duncesplayed

PGP itself is a bit of mess.

For one thing, there's really only one major/popular implementation of it these days, which is GPG. The codebase is arcane. Pretty major security vulnerabilities pop up constantly. It doesn't have stable funding. Several years ago the entire project almost collapsed when the world discovered it had been maintained for several years by a single person who didn't have any time or money to maintain it. The situation is a little bit better now, but not much.

(For this reason, people are starting to use age instead of gpg, as the code is much smaller, cleaner, forces safe defaults, and doesn't seem to have security problems)

But the bigger problem that was never properly solved with PGP is key distribution. How do you get somebody's key in the first place? Some people put their keys on their own personal (https) webpage, which is fine, but that's not a solution for everyone, and doesn't scale very well. Okay, so you might use a key server, but that has privacy implications (your identity is essentially public to the world) and centralizes everything down to a handful of small "trusted" key servers (since there would be no way to trust key servers in a decentralized way). We should probably just have email servers themselves serve keys somehow, but nobody's put that into the email standard protocols.

The fact that keys expire amplifies all the problems with key distribution, and encourages people to do really unsafe things with keys, like just blindly trust them. You can sign other people's keys for them, but that also does not scale very well.

The key distribution problem is something that things like Signal have "solved" with things like phone number verification, but there's really no clear way to solve it on something totally distributed like email.

Not all of these issues have disappeared, either. Anyone remember this headline from a couple years ago? The bottom 1MiB of memory space on x86 is just a minefield. It's impossible (like literally impossible) in general to know if certain parts of the address space are actual memory or are some weird part of your motherboard chipset or some other hardware. Windows I think still goes through the "wankery" of depending on chipset drivers to (accurately) know which parts of memory are actual memory.

Thankfully the 16-bit (though actually 20-bit but actually kind of more sometimes kind of but not totally) pains have all gone away. The move to flat 32-bit address spaces was a godsend.

It was, but it was (and still is) a Unix tool. I believe POSIX still requires that more be provided (even if it's just less secretly).

The original Unix more could only go forwards. Someone wanted to make something like more that could go both forwards and backwards, so he called it less as a joke (because "less" is a "backwards more"). For the past 40 years, everyone's realized that less is much better than the original more, so nobody uses the original any more.

(MSDOS took the idea of "more" before "less" caught on).

RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.

I always coveted the Tandy 1000, but I never got one. Which one did you have?

When Elon Musk wants to see your top 10 most salient lines of code.

The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like "ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of".

these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads

That's a big plus. I also like that they have to use the keyboard, since the mouse can be a bit tricky when you're young.

I had no idea there was a Richard Scarry game! They love the books, so maybe I should give it a shot. (Though it does look pretty mouse-heavy)

Another Oregan Trail generation here.

I'm curious about what's going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I've made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck's Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they're going to think about old tech when they're older. I haven't told them that it's "old" or "retro" yet, so they just think they're normal fun games.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Windows 95 used MSDOS to boot, but once it was booted, it completely removed any trace of MSDOS and replaced it with its own MSDOS subsystem. It's more like MSDOS was a shell on top of Win95, but MSDOS was required to get the kernel loaded.

This one incident has had so many variations and urban legend-ish twists. This article itself even incorrectly lists the date as 1945 in one place, which is a common twist on the story, but incorrect. (This computer didn't even come into existence until 1947, so the bug couldn't have been found in 1945). For any know-it-alls who like to one-up people with the correct facts, here's the truth behind the story, best I can figure out:

• This is indeed a real log entry book from September 9, 1947 (not 1945, as is sometimes reported)
• Grace Hopper did not write the log entry book
• Grace Hopper did not find the bug. She wasn't even there that day
• Grace Hopper did make the story famous, though. Even though she wasn't personally involved, she found it funny, and liked to tell it, which is how she got associated with the story
• This was not the first usage of the word "bug" (obviously, since "First actual case of bug being found" wouldn't have been funny). The earliest recorded usage of "bug" (in an engineering context) was Thomas Edison in 1878, but it surely predated him, as well. It was in common usage among engineers in the early 20th century
• It was not the first usage of the word "debug", as is often attributed. We have a record of the word "debug" being used in 1945. (Maybe this is why some versions of the Mark II story are sometimes given as 1945). "Debugging" was used in the aviation industry before the software industry
• The earliest recorded usage of the word "debug" in the context of software is 1952, but again, it probably predates its first record. Who knows if the word was already in use in 1947!

Yeah this part of it isn't getting enough attention. Take down his videos? Totally normal. Make him pay for some damages? Sure, I guess. Put him in prison? What the fuck?