ciphertext can "decrypt" into any plaintext of the same length and it's not possible to determine which is correct. For this to be true the OTP must have been generated from true randomness - not a PRNG or stream cipher which is sometimes advertised as OTP.

Note that there are attacks against OTP such as bit-flipping attacks, traffic analysis, mounting a camera pointing to the screen, rubber hose cryptanalysis etc. An OTP is only provably secure if the adversary only has the ciphertext but nothing else.

Quantum computing can theoretically be used to break stuff like RSA by implementing Shor's algorithm. It would require much more powerful quantum computers than we have today though. I doubt that we'll see powerful enough quantum computers this century if at all.
It is of course theoretically possible to factor large numbers with conventional computers, it'd just take a long, long, long, long time or you'd have to be extremely lucky.

I haven't kept up to date with this field lately, but I believe it's still not known whether it will be possible for a quantum computer to break symmetrical ciphers. It's theoretically possible to break them (with or without quantum computers) as long as the encrypted message is longer than the unicity distance; an often misunderstood concept that's defined in Claude E. Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication from 1948.

Quantum encryption - which is really quantum key exchange - can be used to exchange an OTP. This would create an unbreakable cipher if you define "unbreakable" to mean "cannot be deciphered." It may still be possible to mount bit-flipping attacks etc. Quantum encryption is not very practical today though, and it's only useful in very few situations. It's interesting research which perhaps may someday result in more practical applications.

people had chosen plan9

Realising that mime types were *not* the answer esp. based on the file extension, the plumber does exactly what you ask but for *all* applications

It regex matches the text sent to it and acts accordingly.

I do almost what you ask but for the internal browser "mothra" and to firefox via ssh.

Mothra is getting old and can't even handle frames and tables so it is necessary to have a 4.x browser available for web access.

• Plan 9
• Inferno
• EROS

What you really need for these tricks is process-specific namespaces with bind mounts. Oh, wait, that's available in Linux. hmmm.

One of the earliest "how to use a mouse" movies, from twenty years ago: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/rob/movies/blit.mpg (linked from http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/rob/).

One of the earliest "how to use a mouse" movies, from twenty years ago: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/rob/movies/blit.mpg (linked from http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/rob/).

• Plan 9
• Inferno
• EROS

Or rather, Plan-9

Define the standard *nix system text encoding to be UTF-8. Require every tool to assume UTF-8 when no encoding or other modifiers are specified, and make UTF-8 support a requirement for every tool that wants to participate in the chaining/piping operations that are the backbone of *nix.

If you have 1000 files on a unix system, and they are all 90% similar, the system should be able to figure out how to store 90% of those blocks in the same space. And manage them so that none are deleted until all references to them are deleted. See Venti.

I was taking a look at plan 9 and I was impressed by the feature that allows every single process to have a unique perspective of the file system. For example, if a process wants to draw in its window, there is a special file in /dev (I think) that maps on it own window and so on. Features like this are implemented via special handling in normal Unix and are probably rare.

These ideas could perhaps extend the philosophy of "everything is a file" and at the same time improve security.

You misspelled bell. Bell Lab's Plan9

http://tinyurl.com/44yspProgramming Pearls by Jon Bently
http://tinyurl.com/5k9o4More Programming Pearls by Jon Bently

If you're even a little bit of a programmer, you'll be glad to have read these books. The second edition of Programming Pearls is online for your reading pleasure at http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/

The freely available online Unix System 7 Manual!

Laugh all you want, but there was a halfway serious effort at one point to see what it would take to get the Plan9 C toolchain (which is vastly simpler than GCC, although ISTR it doesn't support all of ANSI C) released under a BSD-compatible license. I think the motivation was a combination of GCC's GPL-ness and its size/complexity.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

So is this the first manual to have the venerable "Hello, World" programming example? At least in C right?

Too bad the plan9 compiler license isn't compatible with openbsd.

But you have to admit, using "The Creator's" compiler has a certain ring to it. I'd love to see plan9 in more places. Too bad the communities don't match up. Or what little is left of plan9's.

Too bad the plan9 compiler license isn't compatible with openbsd.

But you have to admit, using "The Creator's" compiler has a certain ring to it. I'd love to see plan9 in more places. Too bad the communities don't match up. Or what little is left of plan9's.

while programming in a multithreaded/multiprocessor environment takes a bit more thought than programming otherwise, it's not nearly as hard as it used to be - or rather, it needn't be so. many modern languages (like my favorite, Limbo) can give you multithreading support (with or without multiprocessors) effectively for free. as long as that goes with light-weight threads (like Inferno and Plan 9 give, or with the stupid "special light-weight process" junk present in many unixes), you've got most of the battle won (there's still some design questions to answer, but all your crap work goes away). even the older languages have a plethora of thread models that work (some better than others), at least enough to make it so that you don't have to think about threading more than the problem you're actually trying to solve. in these languages it's certainly not "free", but it makes the cost/benefit tradeoff much more reasonable than it used to be.

Many (if not most) of our developers use Linux as the "host" operating system for developing INTEGRITY and MULTI (our compiler/debugger/code-editor/etc...).

The concern is that Linux is not provably secure. With INTEGRITY, we can prove security and stability.

Have you read Reflections on Trusting Trust, by Ken Thompson? Its general observations, coupled with your own statements, would seem to undermine your claim that INTEGRITY is as secure as you claim it is. If Linux is a "weaker link" than INTEGRITY, and your developers trust the "weaker link" to work on INTEGRITY, then surely INTEGRITY can't be any more secure than Linux?

how can one possibly do anything with all that data that comes in

They wait until Person A is under suspicion and then review their related data.

No need to pre-filter it.

Block level storage systems such as Venti reduce the storage required.

iirc both the authors of that paper moved to Google when Lucent lost the ability to fund the labs.

Welcome to the world of per-process namespaces. They have to be created by hand, however (although you could go and fix that).

I also like what BeOS did. You could create live query directories which would be populated with any files that apply to a query. Combined with their (for lack of a better term) metadata file system, it was awesome.

Well he's being awfully quiet about it. There's no mention of it on his home page.

you're trusting your include to provide the expected behaviour from printf

you're trusting your compiler and linker to provide you with the expected behaviour from compiling and linking your source code

you're trusting the kernel to not modify the behaviour of the syscalls required to print

you're trusting the CPU to execute the instructions you think it executes

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Ken Thompson

It's fairly short and pretty generalized. Lots of pretty pictures though.

A quick search on Google ("silicon fabrication introduction") turns up arguably better links.

One from SGS Thompson
A basic one from Intel
From Bell Labs

And there are plenty more.

Plan 9 from outer space??

Not quite. Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

...and devices are too tightly tied to a specific kernel.

...and devices are too tightly tied to a specific kernel.

Plan 9 can't be all bad: they named an operating system after it.

So, you go to your local polling place and run md5sum on all the voting machines, and md5sum prints out the checksums that you expected it to print out. Now what? How can you be sure that:

1. md5sum hasn't been hacked to give the expected checksums, even for an altered binary?
2. there isn't a bug or back door in the "golden source code" that nobody noticed? (such bugs can be very, very subtle)
3. The compiler used to compile the "golden binaries" wasn't itself hacked to silently insert a back door into the binaries as part of the compilation process?
4. There isn't some hardware bug or sneaky microcode logic somewhere in the machine that might alter the way the software operates, so that even correct code does the wrong thing?
5. Some other clever trick that nobody has even thought of yet isn't in place?

Hey, what about these operations?!

Getting a bit offtopic, but while I really liked Code Complete, one of the most enlightening programming books I've read was The Practice of Programming. Check it out if you haven't yet.

...about patterns and architecture and such - On the Nature of 'The Nature of Order'.

It's a fairly short paper and can give you an idea of his style - or at least his style as it was 7 years ago.