Cryptosmith

Cousin Jon emailed me David Pogues’ recent blog on copyright, with an observation on digital libraries.

The science and technology world has an interesting analog to the paper vs electronic print music debate. In our world, the problem crops up with professional papers. My own attitude is clear: if I have the choice between downloading a free copy of someone’s paper I find on-line, or purchasing a copy from the professional society, I grab the free copy.

Partly this is because the original author doesn’t get a penny from publication sales. In many cases the author is lucky if the association prints the paper for free, without requiring “page charges.” Another reason is that, in most cases, the paper is actually made available on-line by one or more of its authors.

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‘Way, ‘way back in the 1960s, computer designers tried out different techniques to limit how a computer executed its programs. Some should be pretty well known, like storage protection and the distinction between “kernel mode” for the operating system and “user mode” for applications. Another was data execution prevention (aka “DEP”), where the computer distinguishes between RAM that stores instructions and RAM that stores data. If the program tries to jump into instructions stored in data RAM, the CPU aborts the program.

Fast forward to 2010. Most microprocessors were supporting DEP in the mid 1990s; a few supported it before that. OS support came more slowly. Windows as been using one form or another of this since 2004 in XP Service Pack 2. However, it doesn’t matter for most major applications, because they didn’t fix their code to take advantage of it. So, if they suffer a buffer overflow, there’s nothing to prevent the computer from trundling off to la-la land.

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Now that Secure Computing Corporation is a memory, having been acquired by McAfee, I’m going to write up a few memories of my own experiences. At one point I posted much of this in the appropriate Wikipedia entry, but that’s actually not kosher. Since much of it is based on personal recollection, these words fall in line with what they call “original research.” So I’m posting it here.

I joined Secure Computing about a year after it came into existence. It was called “Secure Computing Technology Corporation” at the time. By the time I left, they’d gone through three more company presidents, 4 corporate logos, several mergers, and bounced the corporate headquarters from Minnesota to Silicon Valley.

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Back in 1964, Boston’s public TV station, WGBH, did a show on interactive computing at MIT. They interviewed Fernando Corbató, MIT’s timesharing pioneer, who demonstrated the old CTSS system. The Computer History Museum got permission from MIT and WGBH to post the episode on YouTube:

During the episode, Corby explains how timesharing (multiprogramming) works, in terms of taking turns between programs using round-robin scheduling.

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