EvanAnderson

> Systems that should clearly be air-gapped aren't.

I'd take systems that were permitted to have filtered egress at this point. The lion's share of my work is in networking, so network segmentation is the "hammer" I pick up first.

Vendors gnash teeth and complain when I ask for their app's dependencies on hosted APIs and off-site resources. In the environments where I'm mandated to maintain FBI CJIS compliance I can still hold vendors accountable and get what I want. It's pretty much a lost battle in every other environment and unfiltered egress to the Internet from servers is just expected.

That's not even to get into the topic of communication flow within an application. >sigh<

I keep trying to switch from Chrome to Firefox. I had been trying pretty hard this last time but now this... >sigh<

Change for change's sake is so damn tiring.

I grew up at the tail end of analog phone switches in my part of the country. The little town where I grew up and the surrounding towns had some kind of analog switches. Being owned by an independent telephone company the switches could have been something really oddball, too. I wish I knew what they were.

I hear sounds in some of Evan Doorbell's tapes that are familiar to me (the MF signaling when placing a long distance call, for example), but my memories of the local switch sounds are so fuzzy that I don't think I'll ever be able to identify it by sound alone. I had a magnetic pickup coil and made some phone recordings but never systematically recorded the sounds of the switches or the network. I wish I would have. At my age I never thought about those things as fleeting.

I was interested in "playing with the phone" but with no connection to the phreaking scene I didn't really know what I was doing. I remember finding some odd sounds in the "00xx" or "99xx" numbers in local exchanges but I don't know what I was hearing.

I did figure out I could call numbers "adjacent" my friends' numbers (4723 and 4725 for my friends' 4724) and they'd report hearing their phones w/ mechanical ringers sort of "buzz" but not actually ring (and we used this as a way to sneak phone calls late at night sometimes). I assume this was an artifact of the switches supporting "party lines" (multi-drop POTS services where multiple subscribers shared the same physical wire pair).

Some time in the early 90s the telco came in and replaced the switch with some flavor of Northern Telcom DMS (either a DMS-10 or a remote cluster controller from a DMS-100-- I never did find out for sure) and the "magic" was gone. We got touch tone dialing (which made wardialing practical) but the MF signaling sounds, the adjacent number ringing, the odd tones on various "00xx" and "99xx" numbers, and the crunchy static sound of the intercept messages all disappeared. The local phone exchanges became sterile and boring.

Matt Blaze is still around. I get the feeling he doesn't post often:

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/

I'd always heard, at least here in the Midwest US, that vending machines are run by organized crime (being historically cash-based) and vending routes and locations involve a certain amount of "protection". Maybe cashless vending machines are changing the landscape. Maybe it's all hokum.

It's definitely nothing to mess around with. I had gallstones and didn't take it seriously initially. One of my sisters had a multi-day hospitalization with acute pancreatitis and emergency cholecystectomy from her gallstones. She urged me to take my gallstones very seriously and, when my attacks got worse in my mid-40s encouraged me to advocate for myself to my GP (who was reluctant to order an ultrasound, preferring to try antacids first).

> Btw. - worst pain ever. Allegedly worse than giving birth, although I don’t have a way to confirm.

I haven't given birth, but I've had both gallstones and kidney stones. I'll easily take 100 gallstones to 1 kidney stone. I could think and speak while suffering with a gallstone. Kidney stones reduced me to an unthinking, quivering shambles.

If it were a newer version of NT I'd be concerned about USB media, but being NT 4.0 and not supporting USB it's imminently more capable of being air-gapped than later versions. (I recall a fun Ed Skoudis quote-- "At best, an air gap is a high-latency connection". Evidence Stuxnet.)

A Customer of mine has an 386 machine with an ISA interface board connected to an optical comparator instrument. I believe they also still have some MS-DOS-based computers connected to CNC machines, too.

I have two Customers who use DOS applications under DOSBox (a Clipper-based accounting package at one, and a Symantec Q&A-based application at another).

What were your symptoms that made you seek out bile replacement?

I don't eat a ton of fatty foods post-cholecystectomy but when I do indulge I can't say I have problems. I have some acute intestinal distress now and again, but it seems like that's just as likely to occur for me after a vegan dish as, say, a burger or pizza.

Being earlier to market seems like it would have made a huge difference in competing with the IBM PC. I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985. If the Amiga and ST could have been relased in 1984 it might have made a difference. Either way it's fun to think about counterfactuals.

I think the Amiga could have been released at least 6 months earlier if not for the litigation between Tramiel's Atari and Commodore gumming-up the works. The Amiga was massively more capable than the Macintosh of the day-- with preemptive multitasking, color, and NTSC video compatibility. There wasn't a Mac that held a candle to to the OCS Amiga graphics until the Macintosh II in 1987. I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.

VGA didn't come to the PC until 1987. The Amiga easily exceeded the capabilities of EGA. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and is much less capable and sophisticated than Workbench. I don't know much about the evolution of the native Amiga productivity software market. Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC. That wasn't until 1987 in our timeline. It might have happened sooner in my hypothetical, but probably not years sooner.

Atari could have marketed the Amiga better than Commodore ever did. I recognize that's not really saying much. The post-Tramiel Commodore was an adrift ship of fools when it came to choosing which products to produce and how to market them. Commodore couldn't figure out what to sell (and how not to cannibalize or compete with their own products) or how to sell what it did produce.

I'm less sure what would have happened if the ST had been released as the Commodore product it arguably was. I do think a world where Tramiel stayed w/ Commodore would have made them more focused. They would have have developed fewer products (and likely no products that competed with other Commodore products) and aggressively driven costs down. I think a Commodore with Tramiel still heading it up would have been in a better position, financially and in terms of market perception, to put out a GUI-based business computer than Atari. I'm just not sure how much sooner I'd want to speculate a Commodore ST could have been released in this hypothetical.

The ST was also positioned more as a Mac killer than a PC killer, like my hypothetical Amiga.

You're likely right, though-- by 1985 the IBM PC was probably destined for dominance.

Yikes. I thought my 6 hour attack was bad. I can't imagine 18!

Yeah-- the Atari roots (and Jay Miner's influence) clearly show in the Amiga.

An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).

Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.

I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.

Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.

I got lucky and built a decent Apple II collection in the late 90s and early 2000's before their prices became ridiculous. I bought an enhanced IIe first because that was closest to the computer I grew up with. Later I got a 48K II+ and was able to experience that era of Apple II computing. To round out the collection I got a ROM03 IIgs and decked it out with a memory upgrade and a BMoW Floppy Emu. I never was particularly interested in the IIc so I opted not to get one.

My "white whale" machine was the Laser 128. A friend had one and I enjoyed using it. He'd bring it over to my house and hook it up to the TV. Having a portable computer in the late 80s, even if it wasn't battery powered and didn't have a screen, was pretty cool. I wish I'd bought it from him when he moved to PCs and sold it but at the time I didn't realize it was a good find. It's a bit like the IIc but, I'd argue, is overall a better machine.

I started using the Apple IIe when I was 8 y/o. I started with playing games and programming in Applesoft BASIC, and eventually got to the point of doing rudimentary 6502 assembler programming (mainly modifying programs from magazines). I left the platform at 12 y/o when my father bought a PC.

When I was 14 y/o I scored a copy of the venerable "Inside the Apple IIe" cheap. I spent part of summer vacation really digging-in to the machine. I didn't have a IIe at home so I spent a lot of that summer in the public library using the old IIe machines. They were long-in-the-tooth at that point and no other patrons used them anymore. I got as much time as I wanted on them because of that. It was a fun contrast to the 1 hour / day limit each person got back when I started using them. I could come in when the library opened and spend all day there grinding away.

I feel fortunate having come back to the platform with a broader exposure to programming and while I still had the energy and exuberance of a teenager. I understood a lot more about what was going on and I was willing to grind thru tedium. I had a lot of fun playing w/ double-hires graphics, digitizing audio via the cassette interface, and doing some rudimentary software cracking. It was a fun time.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Inside_the_Apple_IIe

I will concede that you may have a point.

There are things in my life I carefully mete out because I don't want to "burn out" then novelty. I'd like to think I could do that in this case, but I don't know how it would change the memory.

I feel strongly that our memories are a "lossy destructive read" type of mechanism (core memory that "forgets" to write-after-read sometimes). I often think about how I'm permuting memories I recall, even as I'm enjoying recalling them.

> Do people have the memory of a goldfish or what? "I can't remember what's in my fridge" is not a problem I've ever had in my entire life.

I have no problem remembering what's in the fridge. It doesn't do me any good because my wife and daughter also know what's in the fridge and they eat those things too.

Knowing I might need to pick something up while I'm out, particularly when nobody is home to check the remaining stock, would be handy.

Having said that, I don't want anything to do with the modern conception of a "smart fridge". If there was a self-hostable fridge camera I could install I might be into that. Otherwise, no thanks. I like my "dumb" fridge UI the way it is.

I have a similar thing here, albeit not tied to as vivid a memory of a day or of people-- just a memory of food.

I've been chasing a "white whale" bacon / egg / cheddar on grilled Texas toast sandwich I made 20-ish years ago that I've never been able to replicate. I didn't keep track of the particular bacon or cheddar I used, and I don't recall if the eggs were the farm co-op eggs we used to get or plain old grocery eggs. I should have taken notes but didn't.

It's probably a silly thing to do, but I keep fairly meticulous notes about food I make now (including weighing-out ingredients on a kitchen scale). I don't want to have another experience like my mythical sandwich.

My wife has a good point about my quest: I can't replicate my hunger level that day. That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment. I now make a point of planning my eating ahead of special meals to maximize enjoyment. It's shocking, to me, how much a little hunger makes food better.

Our daughter turned thirteen this year. Counting the number of remaining family summer vacations, Christmases, etc, remaining really hit home for me this year.

Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.

Sure. The user would need to logon as the FoxPro user to use the application. At that point, having the FoxPro user credentials, the user can manipulate the FoxPro data files directly without using the application.

The rub here is that FoxPro is an in-process database engine and accesses its data files with the security context of the user running the application. It doesn't have separation between the database engine and the UI like a client/server database would. Think of it like SQLite or BerkeleyDB.

Architecturally users who use the application need full read/write access to all the data files for FoxPro to work.

I appreciate this hobby.

I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.

At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.

A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).

It makes sense that I didn't find it. Integer BASIC didn't make sense to 10 y/o me, either. I'd started with Applesoft, since it was in ROM, and Integer BASIC seemed needless and strange. I also didn't understand why "FP" was the command to get into Applesoft.

(These are yet more examples of situations where, if I'd had a mentor, I think I would have gone much further at a younger age.)

I want apps to use the default widgets because I want theming and color selection in the OS to work again. That's about the extent I care about look and feel. Microsoft has ruined that on current Windows versions anyway-- making me resort to registry modifications to get the colors I want. Every time I see an application with a "dark mode", which should be an OS-wide theme function, I get a little sad at the wasted developer time.

Beyond the now-denied choice of UI color scheme I do not expect (or even desire) deriving any joy or pleasure from the look and feel of software I use. Most of my computing is for "work"-- be that my job, or paying bills, shopping, etc. I want the UI to get out of my way and, most of all, not to insult my 30+ years of muscle memory and visual intuition. I derive joy and pleasure from software that allows me to quickly accomplish my tasks with minimal thought or friction on my part.

I experience massive frustration with software using UI widgets that don't work like the native OS. Not having the standard keyboard shortcuts, for example, is a great way to make me hate your software. It's an immediate "tell" that I'm going to be disappointed if a program has bad tab order on its UI elements, for example.

Moreover, eschewing the time-tested and battle-hardened native UI widgets speaks to arrogance. It feels like an ego trip and it's almost certainly unearned. Random developers probably can't pull off a widget replacement that replicates all the nuance of the native. Good luck pulling off accessibility and internationalization, too. Even if they can how is reinventing that wheel a good use of their time?

My rage is amplified when I find bugs in software with non-native widgets. They had time to dick around with the widgets-- something already done for them in a vastly more competent and comprehensive manner for free-- but not to ship bug-free code for the software's actual purpose?

The same goes for animations, fades, gradients, etc. The vast majority of software I use is not special or dear to me. It's a tool. I don't want to, in a manner of speaking, look at pictures of the developers kids or vacations as a "toll" for using the software. Making software "pretty" is only self-serving and egotistical.

> If it helps at all, we put this article in the SCP...

With the popularity of this post the "SCP" reference made me think Hacker News had some kind of antimemetics department.

Then I saw it was the Second Chance Pool and was sort of disappointed.

Fred Dibnah's steeplejacking videos are awe-inspiring and a little bit horrifying. Fred seems like he was quite a character. I definitely recommend watching any videos he was involved with.

I remember being so confused, as a 10 y/o kid, trying to follow examples from an Apple II-era book on my public library's Apple IIe computers. I didn't understand why I couldn't get the mini assembler to work. The idea that features would be removed on future machines simply didn't occur to me. I guess I really didn't even understand that the IIe was a different machine than what the book was written for since most everything else worked as-expected.

The only Citrix Metaframe (and later Windows Terminal Server) machines I ever deployed in Real Life were because of shared-file database-based applications.

> Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts...

You're thinking of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is interpreted inside of Access. The standalone Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) is a completely different thing, and eliminating VBScript doesn't have any ramifications for Access.

My daughter loves foxes. When I made a desktop shortcut to allow her to easily hibernate her school laptop I knew right where to go to get an icon she'd like.

Exactly. It's not a security hole. It's just the architecture of the program.

It seems like many people have a hard time understanding this, including developers.

Any attempt to add any kind of permissions, security, etc, without addressing the nature of the architecture (that the database engine runs in the same address space / security context as the UI) misses the point.

If it isn't client / server architecture there's no privilege separation using SQLite either. The storage format isn't the concern. Rather, the concern is it all runs in the same OS security context.