I have one Linux -> Windows migration story that went really well. Early-2000s, I worked for a company that printed massive amounts of data and shipped it to clients. The data had to be printed and shipped, digital delivery wasn't an option at the time (legal BS). The Unix/Linux sysadmins were using a Linux box as a print server, having trouble getting a newly purchased, super expensive printer to print correctly. They worked on this "project" for weeks. The printer manufacturer didn't have a Linux driver and wasn't going to make one, so the internal team was trying to write their own. Finally, I told them to just use Windows as the print server; the Windows drivers are right there on the company website. The idea received relentless pushback: Windows can't handle the load. Our automation uses Unix-only protocols (ftp) to copy the data to the print server. Windows is too expensive. Finally, I took an old desktop PC, installed Windows 2000, added all the required printers, including the new, expensive printer. Installed all the manufacturers' drivers. Then I installed ftp, added the matching auth credentials, and it was done. The whole process took me, maybe, 2 hours. Naturally the sysadmins that owned this process were pissed; they hated it. But their boss loved it and it became the solution. Linux -> Windows FTW.
the first computer i got to use was a TRS-80 III i believe in highschool. this thing was already old at the time which was the late 90s, but it did the job. we had a full classroom of them, one of which was acting as a server with two floppy disks, and all the others were booting off the server, freeing the floppy drive for our data. we learned BASIC on it, so i guess that is all that was running on there.
the school also had a 286 i believe, (i am guessing by what models were common in the late 80s) in the library running Novell Netware that i was allowed to use. i distinctly remember wondering if that was unix, trying some unix commands that i had read about. i was able to use turbo pascal on it and a few other programs.
the science teacher had an Apple II i think that i was also allowed to play with occasionally. i remember pranking the teacher with a function that would turn the desktop upside down. and at home we had a PC or compatible. most likely a Tandy 1000 from RadioShack. i remember that the family bought some software for it. was it DeskMate? i don't recognize the screenshots that i can find online now. i do remember using word perfect and connecting to BBS systems with a modem, downloading software that i would try out and play around with.
oh, before all that i did a 3 week internship at a machine design company where i got to use autocad on a PC on whatever that was running on. probably DOS as well.
i had friends with ataris or amigas. but i never got a chance to actually use them, the friends were just showing them to me.
one more interesting detail from that time. at one point we visited friends who had an amiga i believe with a floppy drive that could write 10MB on a 3.5" floppy. i could not find a reference to that on wikipedia, so i don't know what that was. but i am pretty confident that i remember the 10MB capacity correctly.
when i entered university in the early 90s i got my first computer that was actually my own. it came with DOS obviously, while we were using unix at the uni (SunOS/Solaris/AIX (also one class where we got access to VMS)) and when i discovered linux, i made it dual boot, and i remember every time i reinstalled linux to upgrade it, i shrank the DOS partition until finally it was gone completely.
around the same time when i visited my grandparents, grandma, who was volunteering as a secretary for some NGOs wished for a computer. grandpa sent me out to get one, and i picked OS/2 to run on it. i believe i installed emacs for her to use, and LaTeX which i had learned about at uni. when i came back a year later, someone helped her by installing windows on it. could not have that. then i decided to change universities and study in my grandparents home town, so moved in with them, of course bringing my linux computer. grandma was intrigued and wanted to learn linux too. again, emacs and LaTeX set up for her and the G.R.E.A.T desktop system.
wow, long answer. i got a but carried away, sorry. i hope it is interesting.
My only netware experience was with pxeboot (or similar) of a dos/win3.11 environment over ipx, but that was 93 onwards.
> someone helped her by installing windows on it
"helped"
Personally I hadn't tried Linux until after windows 95, and a command line only environment wasn't great. It wasn't until redhat 6 came out that my VGA card (SiS 6326) was properly supported (more than 640x480 with a broken cursor)
By the time I went to university in 2000 there were a handful of CDE powered workstations running some form of unix in one of the labs (the blue lab), but the majority of unix style machines were Linux.
When I started work as a trainee in 2003 they'd just bought a new Solaris setup with an oracle RAC to run a jboss middleware app. The last Solaris box we bought were some T2000s and a pair of X4500s, bought just before I took over in 2006. By 2008 everything was running on linux.
Scares me to think that 2008 was neared to Linux launching than it is today. Its probably about the last time I actually compiled a kernel - certainly via make menuconfig - too.
well actually, to be honest for me too. i had actually read about unix before i could get access to a computer, and the first o'reilly book i bought was titled "DOS meets Unix" in 1988, long before i had my own computer.
I’m sorry to be pedantic, that’s not exactly true. I agree in the sense that extracting hw based keys is next to impossible, but if your machine is compromised, there isn’t much stopping malware from using your hw based key (assuming 1. Left plugged in, 2. Unlocked with either ssh-agent or gpg-agent, and 3. You don’t have touch to auth turned on). Reduced risk? Absolutely. No risk? Absolutely not.
And if you want to be even more pedantic, shell access with a touch based key just means the attacker has to wait for you to auth, which makes touch based systems largely a waste of effort on the defenders part.
> shell access with a touch based key just means the attacker has to wait for you to auth
And if you want to be EVEN more pedantic, on most touch-based keys, you have to touch within 10–15 seconds otherwise it times out.
So it is not a waste of effort at all. First the need to touch at all eliminates a large chunk of attacks. Second the need to touch within 10–15 seconds eliminates a whole bunch more.
There would have to be some heavy-duty alignment of ducks going on to get past a touch requirement.
Even more if the target has touch AND PIN enabled.
The touch based key I use only responds once per touch. If someone compromises the machine it's plugged into, the action I expected to complete won't complete. This means the compromise becomes immediately visible.
I do this to defang the url to prevent unintentional clicks or automatic previewing when working and reporting on security events. Sometimes the habit bleeds over.
Name constraints are an optional feature in the standards. A client can ignore the constraints and be completely standards compliant.
Should the CAs issue intermediate certs that are only secure if a client implements an optional feature?
And even if most web browsers support name constraints properly - who knows if that cheap network webcam does, or that old mail client, or that 20 year old retro PC game?
If you want to uphold the name constraints in your CA cert, mark the field as critical. At that point clients that don’t understand them should fail validation of the CA cert.
So it may have limited use-cases today if you require full compat for all clients. For example internal controlled networks like discussed in the article.
Just like you presumably already wouldn't issue LE certs when you need to support clients with ancient CA bundles.
I mean if its being hostile to your LAN then why not?
Let the hostile phones, TV's, sonos, toasters, etc live on the IOT network and your laptop, desktop, NAS and whatever else you value live on a your actual LAN.
Not defending ridiculous claims based on small sample sets, but isn't this how it's supposed to work? You run some tests and notice a pattern and develop an hypothesis, and then continue to expand the test to see if it holds true? Then other groups perform the same tests to hopefully receive the same results so that we end up with known facts. Essentially, the definition of scientific method.
Yeah, but people aren't actually that interested in the scientific method here. Criticizing things is an easy way to appear smart, and that's the main point.
Empirical research has never been about some true/false binary; that's a myth perpetuated on HN. It has always been about strength of evidence, improving models, and opening paths for future research. I've seen people dismiss case studies by decrying that their n=1, for god's sake.
