asciilifeform: 'Exploiting the flaw in the vulnerable module n_hdlc does not require Microgate or SyncLink hardware. The module is automatically loaded if an unprivileged user opens a pseudoterminal and calls TIOCSETD ioctl for it setting N_HDLC line discipline.'
asciilifeform: in other recent lulz , https://archive.is/xXW9T >> '...race condition in the n_hdlc Linux kernel driver (drivers/tty/n_hdlc.c). It can be exploited to gain a local privilege escalation. ... This driver provides HDLC serial line discipline and comes as a kernel module in many Linux distributions, which have CONFIG_N_HDLC=m in the kernel config. ...introduced on 22 June 2009'
asciilifeform: ( for noobs -- 'stack cookie' is the -- nowadays common, at least in gccland -- practice of putting a random turd on the end of a stack that overflows, and later testing if it is still there before popping a return addr )
asciilifeform reading the vendor's www, the 'magical tech' seems to resolve to... stack cookies
asciilifeform: 'Cybellum Is The First Deterministic Zero-Day Prevention Platform™ That Eliminates Unknown Threats With First-Step Threat Protection™' << lel
asciilifeform: but the expectation -- has vanished. konsoomer expects, dare say enjoys, crashes, 0days.
asciilifeform: today -- can afford them, your cpu's tlb cache alone is 50x the size of the bolix total transistor count.
asciilifeform: the concepts in question reduce to very basic sanity, which the transistor-impoverished people of the '70s-'80s simply could not afford : cpu that understands context ('is this word part of a bignum? where does the array end?'), programs that hold enough info to restart/repair, and various other.
asciilifeform: the bolix -- also needs full rewrite. 99+% of what was in it, was to work around the frightening limitations of the tech of the period.
asciilifeform: simply, the other minis had by then vanished.
asciilifeform: incidentally the cost was quite typical of minis.
asciilifeform: (for most of the life of the product, they were 1bit b&w, for the elementary reason that no one would buy $mil of video ram)
asciilifeform: speaking of demise of bolix, one of the oddities behind the princely (like entire bulldozer!111) cost of the machines, was the crt, at the time there was NO mass manufacture of high-res (1152x864 iirc) crt, anywhere on planet3; they had'em custom-blown.
asciilifeform: in other lulz, https://archive.is/ADnD6 >> 'Nunes set off the firestorm with a news conference earlier in the day in which he described the surveillance of Trump aides through what’s called “incidental collection,” something he noted was routine and legal.'
asciilifeform: could have very easily not made-bank.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: moar analogous to ac current. which very nearly went to same place as symbolics.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not apart from the amex fraud sensor thing, afaik.
asciilifeform: 'nothing kills like bad money' or how it went.
asciilifeform: of having been a miniature steklov institute, in turn part of a miniature su, reagan's bezzle.
asciilifeform: 'we live in the best of computings, bolix died on own power' etc
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is difficult to compress decade of archaeology into 1 persuasive paragraph. esp. to persuade a fella who in his panglossism has determined not to be persuadable.
asciilifeform: decade of archaeological work == 'only feelings' nao? lol
asciilifeform: cpu that obeys type constraints is quite unlike the familiar idiot kind. in exactly same way that trains equipped with westinghouse's air brake, are unlike the earlier ones where brake man ran from car to car pulling ropes.
asciilifeform: this equivalence does not exist here.
asciilifeform: on the other hand, there is not ONE sane cpu on the market. the kind with enforced type tags and bounds.☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the basic tech of internal combustion -- was not lost.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: arguably, in the sense where sikorsky's chopper is interesting, while davinci's -- much less .
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu is free to be as 'unpersuaded' as he wants. fact: his machine -- can overrun an array; bolix -- could not; his box -- crashes, cannot be examined or uncrashed (yes) -- bolix -- could; and various other aspects, well covered in teh logz.☟︎
asciilifeform: and the iron -- is also of interest, in so far as it made the soft -- possible.
asciilifeform: and ergo the software, to the extent it embodied these concepts -- which was quite large -- is interesting;
asciilifeform: the old iron, doppler , is not -- contrary to the delusions of 'collectors' -- interesting per se. the ~software~ was not even interesting per se -- it was a tall pile of stinking mit hacks. the CONCEPTS, however, as described in http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 , WERE interesting.☟︎
asciilifeform: the result, however, is that the ~singularly~ most interesting comp from 1980s -- is ~entirely lost .
asciilifeform: it wasn't an outrageous / illogical / atrocious thing to do. smbx was a fabless chip maker which competed directly with, among others, TI ('explorer' lispm)
asciilifeform: symbolics -- also quite deliberately -- never even printed an honest instruction set reference, for any of the machines.
