amirmc

For interest, the line that was fixed from the first commit is:

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/da084a5ec6cebd67ae...

Interesting that they don't (can't?) do this for all the shows. For example, Better Call Saul was released on a weekly schedule in the UK in 2015, even though it had already been aired in the US in 2013. I wonder if this was just experimentation with the model or due to an agreement about how the show should be released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Call_Saul#Broadcast

Another way of looking at it is that the libOS's time has come. Early versions like Exokernel and Nemesis were ahead of their time but the wider ecosystem is now ready to make use of new implementations. Also, Unikernel is a more general term, whereas Exokernel was largely for a specific project.

You might find the following two references useful.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628

http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf

https://nqsb.io/nqsbtls-usenix-security15.pdf

The reality is that if the brain regions known to be involved in processing emotion are damaged/destroyed, then there are very negative consequences for your ability to make rational and well-reasoned choices. In other words, emotion (and emotional processing) is critical for logical thought to prevail. In that sense, I really like that the movie had emotions at the 'control panel' (I've yet to see it).

So it's not quite about trading safety and portability, as you can retain those depending on the approach you take (eg, MirageOS currently lets you target Unix, Xen-on-x86 and Xen-on-ARM from exactly the same code-base).

You can also try out static sites in MirageOS [1] and I gave a talk at polyconf last weekend with slides at [2].

[1] http://amirchaudhry.com/from-jekyll-to-unikernel-in-fifty-li...

[2] http://amirchaudhry.com/unikernels-polyconf-2015/

[1] My PhD was the interaction between human emotion and decision-making but even defining 'emotion' was tricky.

Wow. I get that private money is easier to deal with but disparaging the public markets as 'unwashed masses' seems rather uncouth. I expect leading a public company requires quite a different skill-set than a private company and the 'scrutiny' is a necessary part of that (information release etc).

That all this seems to be happening behind closed doors doesn't inspire confidence.

https://github.com/mirleft

No amount of prize money can ever really tell you how secure something is. We knew this before we announced it (see background at [1]).

[1] http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/

We didn't really expect the money to be the main motivator. Just a hook to draw attention.

Right now, unikernels aren't in major production use, so there's little to gain by holding on to an exploit (one would assume).

Having said that, yes there are ways to make it even smaller. We're working on getting the pieces right first.

HN discussion when the Pinata was released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9027743

(some general background to the Pinata is at: http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/)

Alice: "Doing X will prevent bugs like Y!"

Bob: "Oh, but it does nothing for bugs like Z. I just won't bother at all, then".

Why would you not want to try and remove an entire class of bugs if it were within your power to do so? Just look at all the effort companies like Facebook have poured into exactly this kind of problem with things like Hack and Flow (which make use of OCaml).

Products like this would be great if they could somehow be plugged into a user's existing, personal ecosystem (cf. concept of distributed personal cloud). I'm working towards this but it'll take time before such things are fully baked [1] (and there's also the question of business models).

Until then, we're just going to see more and more devices that require external back ends to operate and our homes/lives will become ever more porous, to (eventually) ever fewer companies.

[1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/

My take on this is that lack of 'management' might seem like fun but there's a reason most grown-up companies have more process.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2014/04/21/github-found...

Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.

5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?

There you have five reasons the story is a lie.

The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.

While the copyright in that article remains mine, I grant permission for it freely to be reproduced by anybody, anywhere. I shall be grateful for multiple copies to be posted around the web so it can’t be taken down.

Some extremely brilliant people have put an awful lot of time and a bit of money on the defences of this blog, making it very hard to crash even by governments, through a cloud hosting system. (OK, you got me, I don’t understand how they do it). With any luck we won’t go down, but backups on that article very welcome.

This article will be deleted in an hour or so to put the MI6 lies back at top of the blog.