4 ms·

The point about WCHAR size reminded me of how little browser security mattered back then. Kinda interesting to think about how the internet was so fresh that th

The point about WCHAR size reminded me of how little browser security mattered back then. Kinda interesting to think about how the internet was so fresh that there wasn't such a focus on a secure application. I wonder how many buffer over/underflow exploits were completely ignored.

on_ 11y ago
Danny Hillis gives a great talk called "The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B"[0]. In the talk, outside of security, he was talking about the culture of the early internet. It was really interesting, he said he still has a phonebook sized book of email addresses. He registered the 2nd domain on the entire internet (i think it was symbology but maybe that was the first) and he could have whatever he wanted. He summed up the culture of the time as, "then I realized it would be great to have a couple other domain names, but I thought that wouldn't be very nice"[approximated]. edit: Sorry forgot to make the point. Paul Graham says it in the Pycon 08' talk, it was built for guys at Bell labs to ask one another to get lunch. The people on the early internet were often scientists, engineers and academics and thus had mutual respect for one another. Stallman talks about not even having passwords on stuff, these were academics who were personally or professionally friendly so security wasn't at the forefront of the design. [0]https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_crash_we_need_a_plan_b?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_cr...
- hga 11y ago
  [Danny Hillis] registered the 2nd domain on the entire internet (i think it was symbology but maybe that was the first) That would be Symbolics, the best known Lisp Machine company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics Which he personally did not like at all due to its role in suppressing use of Macsyma outside of its machines. Per Wikipedia his Thinking Machines "think.com" was 3rd, per http://interwebs.top5.com/then-and-now-5-oldest-domain-names/ http://interwebs.top5.com/then-and-now-5-oldest-domain-names... BBN, which helped build a lot of the ARPANET and Internet was 2nd, think.com was followed by the MMC consortium and DEC. As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security, just obscurity, although a password system did have to be added by the end of the '70s. The threat environment was certainly much much less back then, but computer time was very dear, and the most common paradigm required explicit budgeting, accounts that kept track of each CPU second used, etc. One reason PCs became so popular, their bigger engineering workstation brothers, etc. And plenty of people were thinking about security, e.g. see the Multics project.
  - on_ 11y ago
    This was really interesting. Thanks. His talk was fascinating and really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed. I thought that bit was really interesting. Rarely am I early, but if I get in on a service well before others I think about this and only register a single acct.
    - hga 11y ago
      I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed. That was indeed the culture of ITS, but it was mediated by very competent and humane admins. The nature of AI research meant that there were times some would need to pretty much take over the machine to do something hard, or quasi-real time (e.g. robotics, or a demo). So this was allowed, but e.g. I remember ... Jeff Schiller, I think it was, telling about how someone upped the priority of a long computation on MIT-MC too high, and rather than kill it and lose what it had accomplished up to that point, they set it to a lower priority (which, I note, anyone with the requisite system knowledge could do) so it wouldn't interfere with other users, and then educated the user about how to politely accomplish his goals (e.g. MIT-MC had a lot of spare cycles at times, it was bloody fast by the time dawn broke, and logged in from the VT-52 in the middle of it I could see lights advance every time I typed in a character).
  - lispm 11y ago
    Symbolics.com was the first .com domain. > Which he personally did not like at all due to its role in suppressing use of Macsyma outside of its machines. Symbolics offered Macsyma on other platforms. Anyway Hillis' problems with Symbolics can't have been very deep, since Thinking Machines used Symbolics Lisp Machines extensively and offered them commercially as frontends for the Connection Machine. > As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security Stallman was reading other people's mails and he was threatening to sabotage other people, wasn't he?
    - hga 11y ago

on_ 11y ago

Danny Hillis gives a great talk called "The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B"[0]. In the talk, outside of security, he was talking about the culture of the early internet. It was really interesting, he said he still has a phonebook sized book of email addresses. He registered the 2nd domain on the entire internet (i think it was symbology but maybe that was the first) and he could have whatever he wanted. He summed up the culture of the time as, "then I realized it would be great to have a couple other domain names, but I thought that wouldn't be very nice"[approximated]. edit: Sorry forgot to make the point. Paul Graham says it in the Pycon 08' talk, it was built for guys at Bell labs to ask one another to get lunch. The people on the early internet were often scientists, engineers and academics and thus had mutual respect for one another. Stallman talks about not even having passwords on stuff, these were academics who were personally or professionally friendly so security wasn't at the forefront of the design. [0]https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_crash_we_need_a_plan_b?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_cr...

hga 11y ago
[Danny Hillis] registered the 2nd domain on the entire internet (i think it was symbology but maybe that was the first) That would be Symbolics, the best known Lisp Machine company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics Which he personally did not like at all due to its role in suppressing use of Macsyma outside of its machines. Per Wikipedia his Thinking Machines "think.com" was 3rd, per http://interwebs.top5.com/then-and-now-5-oldest-domain-names/ http://interwebs.top5.com/then-and-now-5-oldest-domain-names... BBN, which helped build a lot of the ARPANET and Internet was 2nd, think.com was followed by the MMC consortium and DEC. As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security, just obscurity, although a password system did have to be added by the end of the '70s. The threat environment was certainly much much less back then, but computer time was very dear, and the most common paradigm required explicit budgeting, accounts that kept track of each CPU second used, etc. One reason PCs became so popular, their bigger engineering workstation brothers, etc. And plenty of people were thinking about security, e.g. see the Multics project.
- on_ 11y ago
  This was really interesting. Thanks. His talk was fascinating and really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed. I thought that bit was really interesting. Rarely am I early, but if I get in on a service well before others I think about this and only register a single acct.
  - hga 11y ago
    I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed. That was indeed the culture of ITS, but it was mediated by very competent and humane admins. The nature of AI research meant that there were times some would need to pretty much take over the machine to do something hard, or quasi-real time (e.g. robotics, or a demo). So this was allowed, but e.g. I remember ... Jeff Schiller, I think it was, telling about how someone upped the priority of a long computation on MIT-MC too high, and rather than kill it and lose what it had accomplished up to that point, they set it to a lower priority (which, I note, anyone with the requisite system knowledge could do) so it wouldn't interfere with other users, and then educated the user about how to politely accomplish his goals (e.g. MIT-MC had a lot of spare cycles at times, it was bloody fast by the time dawn broke, and logged in from the VT-52 in the middle of it I could see lights advance every time I typed in a character).
- lispm 11y ago
  Symbolics.com was the first .com domain. > Which he personally did not like at all due to its role in suppressing use of Macsyma outside of its machines. Symbolics offered Macsyma on other platforms. Anyway Hillis' problems with Symbolics can't have been very deep, since Thinking Machines used Symbolics Lisp Machines extensively and offered them commercially as frontends for the Connection Machine. > As for the security, it was actually quite unusual that the ITS operating system machines he, Stallman, etc. used had essentially no security Stallman was reading other people's mails and he was threatening to sabotage other people, wasn't he?
  - hga 11y ago