BSD Archives - The Silicon Underground

Predicting the future, circa 2003

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 11:00:38 +0000

In the heat of the moment, I searched my blog this weekend for quotes that could potentially be taken out of context and found something rather prophetic that I wrote in the heat of the moment 11 1/2 years ago:

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Bash is worse than heartbleed! Oh noes!

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:00:35 +0000

A really bad remote code execution bug surfaced yesterday, in Bash–the GNU replacement for the Unix shell. If you have a webserver running, or possibly just SSH, it can be used to execute arbitrary code. It affects anything Unixy–Linux, BSD, Mac

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Curious conspiracies… or maybe just progress all at once

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 11:00:09 +0000

In the wake of Truecrypt’s sudden implosion, someone sent me a link to this curious blog post. I can see why many people might find the timing interesting, but there are a number of details this particular blog post doesn’t

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How to be an Apple Genius

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:39:44 +0000

Gizmodo got its grubby little hands on a training manual allegedly used in Apple Stores. It looks credible, and answers some questions. Apple’s marketing is incredibly effective–probably the most effective that I’ve seen in my lifetime. This manual demonstrates that

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Thanks for the misinformation, Disney

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 21:52:52 +0000

In one of its throwaway kid’s sitcoms, Disney insinuates that open source software contains spyware and using it is a ‘rookie mistake’. Open source software rarely contains viruses or spyware. Since it’s open for examination, changes to the code that

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SCO v. IBM winds toward resolution

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:23:48 +0000

Slashdot reported yesterday that SCO v. IBM is back on. Well, it is, sort of. The case never was fully resolved, due to SCO running out of money and filing for bankruptcy. Groklaw has the details. If this sounds vaguely

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Open-source licenses, the CISSP, and the real world

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:09:56 +0000

You may have a question about open-source licenses on your CISSP exam. I don’t remember the specifics and wouldn’t be able to repeat them anyway, but I had a question on my exam where knowing the differences was helpful in

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Open sourcing code doesn’t necessarily mean people will rush to it

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 22:40:38 +0000

John C. Dvorak wrote a nice layman's introduction to open source this week on PCMag.com. But he makes at least one big false assumption.

Dvorak says he'd love to see old code open sourced. Some examples he sought, such as CP/M, CP/M-86, and GEM, have already been open source for years. Caldera, after buying the intellectual property of the former Digital Research from Novell, released just about everything that wasn't directly related to DR-DOS, some of it as GPL, and some under other licenses. The results have hardly been earth shattering.

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That PC wasn’t broken, it was just spyware

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 19:30:56 +0000

I "repaired" a PC this weekend. Actually it wasn't much of a repair. It had problems: disk errors, applications crashed a lot, the computer crashed a lot, startup times were slow, and at times the computer was really unresponsive.

At first I suspected viruses, but I quickly found the virus software was up to date, which was a good thing.

The problem was spyware.

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Well, I’m a Slowlaris administrator now

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 23:05:57 +0000

Let me run down <strike>my list of qualifications</strike> what I know about Solaris.

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