Re: [tlug] Bashing away at Unix

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

On 3/15/08, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

>  This basically means that an expert attacker (you) can often succeed
>  against one of the foremost security experts in the world, for your
>  advantageous terrain gives you an order of magnitude boost in
>  effective skill level.

I'm sure there's a suitable quote somewhere in "The Art of War".  Fighting
a reactive war is seldom advantageous.  The security model as provided by
the McAfees, etc. is fundamentally broken.  Being able to choose a time and
a specific battleground is usually enough to win even against vastly superior
forces.  The malware authors know this.

And as a matter of fact, I _do_ consider Ian Goldberg "one of the foremost
security experts in the world."  Cypherpunks write code and I did and do
regard him with respect as one of the uber Cypherpunks.

btw, As I told Steve-san earlier, I did *not* read about the treatment of `^' in
a man page[1].  It was in an obscure section of the user's manual
dealing with the
caveats of installing ksh as /bin/sh.  I thought when I first read it,
"that's a stupid
thing to do." and promptly forgot it, until the day when I replaced /bin/sh with
ksh on a System V/R2 box without kernel support for #! and strange things
started happening.

[1] And I've read and reread Unix documentation all the way back to the trade
Green and Blue Books of the Version 7 documentation.

-sb