The Unix-Hater's Handbook
has finally been released free to the public. It talks about Unix's
design (or lack thereof), in a detailed manner that many tech
communities nowadays consider heretical. In the spirit of fairness and
entertainment, it includes Unix creator Dennis Ritchie's blisteringly
stinging anti-foreword, as well as usability guru Donald A. Norman's
more conciliatory foreword.
April 2003 Archives
In a presentation
about VPN hacking Michael Thunmann and Enno Rey talked about the
process of cracking pre-shared keys in certain IPSEC/VPN environments.
They were able to capture and crack successfully PSKs of a cisco router
due to the issue that the cisco router switches automatically to
aggressive mode if the initiating clients demands it. Key-Recovery was
done with the help of ikecrack and good old tcpdump.
In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam.
To do so, they set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them
for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of
mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users
insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The
results also debunk some of the myths about spam.
Paul Graham has a new article called "The Hundred-Year Language" posted. The article is about the programming languages of the future and what form they may take. He makes some interesting predictions about the rate of change we might expect in programming languages over the next 100 years.
