The act of breaking into a computer system… (Ken Thompson)

Ken Thompson’s quote: “The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor’s house.” (1984).

Nowadays, this and such an others similar “behaviours” are considered crimes in most of the UE countries. We think that what is a crime in the “real” life have to be also a crime in the “digital-virtual” life –when possible.

I say it, just in case –there are a lot of “special” people out there. :))

But Ken Thompson –father of UNIX–, said much more a lot of time ago (1984)…

Reflections on Trusting Trust
Ken Thompson

Another one to think about it…

Ode to security researchers

Martin Pittenauer – 0×2a: Ode to security researchers

“Dear security researchers, that…

• don’t prance around like a pwnie over every 0day
• value responsibility and public interests over your own ego
• have grown up
• don’t complain about people who haven’t, all the time
• understand software development processes and the meaning of “trivial”
• don’t insist on being baby-sitted 24/7 by $BIG_COMPANY
• aren’t at the center of the universe
• can resist making cheap jokes
• have written code worth mentioning, to broaden your horizon
• can make their outcome without having to pimp their personality, sell stuff to questionable characters or use tactics akin to extortion
• face discussion instead of declaring everybody else stupid
• don’t try so very hard to be a cool kid

…, I wish there were more of you.”

Well, as an open-mined person, I have decided to transcript this to your consideration…

Finder’s Locum

unixjunkie: Finder’s Locum.

Worth a read.

Nervous Breakdown

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” – Bertrand Russell

opensolaris and principles

“Our principles:
(…)
We will be respectful and honest. Developers and users have the right to be treated with respect. We do not make ad hominem attacks, and we encourage constructive criticism. Our commitment to civil discourse allows new users and contributors with contrarian ideas an opportunity to be heard without intimidation. (…)”

Burnout

Can’t Get No Satisfaction
In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith.

Scientist Organizes Resistance To Polygraphs (via Slashdot)

Scientist Organizes Resistance To Polygraphs:

“Brad Holian, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is using a blog to organize resistance to plans for random polygraph and drug testing of Lab scientists. Holian writes: ‘Polygraphy is an insulting affront to scientists, since a committee of the National Academy of Sciences has declared that, beyond being inadmissible in court, there is no scientific basis for polygraphs. In my opinion, by agreeing to be polygraphed, one thereby seriously jeopardizes his or her claim to being a scientist, which is presumably the principal reason for employment for many scientists at Los Alamos.’”

From “Leopard Technology Series…”

From Leopard Technology Series for Developers.

Picking Up the Pace of Cocoa Application Development
“Cocoa is, quite simply, the best tool to use to create compelling modern Mac OS X applications. Thanks to Interface Builder and the richness of the Application Kit and Foundation frameworks, many tasks that take hundreds or thousands of lines of code in other environments are taken care of in a line or two. The lingua franca of Cocoa is the highly dynamic Objective-C. In Leopard, Objective-C has been modernized with garbage collection, fast iteration, and powerful declared property accessors. These features will help increase your productivity when you work with the language. (…)”

(…)
Security Enhancements
“Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit.
Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on. (…)”

(…)
OS Foundations
“Leopard certainly won’t be UNIX in name only. Apple will submit Leopard and Leopard Server to The Open Group for certification against the UNIX ‘03 product standard. (…)”

/dev/fd

via Amit (see Blogroll)

Mac OS X Filesystems
Local Filesystems
(…)
Network Filesystems
(…)
Other/Pseudo Filesystems

fdesc

“The fdesc filesystem is typically mounted on /dev/fd. It’s functionality is similar to /proc//fd (or simply /proc/self/fd) on Linux, that is, it provides a list of all active file descriptors for the currently running process. Note that a typical Linux system has /dev/fd symbolically linked to /proc/self/fd.

/etc/rc mounts the fdesc filesystem during system startup (…)

The “/dev/fd*” files are special devices. These aren’t really taking up that much space on your system. They allow a process to access file descriptors by number; 0,1,2 are standard input, standard output, and standard error, and other open files start with 3.”

more info: ‘man mount_fdesc’ (8): mount the file-descriptor file system.

Finder File/Folder Overwrite Bug (¿?) :))

Thursday, February 27, 2003 (!!)

Finder File/Folder Overwrite Bug

Credit where credit is due!