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NTPsec dodges 8 of 11 CVEs because we’d pre-hardened the code

While most of the NTPsec team was off at Penguicon, the NTP Classic people shipped a release patched for eleven security vulnerabilities in their code. Which might have been pretty embarrassing, if those vulnerabilities were in our code, too. People would be right to wonder, given NTPsec’s security focus, why we didn’t catch all these… Continue reading NTPsec dodges 8 of 11 CVEs because we’d pre-hardened the code

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Categorized as Software Tagged

NTPsec’s beta is released

You’ve heard me uttering teasers about it for months. Now it’s here. The repository is available for cloning; we’re shipping the 0.9.0 beta of NTPsec. You can browse the web pages or clone the git repository by one of several methods. You can “wget https://github.com/NTPsec/ntpsec/archive/NTPsec_0_9_0.tar.gz” to get a tarball. This is an initial beta and… Continue reading NTPsec’s beta is released

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Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved

A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I… Continue reading Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved

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Categorized as Software

My SubscribeStar account is live

I’ve finally gotten validated by SubscribeStar, which means I can get payouts through it, which means those of you who want nothing to do with Patreon can contribute through it: https://www.subscribestar.com/esr If you’re not contributing, and you’re a regular here, please chip in. While I’ve had some research grants in the past, right now nobody… Continue reading My SubscribeStar account is live

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Categorized as General

How not to design a wire protocol

A wire protocol is a way to pass data structures or aggregates over a serial channel between different computing environments. At the very lowest level of networking there are bit-level wire protocols to pass around data structures called “bytes”; further up the stack streams of bytes are used to serialize more complex things, starting with… Continue reading How not to design a wire protocol

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Categorized as Software

Announcing a new book: “The Programmer’s Way”

A decade and change after “The Art of Unix Programming”, I’ve decided to do another book. Actually, I have more than just an intention and some notes; I’ve been working hard on it over the last five days it and have 41 Kwords of rough-cut manuscript ready.

Reposurgeon’s Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python

Time to make it public and official. The entire reposurgeon suite (not just repocutter and repomapper, which have already been ported) is changing implementation languages from Python to Go. Reposurgeon itself is about 50% translated, with pretty good unit-test coverage. Three of my collaborators on the project (Daniel Brooks, Eric Sunshine, and Edward Cree) have… Continue reading Reposurgeon’s Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python

You’re gonna need a bigger Beast

I’m taking a management-approved break from NTPsec to do a repository conversion that dwarfs any I’ve ever seen before. Yep, more history than Emacs – much much more. More backtrail than entire BSD distributions, in fact about an order of magnitude larger than any repo I’ve previously encountered. Over 255000 commits dating back to 1989… Continue reading You’re gonna need a bigger Beast

The long goodbye to C

I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systems-programming heap – Go and Rust, in particular. I reached a startling realization – I have 35 years of experience in C. I write C code pretty much every… Continue reading The long goodbye to C