Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson
VCF East 2019
Tag: Computer
A cloud without Google and Microsoft for all italian schools
A bill just presented to the italian Senate proposes the establishment of one “single national interconnection network” called UNIRE (“to join”). The mission of this network would be to connect all italian schools with each other and to the Internet, with a private cloud, managed by the State.
This cloud would host platforms for digital teaching, alternatives to those of Google and Microsoft, maximizing data protection of underage students.
This post translates and comments the main points of an interview about UNIRE to the first signatory of the bill, senator Maria Laura Mantovani (Five Star Movement).
Objectives of both the Bill and UNIRE
The bill aims to implement the “School 4.0” intervention included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). More specifically, UNIRE would provide:
interconnection to all schools of all types and levels among themselves, with the regional school offices, with the Ministry of Education and globally to the Internet;
basic network services such as DNS, data storage services and cloud computing;
— source stop.zona-m.net | 2021-03-23
Python communist revolution
A man once said to abolish the classes or something like that. Unfortunately, it is impossible to abolish class in python without breaking the language, so we do the next best thing: we consider that all classes are born equal1.
Use this module to unite all classes, and initiate the global communist revolution2:
import communism
class OurClass1:
pass
class OurClass2:
pass
communism.revolution(globals())
# As all classes are equal (in __hash__ and in __eq__)
# This is why you cannot put more than one object in any Set or Dict
print(set([OurClass1(), OurClass2(), OurClass2()]))
# >> {}`
— source [boycott] github.com
[you could avoid github. it is a symbol of slavery.]
A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
“The Univac Air Lines Reservations System: a special-purpose application of a general-purpose computer” was published in 1958 and talks about the first computerized airline reservation system.
The system was up 99.7 percent of the time for its first six weeks and the authors envisioned a future system serving 1,200 travel agents simultaneously.
— source philip.greenspun.com | Philip Greenspun | Nov 4, 2021
[computer not came from the sky to serve people.]
How to install Hyperbola Gnu
Refer https://www.hyperbola.info/ for more information.
Find existing partitions. lsbkl -f Select partition type. Gpt or MBR [1] cfdisk /dev/sda For MBR partition type, Create 2 partitions. One for root, 24gb, one for swap 4gb. [2] Formart partitions mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 mkswp /dev/sda2 Mount partition mount /dev/sda1 /mnt pacman-key –init pacman-key –populate hyperbola arch pacman-key –refresh-keys If error happens repeat the above 3. Edit mirror list. nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlists Install base system pacstrap /mnt base genfstab -U -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab arch-chroot /mnt (now prompt changes) echo myhostname > /etc/hostname nano /etc/locale.gen (uncomment en_USUTF8 UTF8) locale-gen useradd -m -G wheel passwd echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf export LANG= en_US.UTF-8 ln -s /usr/share/ZoneInfo/Asia/Calcutta /etc/localtime hwclock –systohc Set root password passwd root Install softwares pacman -S grub os-prober grub-install /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg umount -R /mnt reboot Intall other softwares Start dhcp client dhcpcd pacman -Syy pacman -S xorg pacman -S xorg-video-amdgpu xf86-video-ati pacman -S plasma if needed can install plasma-wayland-session Set daemon programs rc-update add dhcpcd default rc-update add sddm default reboot Welcome to gnu. Some other options For setuping up different partitions for home and var After [2] do the following, mkdir /mnt/home mkdir /mnt/var mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/home mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/var [1] For gpt partition type, 2 extra partitions are required. /dev/sda1, boot partition with 512M (linux partion) /dev/sda2, BIOS boot (hex code EF02) with 1M (bios partition) mkdir /mnt/boot mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
They are not security company, the only thing they sell is a virus
Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over
This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.
This is a large claim that comes on the heels of many premature forecasts of capitalism’s demise, especially from the left. But this time it may well be true
The clues have been visible for a while. Bond and share prices, which should be moving in sharply opposite directions, have been skyrocketing in unison, occasionally falling but always in lockstep. Similarly, the cost of capital (the return demanded to own a security) should be falling with volatility; instead, it has been rising as future returns become more uncertain.
Perhaps the clearest sign that something serious is afoot appeared on August 12 last year. On that day, we learned that, in the first seven months of 2020, the United Kingdom’s national income had tanked by over 20%, well above even the direst predictions. A few minutes later, the London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%. Nothing comparable had ever occurred. Finance had become fully decoupled from the real economy.
But do these unprecedented developments really mean that we no longer live under capitalism? After all, capitalism has undergone fundamental transformations before. Should we not
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 05/07/2021
Arjen Kamphuis Infosecurity Book Launch
Friday evening I went to the Vrijland estate near Schaarsbergen/Arnhem. This former hq of the Dutch 11th Air Mobile Brigade (who still reside nearby) is currently used by the Hack42 collective. Here the book launch of “Infosecurity (Gran knows why)” and opening of the art exhibition “Into Nothingness” took place, in the former chapel of the estate.
Arjen Kamphuis was well known for his work on government transparency, and especially IT and online security. He e.g trained journalists on how to do their work more safely, and consulted various companies on their IT security. He also e.g. consulted the Dutch government in 2013 on why using voting computers is bad practice in an accountable democracy. Next to that he was an avid hiker and mountaineer. In August 2018, during a trip in the north of Norway he went missing, and is presumed to have died due to a kajaking accident. I’ve known Arjen through his work for well over a decade (and I’ve written about his disappearance here before). I’m sad about his disappearance, and as a result have been more active in paying what I learned from him and what he made me aware of forward since then.
Friends of Arjen have collected a selection of his writings and talks, as well as the text of his 2014 book “Information Security for Journalists” (2017 Dutch translation) that he wrote together with journalist Silkie Carlo. Friday they launched a printed version of that collection with the title
— source zylstra.org | Ton Zijlstra | 26 Jan, 2020 
Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for ‘killing’ the ECC industry
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being “instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation.” ECC stands for error-correcting code. ECC memory uses additional parity bits to verify that the data read from memory is the same as the data that was written. Without this check, memory is vulnerable to occasional corruption where a bit is flipped spontaneously. Memory can also be attacked using a technique called Rowhammer, where rapid repeated reads of the same memory locations can cause adjacent locations to change their state. ECC memory solves these problems and has been available for over 50 years yet most personal computers do not use it. Cost is a factor but what riles Torvalds is that Intel has made ECC support a feature of its Xeon range, aimed at servers and high-end workstations, and does not support it in other ranges such as the Core series.
— source theregister.com | 4 Jan 2021
dont buy intel chip based products.
UEFI images that could be used for malware transport
Russian security firm Kaspersky claims to have found a number of suspicious UEFI images, based on the leaked source code of the Italian firm Hacking Team, containing a malicious implant that could be used place a malicious update on a Windows system.
The images placed a file called IntelUpdate.exe in the victim’s Windows Startup folder.
Researchers Mark Lechtik, Igor Kuznetsov and Yury Parshin said in a detailed blog post that this was the second time that malicious UEFI firmware being used by a threat actor had been found in the wild.
— source itwire.com | 06 Oct 2020