3 ms·
30 years ago, much (UNIX) system software was built out of calls to system(), ie it would have shell commands do most of the steps. Partly this is because it is
by dan-robertson 4y ago
30 years ago, much (UNIX) system software was built out of calls to system(), ie it would have shell commands do most of the steps. Partly this is because it is hard to do everything in C and partly it is just laziness. This is partly the reason for terrible security (the IFS environment variable could be changed to change the meaning of the system() calls and trivially make a suid program do bad things).
I think you’re giving programmers of the past too much credit.
- salawat 4y agoI think you're not giving them enough. They managed to have a glaring security hole to be exploited, but no one bothered to. It took the bunch of degenerates we have around today with no respect for the sanctity of someone else's machine for this type of practice to even become a problem. You'll be amazed how many seemingly intractable technical issues aren't due to having been solved at higher layers of abstraction. Nowadays with things like clear cut ownership of post first sale ownership breaking down, we're actually getting bitten by having to try to technically solve problems, previously made tractable by the social consensus between professionals. As a consequence, here we are with a now crappy, pathological Notepad.
- dan-robertson 4y agoWe must be talking about a different 1990s. It’s true that before then it was easier to get away with bad security due to few computers being networked, and it took a while for eg buffer overflows to be exploited (smashing the stack for fun and profit was November ’96). But in the first half of the decade or so there were lots of vulnerabilities found in sendmail and suchlike.