Owing to its BSD heritage, OpenBSD ships with a few games installed in /usr/games. Quite a few, in fact. There are more programs in games (46) than in /bin (43). Some of them aren’t really games, but more like toys, but nevertheless there they are. They aren’t exactly the focus of OpenBSD, but they’re still part of the system and do get the occasional maintenance update.
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Watched two movies.
Automata. Starring Antonio Banderas. This starts out like some of the best Asimov robot short stories, especially Little Lost Robot. The earth is a desiccated, irradiated husk but slowly being rebuilt by robots with two Protocols. One says no harming humans. The other says no self modification. Antonio is tasked with tracking down the origins of a group of robots that apparently can modify themselves. Then the story gets sidetracked quite a bit. The evil Robo Corp henchmen decide Antonio must be in on the trouble and are sent out to get him. So much trouble could have been averted if they had even once asked him what was happening, but no. Shoot first, ask questions later. Turns a rather good mystery thriller into a boring bang bang western.
The Colony. Starring Morpheus. Like Snowpiercer the world is frozen over after a global warming reversifier. Instead of the silly train conceit, however, people live in underground bunkers like in Fallout. So far, so good. Then we get lots of contrived conflict, blood thirsty cannibals (why is it always cannibals?), and whatever. I stopped caring.
Disappointing. It’s like the producer/director for each movie got halfway through, realized they hadn’t used any of the spurting blood budget, and then decided to use it all up. But at least in terms of atmosphere and setting, they were briefly entertaining.
Two movies, two bonus comics!
The Washington Post seems to have kicked a crypto hornets nest recently, with their suggestion that Apple (and other phone manufacturers, though I’ll stick with Apple as an example) should include a golden escrow key to allow law enforcement to decrypt suspects’ phones. This provoked the expected reaction from everybody who gets it that escrow is a terrible idea. Fair enough. But what’s the least worst escrow system we can devise?
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Lots of great articles in the October 13, 2014 New Yorker, all connected by the common theme of knowledge is power. Who knows what and when gives one a considerable edge. Nothing surprising, but reading about it from several perspectives reveals just how true the old saying is.
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Reflections on a few security vulnerabilities; some recent, some less so.
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For the past few years, I’d been opting out of the new airport scanners. Initially I had several reasons for this decision, but over time things changed, and after some reflection I realized the most compelling rationale I now had each time I opted out was “I opted out last time.”
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“Startup culture starting to resemble a pyramid that has folded in on itself, exploring funding topologies Ponzi never dreamed of” - Pinboard
Funding topology is definitely a subject worthy of further research.
Copying another idea from Old New Thing and porting to unix. This time it’s Piping to notepad. Instead of starting a new notepad process, let’s feed stdin to any existing window.
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At the g2k14 hackathon in July, I thought about a new interface for SSL connections. One of the most frequent complaints from OpenSSL users was that it was too much work to do anything, and one of the most frequent complaints from advanced users was that it was too much work to do anything correctly. Notably, failure to check the hostname in the cert against the hostname of the network connection is an unfortunately common mistake. And so was born the ressl (reimagined SSL) interface. Joel Sing (jsing) ended up implementing it first, putting the libressl in LibreSSL.
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OpenBSD has lots of version numbers, each incremented at their own pace and for their own reasons. Here’s a rundown.
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