Security may be a process, not a product, but security patches are definitely a product. Some reflections on a few recent experiences making security sausage, er, patches.

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The primary product of the OpenBSD project is the OpenBSD operating system, but sometimes other artifacts are produced as byproducts. Avant-garde web site design, funny email threads. Also, reusable code that can be beneficial to other developers, outside the strict confines of OpenBSD.

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Some early followup from efforts to improve browser security with more details about possible refinements to W^X.

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WTF is this? No, this is not a git mirror. Not here, not there, not anywhere.

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What’s the difference between the following length and pointer pairs?

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I’m guessing only a few wikipedia editors view articles about smartphones using a smartphone.

At least now I know the iPhone 6 has a slate form factor.

Recently was reminded of an old string handling function I used for programming interviews.

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The OpenBSD Firefox package includes the en-GB dictionary. This results in lots of red squiggly lines. There are additional en language packs localized for AU, CA, GB, and ZA, but no US package. There is also a firefox-i18n-en-US package but it doesn’t do anything except print a message that you can change the useragent locale from its default of... en-US.

If you want an Americanized spelling dictionary, you’re out of luck. Debian to the rescue! Start with the hunspell source package page and download the big orig.tar.gz file. Extract it and copy the two en_US files to /usr/local/share/mozilla-dicts/. Restart Firefox and right click in a text area to change language.

Save a step! This is apparently just a bug in Firefox because it should also be looking in /usr/local/lib/firefox-*/dictionaries which includes US dictionary files. These files are a little different (smaller), but they too could simply be copied or symlinked into the above location.

There was a recent bug in OpenBSD install kernels. At random times during the install, messages like the following would appear:

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More ghostly followup. There was a thread on Hacker News wherein it was claimed that using rust would have prevented Heartbleed. Specifically, it would not have even compiled. That sounds like a challenge!

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