69,558 karma · joined January 13, 2008
Formerly at kCura/Relativity, security. I do application penetration testing for hire these days. Happy to chat about application security, programming, and ham radio. My conversations about agriculture are not that interesting.
Security: https://ciexinc.com/ Of particular interest are the solarwinds articles at https://ciexinc.com/blog/solarwinds/index.html Old very fun projects: https://ciex-software.com
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
Beware the anxiety industrial complex.
So it seems like there is a gps.gov to help with this: https://www.gps.gov/resilience-through-responsible-use-pnt#:...
A similar failure in the channel islands: https://www.jcra.je/media/598397/t-027-jt-july-2020-outage-d... (pdf).
So my next gig was writing a compiler on a team of three of us. It was highly successful for its time.
I agree that understanding how to write a compiler is pretty essential for computering.
*30-day minimum retention by default*>NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore
I did not address the issue of the hardware documentation, just the issue raised by the headline. I fully understand the issues that the hardware and the problems of not having a full map of the hardware or a test bed to check out the code.
I've audited codebases in languages that I haven't programmed in. It is a matter of grasping a few basic concepts, like branch execution, branch destination, where data is stored, how it is communicated. Don Lancaster told us how to do this: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vI.pdf.
CTF stands for Capture The Flag, which is a cybersecurity competition where participants find hidden "flags" in vulnerable programs or systems to test and develop their security skills. There are two main types of CTFs: jeopardy-style, where teams solve various challenges for points, and attack-defense, where teams defend their systems while trying to exploit their opponents'.1. Type checking built in 2. More concise and readable than most languages 3. Trivial to inspect while running, ability to change a running program 4. There seems to be a massive amount of lisp that it is inhaling from somewhere 5. Large amount of libraries.
This has the added benefit that even if you publish the code, nobody will be stealing it.
Edit -- I find it very useful to write tests for critical functions. This catches situations where the agent decides some interesting functionality is no longer interesting.