[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


The Ken Thompson hack

1 2020-03-18 19:45

How do we make people more aware of this terrible danger? Some bitch started yelling at me because I didn't give enough of a shit about Covid-19 for her taste. That's her unique obsession right now. There's no talking about something else.

I tried to share my own preoccupations with her, things that matter much more than yet another lame Chinese flu pandemic. I tried to tell her that she cannot trust the compiler, even if she compiled it herself after auditing its source code. I shared some links, and advised her to read them carefully, but to no avail. She had hang up the phone before I had a chance to bring up the topic of Intel's out-of-the-band Management Engine.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack

2 2020-03-18 19:57 *

It has already been solved: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/

3 2020-03-20 06:34

>>2

Gash [ https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gash ] is a work-in-progress implementation of a POSIX shell in Scheme, that is already capable-enough to interpret Autoconf-generated configure scripts. It can run on Guile but it is designed to also run on Mes, meaning that we can use it early on during bootstrap.

The stage0 [ https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0 ] project by Jeremiah Orians starts everything from ~512 bytes; virtually nothing. Have a look at this incredible project if you haven’t already done so.

They're doing God's work!

4 2020-03-29 18:32

I'm not sure why you think women are capable of perceiving anything that they can't immediately interface with

I've been trying to find a low-tech alternative to modern PCs for this very reason OP, so far I've found Kolibri OS to be the best option, althought I'd prefer something similar running on an actual 8-bit PC

So this hack would work even if it was assembly? if I write in pure machine code, would this be avoidable?

5 2020-03-29 19:39 *

I'm not sure why you think women are capable of perceiving anything that they can't immediately interface with

I expect posters on this board to be less stupid than this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem

6 2020-03-30 00:53

I'm not sure why you think women are capable of perceiving anything that they can't immediately interface with

I'm not sure why your patently superior masculine intellect is wasting it's precious thought-time composing such puellar notions as femmenine intellectual inferiority.

7 2020-03-31 10:20 *

>>4

So this hack would work even if it was assembly? if I write in pure machine code, would this be avoidable?

If you write (and bootstrap!) a compiler yourself then there's no Thompson hack. But, as you are aware, you can't trust the hardware nowadays. Proprietary bootloaders and firmwares all the way down, loading unauditable binaries, doing things in your back. Modern CPU even have out-of-band management engines (a whole secondary computer with its CPU, OS and network access)
I wouldn't use Kolibri myself but I've been searching for a reasonably open small computer to run Linux. Something that -unlike the Raspberry Pi- can boot and, why not, use hardware graphics acceleration without binary blobs. If you've been looking into that yourself and have some findings to share... I think there are SoCs based on the Freescale i.MX6 platform with Vivante GPU that should fill the bill. Which one, I'm not sure. Keeping an eye on Risc-V boards too.

8-bit

You could buy a Commodore 64 and run LUnix on it. There's a TCP/IP stack, so you should be able to post a message in a textboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix
Necrocomputing is but a nice hobby. On the other hand, if you have $6000 to spend, the Talos II workstation is FSF-certified hardware: https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

8 2020-04-10 18:34

What if a cyber-brain could generate its own ghost... Create a soul by itself
What could you base your belief in yourself on then?

9 2020-06-15 16:21

Advances on the Guix front!

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25/

I had no idea glibc depended on Python. I'm a bit disappointed that the GNU world is not self-contained.

10 2020-06-15 17:42

>>9
I once tried to maintain a system without Perl and Python but they always end up being pulled as build dependencies.

11 2020-06-15 18:06 *

>>10
You could just do what the mad Stanislav has done to avoid GCC 5+ and Python 3.x and just go a little further back: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3682

12 2020-06-16 13:36

>>7

If you write (and bootstrap!) a compiler yourself then there's no Thompson hack

Bootstrap better mean from wires making logic gates then an asic from those logic gates.

if you've been looking into that yourself and have some findings to share.

Yes, mesa recently added support for a lot of arm gpus without needing blobs. Not raspi though. Arm sbcs have ondie readonly boot code that is closed source usually.
>>6
This is a good post, lol.
>>9
They used linux instead of clinging to hurd all the way.
>>11
I must be mad since I agree with and have done a lot of what he has done.

13 2020-06-16 15:04

>>12

I must be mad since I agree with and have done a lot of what he has done.

I mean Copernicus was surely mad, it's not a insult.

14 2020-06-16 15:16

>>13
That was a joke but I am mad and not in the good way my IQ dropped by 20 points which means a 18 drop in G.

15 2020-06-16 16:20

>>14
Well Copernicus didn't have any mental illnesses that I'm aware of, just slightly irrational beleifs which turned out to be correct. Mental illness is a very difficult thing. Anti-psychotic medications have been proven to not only stop but in some cases reverse the decline in grey matter, but I know many people struggle to take their medications due to side effects etc. Do you have a strong support network, and do you avoid self medicating? These seem to be the most crucial indicators of quality of life of the mentally ill.

16 2020-06-16 20:19 *

>>15
I'm not in a position to take antipsychotics, I'm not that flavour. Should inform nootropic communities about antipsychotics reversing grey matter, if they haven't already jumped on that.

17 2020-06-16 23:09

Copernicus

Yeah, nice translation you have there from Ibn al-Shatir's work found in the Alhambra after the fall of Granada. If you're going to try to pass it off as a european "discovery" instead of acknowledging the source of your translation while trying to play catch up to islamic astronomy, maybe try not to copy Ibn al-Shatir's drawings exactly. It kind of hurts the fantasy bubble of european "discovery".

18 2020-06-16 23:40 *

>>17
It doesn't matter too much for the point I was making.

19 2020-06-17 01:13 *

>>16
I think I was actually incorrect about antipsychotics anyway, if anything they might have the opposite effect. I might have been thinking of Lithium, but it's been awhile since I've taken my class on mental illness, and I'm just some guy on the internet anyway. In anycase I wish you the best anona

20 2020-06-17 03:04 *

>>19
Being wrong about that is perfect for a majority of nootropic communities. They just want an easy way out, I was assuming you weren't trying that much with the reply. Now there are some that take it like those who body build with a properly studied and audited protein diet, those don't deserve semishitposts that could ruin their mind if took seriously. You'd have to link the sources for them to even consider attempting it anyway, if I was to go shill it and took you seriously, I'd back off the second there was no sources.
There is a lot of different matter in the brain, nootropic, mind tuning, is a perfect fit for modulating this.

21 2020-06-17 14:27

>>10
Try maintaining one without Bell Labs interfaces.

22 2020-06-17 15:11 *

>>20
I'm sorry, I was reckless and stupid. The first study shows that antipsychotics have more complex effects than simply increasing or decreasing gray matter volume, the second shows that lithium increases gray matter volume, both of these studies only apply to the relevant groups of mental illnesses mentioned in the studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4790397/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055479/
Licensed psychiatrist are the only people qualified to give this sort of advice anyway, so even continuing to offer this information is still reckless and stupid of me.

23 2020-06-17 15:20 *

>>22
Your assuming jurisdictions now. For the jurisdiction your assuming, you can just claim your not a licensed practitioner and say whatever you want or you can waste les time and funding if that floats your boat, just don't claim that was your agenda. In the vain of serious discussion, this is over.

24 2020-06-17 15:24 *

>>23
okay.

25 2020-06-17 17:06

Lithium is hardcore.

26 2020-06-17 18:30

negative. It's a naturally element.

27 2020-06-17 18:44 *

>>25,26
Probably best to end this conversation now considering both the participants did already.

28 2020-06-30 19:22

>>17

islamic astronomy

arabs were the european devils of their time, where the famed islamic art, philosophy and astronomy were mostly produced by subjugated Iranian scholars, who used their refined linguistic skills to leave messages to readers on how they really felt about their "islamic" oppressors and their enforced religion.
but that's not the kind of stuff that your local college commissar will tell you, you have to actually read their works for that.

29 2020-06-30 20:17 *

>>28
Did they leave your "refined linguistic skills [...] messages to readers" in the letters with Fibonacci number indices? Did they also predict the fall of the Soviet Union, locate Christ's descendants, and find the first example in history of a people happy at having been conquered?

30


VIP:

do not edit these