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Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix acc
by dhosek 6y ago
Some of those good intentions got tested early enough. There was an instance of a student at Harvey Mudd in the 80s who set up mail forwarding from his Unix account to his VMS account and forwarding from his VMS account to his Unix account. The first e-mail that came in eventually brought both systems to their knees. And the trust remained pretty unbroken regardless of this. Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough between corporate and university systems, no VPN needed (although a quick google reveals, no VPN invented either). The levels of access that were granted were rather shocking by contemporary standards.
- icedchai 6y agoIn the 90's I had my home network completely exposed to the public. Fully routable IP's. No firewall. It was a different world then.
- dhosek 6y agoI had two machines at home in those days, a Win2k machine and a Mac. Both were locked down against remote logins by default. When my parents first got broadband, their Windows 95 machine was not locked by default and some courteous hacker updated startup.bat to alert them of the vulnerability.
- zokier 6y ago> Into the 90s, I could telnet easily enough between corporate and university systems, no VPN needed (although a quick google reveals, no VPN invented either). Apparently IPsec, SSH, and SSL all appeared in 1995, as did SHA1 and 3DES, must have been quite a year for crypto. But those took time to catch on, especially as the systems were far more fragmented then than today. It took five years more to get rid of the silly export regulations finally on 2000. That should illustrate how new thing even relatively reliable widespread crypto is, before systems were far more trust based
- jachee 6y agoI did my junior (high-school) year English research paper on RSA and public key encryption that year (1995). I recall using a phrase along the lines of "This may lead to more trust of The Information Superhighway, and enable its use as a commercial trade center."
- zokier 6y agoCuriously RSA is the one thing that's ancient, coming from the 70's. I don't know if it was used much at all for anything before mid nineties though.
- jachee 6y agoYeah, they'd done the math bit, but there wasn't really any practical application until Phil Zimmermann built and distributed (rather cleverly in some cases) PGP.
- _wldu 6y agoSome research edus in the US still run open networks with globally routed IPs on every node and no edge firewalls. While they are a dying breed, they still exist.
- icedchai 6y agoWhen I was in college in the 90's, the whole school was like that, including dorms. Fun times.