Podcast appearances and mentions of Mark S Miller

Today on the Ether we have erik.io with Babylon hosting the Scaling Bitcoin Sessions with Agoric. You'll hear from Sufyaan Khan, Mark S. Miller, and more! Recorded on December 19th 2023. Make sure to check out the newest tracks from Finn and the RAC FM gang over at ImaginetheSmell.org! The majority of the music at the end of these spaces can be found streaming over on Spotify, and the rest of the streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

Mark S. Miller is the Chief Scientist at Agoric. He is a pioneer of agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, the main designer of the E and Dr. SES distributed persistent object-capability programming languages, inventor of Miller Columns, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a representative of the ECMAScript committee, a former Google research scientist, and member of the WebAssembly (Wasm) group.Key HighlightsThis podcast addresses common misconceptions about the risks of advanced AI – an example being the paper clip scenarioHow more pressing concerns regard one entity gaining unchecked power and that solutions lie not in just dispersing power but in structuring institutions effectively – similar to the separation of powers principle.The blend of human and AI intelligence is the cornerstone of future civilization, demanding innovative governance to ensure harmony.Dive deeper into the session: Full SummaryThe Foresight InstituteA research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 with a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison DuettmannThe President and CEO of Foresight Institute, Allison Duettmann directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, alongside Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees. She has also been pivotal in co-initiating the Longevity Prize, pioneering initiatives like Existentialhope.com, and contributing to notable works like "Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy" and "Gaming the Future".Get Involved with ForesightApply: Virtual Salons & in-person WorkshopsDonate: Support Our Work – If you enjoy what we do, please consider this, as your donations fund us entirely!Follow Us: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedInNote: Explore every word spoken on this podcast through Fathom.fm, an innovative podcast search engine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heck is it? Is it just for C and Rust programs? Can you write it by hand? (Do you want to?) And wait, how is Spritely getting involved in WebAssembly efforts? Find out!Links:WebAssemblyHoot! (and Hoot announcement, Andy Wingo joining, Robin Templeton joining)Lisp Game Jam - "Wireworld" - Hoot's low level WASM tooling in actionDirectly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration!Understanding the WebAssembly text formatWebAssembly GC proposalEpisode 49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for EveryoneWASIPOSIXEpisode 17: Gardening, from seedling to seasonedConway's Game of LifeWASM-4Episode 46: Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1Schism by Eric Holk

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Boundaries-based security and AI safety approaches, published by Allison Duettmann on April 12, 2023 on LessWrong. [This part 3 of a 5 part sequence on security and cryptography areas relevant for AI safety, published and linked here a few days apart.] There is a long-standing computer security approach that may have directly useful parallels to a recent strand of AI safety work. Both rely on the notion of ‘respecting boundaries'. Since the computer security approach has been around for a while, there may be useful lessons to draw from it for the more recent AI safety work. Let's start with AI safety, then introduce the security approach, and finish with parallels. AI safety: Boundaries in The Open Agency Model and the Acausal Society In a recent LW post, The Open Agency Model, Eric Drexler expands on his previous CAIS work by introducing ‘open agencies' as a model for AI safety. In contrast to the often proposed opaque or unitary agents, “agencies rely on generative models that produce diverse proposals, diverse critics that help select proposals, and diverse agents that implement proposed actions to accomplish tasks”, subject to ongoing review and revision. In An Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI, Davidad expands on Eric Drexler's model, suggesting that, instead of optimizing, this model would ‘depessimize' by reaching a world that has existential safety. So rather than a fully-fledged AGI-enforced optimization scenario that implements all principles CEV would endorse, this would be a more modest approach that relies on the notion of important boundaries (including those of human and AI entities) being respected. What could it mean to respect the boundaries of human and AI entities? In Acausal Normalcy, Andrew Critch also discusses the notion of respecting boundaries with respect to coordination in an acausal society. He thinks it's possible that an acausal society generally holds values related to respecting boundaries. He defines ‘boundaries' as the approximate causal separation of regions, either in physical spaces (such as spacetime) or abstract spaces (such as cyberspace). Respecting them intuitively means relying on the consent of the entity on the other side of the boundary when interacting with them: only using causal channels that were endogenously opened. His examples of currently used boundaries include a person's skin that separates the inside of their body from the outside, a fence around a family's yard that separates their place from neighbors, a firewall that separates the LAN and its users from the rest of the internet, and a sustained disassociation of social groups that separates the two groups. In his Boundaries Sequence, Andrew Critch continues to formally define the notions of boundaries to generalize them to very different intelligences. If the concept of respecting boundaries is in fact universally salient across intelligences, then it may be possible to help AIs discover and respect the boundaries humans find important (and potentially vice versa). Computer security: Boundaries in the Object Capabilities Approach Pursuing a similar idea, in Skim the Manual, Christine Peterson, Mark S. Miller, and I reframe the AI alignment problem as a secure cooperation problem across human and AI entities. Throughout history, we developed norms for human cooperation that emphasize the importance of respecting physical boundaries, for instance to not inflict violence, and cognitive boundaries, for instance to rely on informed consent. We also developed approaches for computational cooperation that emphasize the importance of respecting boundaries in cyberspace. For instance, in object-capabilities-oriented programming, individual computing entities are encapsulated to prevent interference with the contents of other objects. The fact that ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Boundaries-based security and AI safety approaches, published by Allison Duettmann on April 12, 2023 on LessWrong. [This part 3 of a 5 part sequence on security and cryptography areas relevant for AI safety, published and linked here a few days apart.] There is a long-standing computer security approach that may have directly useful parallels to a recent strand of AI safety work. Both rely on the notion of ‘respecting boundaries'. Since the computer security approach has been around for a while, there may be useful lessons to draw from it for the more recent AI safety work. Let's start with AI safety, then introduce the security approach, and finish with parallels. AI safety: Boundaries in The Open Agency Model and the Acausal Society In a recent LW post, The Open Agency Model, Eric Drexler expands on his previous CAIS work by introducing ‘open agencies' as a model for AI safety. In contrast to the often proposed opaque or unitary agents, “agencies rely on generative models that produce diverse proposals, diverse critics that help select proposals, and diverse agents that implement proposed actions to accomplish tasks”, subject to ongoing review and revision. In An Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI, Davidad expands on Eric Drexler's model, suggesting that, instead of optimizing, this model would ‘depessimize' by reaching a world that has existential safety. So rather than a fully-fledged AGI-enforced optimization scenario that implements all principles CEV would endorse, this would be a more modest approach that relies on the notion of important boundaries (including those of human and AI entities) being respected. What could it mean to respect the boundaries of human and AI entities? In Acausal Normalcy, Andrew Critch also discusses the notion of respecting boundaries with respect to coordination in an acausal society. He thinks it's possible that an acausal society generally holds values related to respecting boundaries. He defines ‘boundaries' as the approximate causal separation of regions, either in physical spaces (such as spacetime) or abstract spaces (such as cyberspace). Respecting them intuitively means relying on the consent of the entity on the other side of the boundary when interacting with them: only using causal channels that were endogenously opened. His examples of currently used boundaries include a person's skin that separates the inside of their body from the outside, a fence around a family's yard that separates their place from neighbors, a firewall that separates the LAN and its users from the rest of the internet, and a sustained disassociation of social groups that separates the two groups. In his Boundaries Sequence, Andrew Critch continues to formally define the notions of boundaries to generalize them to very different intelligences. If the concept of respecting boundaries is in fact universally salient across intelligences, then it may be possible to help AIs discover and respect the boundaries humans find important (and potentially vice versa). Computer security: Boundaries in the Object Capabilities Approach Pursuing a similar idea, in Skim the Manual, Christine Peterson, Mark S. Miller, and I reframe the AI alignment problem as a secure cooperation problem across human and AI entities. Throughout history, we developed norms for human cooperation that emphasize the importance of respecting physical boundaries, for instance to not inflict violence, and cognitive boundaries, for instance to rely on informed consent. We also developed approaches for computational cooperation that emphasize the importance of respecting boundaries in cyberspace. For instance, in object-capabilities-oriented programming, individual computing entities are encapsulated to prevent interference with the contents of other objects. The fact that ...

Charlie and Mark Miller take a trip to the past and the start of smart contracts. Charlie kicks off the show sharing an abstract that Mark wrote in 1988 that envisioned a future of smart contracts. Mark shares what was missing from that abstract when it comes to blockchain, diving into solving the problems of ignorance and malice brought on by centralization. Mark explains Polycentrism and how it relates to consensus mechanisms. Charlie shares his thoughts on Bitcoin and its lack of need to make decisions. Mark talks about the road to immutability and the DAO bug on Ethereum. Mark shares info on Agoric and how it's building a blockchain on utilizing familiar technology. Mark dives into finality, proof-of-stake, and differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum. Charlie and Mark hypothesize consensus scenarios with Ethereum. Mark shares Agoric's capabilities and its governance mechanism.

Mark Miller, AgoricMark S. Miller is a Chief Scientist at Agoric. He is a pioneer of agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, the main designer of the E and Dr. SES distributed persistent object-capability programming languages, inventor of Miller Columns, and an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system.Humans cooperate through institutions to solve problems that could not be solved individually. Civilization as a whole is the superintelligent ecosystem emergent of those interactions. However, the infrastructure that enables cooperation has extremely bad security. The exploitation of these vulnerabilities are currently still limited by human effort, but AI is already changing the ability to exploit these systems. Securing the foundation for cooperation is necessary if we want civilization to be resistant to emerging technologies, and there are promising projects we can support today.This was recorded at the Foresight Crypto, Security & AI Workshop, October 4-5 @50 Years in San Francisco.Session summary: Mark S. Miller, Agoric | Computational Markets & Agoric Systems - Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Spritely Institute (of which Christine is CTO) just announced its multi-year grant by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and gave a tour of its current tech! This is a big moment that's been in the works for a while, as Spritely moves hands towards real stewardship by a real nonprofit!Also also! The video recording of the Lisp/Scheme workshop (based on A Scheme Primer) is released! Unlock Lisp / Scheme's magic: beginner to Scheme-written-in-Scheme in one hour! (PeerTube, YouTube, )Links:Spritely Networked Communities InstituteFFDW funding announcementTech tourDonate to the Spritely Institute!FOSS & Crafts episodes about Spritely:The What is Spritely episode, where Morgan says "get in the car Christine you need to talk about your project", is the first time Christine laid out the broader (early) plans for Spritely in depth! (In that sense, FOSS & Crafts has been here for much of Spritely's journey, as many of our listeners know!)Spritely Updates! (November 2021)Less directly, Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 talks about much of the tech that informs Spritely's design!Spritely Institute's jobs page which will have jobs posted on it like, real soon nowSpritely Institute is also the org that published A Scheme Primer, which we've talked about beforeFree as in Freedom has talked about how the IRS has been more cautious about granting nonprofit status to FOSS orgs in Episode 0x4E (IRS Refusal Redux)Some background about Randy Farmer (Spritely Institute's Executive Director):Randy co-founded Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first graphical massively multiplayer virtual world, which ran on the Commodore 64 in 1985 (!!!)Revival over at neohabitat.orgSee the hilarious marketing videoThe Lessons of Lucasfilms Habitat is one of the most cited papers about virtual community designs of all times, and still holds up todayElectric Communities Habitat was Habitat's followup.Hard to find information on, but here's a Randy demo'ing the system from 1997!The E Programming Language, on which much of Spritely is designed, came from EC Habitat. See Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1 for more on that (and hey, when are we getting out part 2?)Randy co-hosts a podcast called Social Media Clarity which has some interesting episodes.See also Spritely Institute's brilliant engineer Jessica Tallon writing about her experiences and especially her pebble bank design!

Have you ever played Civilization?  In the game, you're discovering technologies that unlock new levels, one capability at a time. But not all innovations are equal. Better technologies of cooperation could unlock new levels of progress across the board. Opportunities for bright futures enabled by bio, nano, and computing technologies are now within our reach. This book explores how technologies of intelligent voluntary cooperation can help us navigate the traps. This is a recording from this living book and book club about technologies for intelligent voluntary cooperation by Allison Duettmann, Mark S. Miller, and Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute.  This episode goes through chapter 4 of the book: SKIM THE MANUAL | Intelligent Voluntary Cooperation. Session summary: (425) David Friedman: Intelligent Voluntary Cooperation | Gaming the Future Book Club Chapter 4 - YouTubeThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Calling all programming language nerds! Distinguished computer scientist Mark S. Miller (presently at Agoric) joins us to tell us all about distributed object programming languages and their history! We talk about actors, a bit of Xanadu, and little known but incredibly influential programming languages like Flat Concurrent Prolog, Joule, and E!Actually there's so much to talk about that this episode is just part one! There's more to come!Links:The actor model (the core of which is sometimes distinguished from modified variants by as being called "the classic actor model"). Long history; Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actors is maybe the cleanest writeupThe Agoric Open Systems papers by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into the underlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objectsmarkm-talks and markm-more-talks which are mostly about object capability security topicsAPConf keynote, Architectures of Robust Openness by Mark S. Miller (YouTube copy)Mark diagraming a (certificate based) object capabilities flow at Rebooting Web of Trust 2017 (when Mark and Christine first met!)The history of Mark and company performing civil disobediance to make cryptography available to everyone is discussed in When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in Software, part of a four part seriesRSAXanadu, Ted Nelson, and Computer Lib/Dream MachinesXerox PARC, which is where the Vulcan group happened (which is hard to find information on, sadly).Mark mentions some of his colleagues who worked with him in the Vulcan group, including Dean Tribble (who worked on Joule, see more below) and Danny Bobrow who is famous for his groundbreaking program STUDENT (Natural Language Input for a Computer Proglem Solving System is an incredible read, detailing a program (written in lisp!) which could read algebra "word problems" written in plain English and solve them... in 1964!).Flat Concurrent Prolog... it's tough to find things about! Presumably here's the paper Mark mentioned that Dean lead on Flat Concurrent Prolog from the Vulcan group which lead to Joule's channels. A bit more on (go figure) erights.org!The Joule manual is still a very interesting read, if you can find the time. Talks about channels in depth.Here's the Communicating Sequential Processes book by Tony Hoare, quite a nerdy read!On capabilities and actors... we'll get to this more in the next episode, but for now we'll leave the Ode to the Granovetter Diagram paper here (it's a truly amazing document!)

What's at Stake in the Game of Civilization? We explore how technologies of intelligent voluntary cooperation can help us navigate the traps. Cryptocommerce enables decentralized, secure cooperation across humans – and AIs.Mark S. Miller is the chief scientist of Agoric, a pioneer of agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, the main designer of the E and Dr. SES distributed persistent object-capability programming languages, inventor of Miller Columns, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a representative to the ECMAScript committee, a former Google research scientist, and a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute.Christine Peterson is cofounder and senior fellow at Foresight Institute. She writes and lectures to general audiences on a wide variety of topics including nanotechnology, longevity, and computer security.  Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She leads Foresight's longevity, molecular machines, neurotechnology, computing, and space programs, and shares their results with the public.Session summary: M. Miller, C. Peterson, A, Duettman: What's at Stake in the Game? | Gaming the Future Ch. 1,2 - Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“In the mid 90s, we had a vision of smart contracting well before the invention of blockchain.”Mark S. Miller is a pioneer of Agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a former Google research scientist, and a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute.Dean Tribble co-designed the negotiation process and contract for the first smart contracting system, AMiX. As a Principal Architect at Microsoft, he co-designed the Midori distributed object-capability operating system. This episode is a fireside chat Q&A with Mark S. Miller and Dean Tribble of Agoric. Agoric is an open-source development company launching an interoperable Proof-of-Stake chain and economy. Their JavaScript-native smart contract platform offers developers a safe, reusable library of DeFi components to rapidly build and deploy on-chain.Music: I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Session Summary: (390) Fireside Q&A with Mark Miller & Dean Tribble | The Agoric Approach to Computing - YouTubeThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's time for some updates on Spritely, the project Christine founded to advance decentralized networking technology! A lot has happened since our episode about Spritely from last year (which is really where Spritely got its main public announcement)! Most notably, Jessica Tallon has joined the project thanks to a generous grant from NLNet and NGI Zero! But there's a lot more that has happened too, so listen in!ALSO! As mentioned at the end of this episode, starting with the NEXT episode, we'll begin signing off every episode by thanking donors to FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! By donating you both support this podcast AND Christine's work on Spritely!Links:The Spritely ProjectFOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! Donate to show up in the thank-yous for upcoming episodes!The previous "What is Spritely?" of this podcastJessica Tallon joins with a grant from NLNet/NGI Zero! Plus an interview!Spritely Brux, Spritely's identity and trust management framework, which Jessica is working on (and Morgan dressed as for the costume contest)Goblin-Chat (mostly a prototype to demonstrate the underlying networking tech)Spritely Goblins, Spritely's distributed programming environment framework (and which Christine dressed as for the costume contest) (code, documentation)Work in progress port of Goblins on Guile! It's getting close!Spritely Aurie, Spritely's security-preserving runtime serialization and upgrade frameworkSafe Serialization Under Mutual Suspicion by Mark S. MillerPickling, Uneval, Unapply by Jonathan ReesOCapN, the new generation of CapTP and friends (see also What is CapTP, and what does it enable?)Coroutines, Goblins' scoped suport for them. As for why they aren't prioritized in Goblins, read up on re-entrancy attacks, including this ancient e-lang email threadGoblins' integration with Racket's asynchronous programming stuff via sync/pr (will be documented in the next tutorial version)SeaGL, where Morgan and Christine keynoted... and performed in the costume contest as the Spritely Brux and Goblins mascots!

Mark S. Miller discusses civilization as relevant superintelligence, the importance and neglectedness of cybersecurity, and decentralized approaches to AI safety.  Even if we don't know yet how to align Artificial General Intelligences with our goals, we do have experience in aligning organizations with our goals. Some argue corporations are in fact Artificial Intelligences - legally at least we treat them as persons already.Mark S. Miller is Chief Scientist at Agoric, and a pioneer of agoric (market-based secure distributed) computing and smart contracts, the main designer of the E and Dr. SES distributed persistent object-capability programming languages, inventor of Miller Columns, an architect of the Xanadu hypertext publishing system, a representative to the EcmaScript committee, a former Google research scientist and member of the WebAssembly (Wasm) group. Music: I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Session Summary: Civilization as relevant superintelligence – Mark S. Miller - Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris and Morgan, driving in the Covid-19 pandemic, reflect on lessons of hygiene and a separation of concerns from the past (seen through the retroactively surprising struggle for handwashing acceptance) while analyzing how to bring safety to today's computing security pandemic via object capability discipline.As said in the episode, there's a lot of research and evidence for the object capability security approach! Please do scour the links below (with significant commentary attached).Links:Ignaz Semmelweis and two excellent podcast episodes with more:Ignaz Semmelweis and the War on Handwashing on Stuff You Missed in History ClassThe fascinating, inspiring, and infurating story of Ignaz Semmelweis on SawbonesThe mailing list post by Chris that prompted this episode (largely the same stuff, a bit more particular to the targeted audience): Hygiene for a computing pandemic: separation of VCs and ocaps/zcapsPOLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident, by Kate Sills. Examines how malicious code inserted into a library designed to steal programmers' private information/keys/money could have been prevented with capability-based security.An interview with Kate Sills about object capabilities; contains some of the same information presented in this episode, but with more focus on the basic concepts.A Security Kernel based on the Lambda Calculus explains how these concepts apply to programming language design (using a limited subset of the Scheme programming language).Ka-Ping Yee's PhD dissertation, Building Reliable Voting Machine Software, demonstrates the difficulty of finding intentionally obscured security vulnerabilities through code review (see "How was PVote's security evaluated?"). This demonstrates that FOSS is necessary but insufficient on its own for security.A backdoor which was inserted into the official Linux kernel source code (and actually distributed on the official CVS server, briefly!) all the way back in 2003. Note that the vulnerability was initially discovered not through code review, but through discovering a server intrusion. The code is well obfuscated in a way that might be difficult to observe through visual inspection of a significant body of code.The zcap-ld spec has a subsection on how to safely and hygienically bridge the worlds of identity/claims/credentials with authority/ocaps. (Note some bias here: Chris co-authored this spec with Mark Miller.) It also has some other useful subsections: Capabilities are Safer contrasts with ACLs, and ZCAP-LD by Example shows how capabilities can be constructed on top of certificate chains (an approach not even mentioned in the episode... but yes, you can do it!)So why are ACLs / an identity-oriented approach so bad anyway? ACLs Don't explains the problems caused by an identity-oriented authority model:Ambient authority, ie "programs running with too much authority"... think about the "solitaire running 'as you'" part of the podcast (and contrast with the POLA/ocap solution also explained in-episode)Confused deputies, which are notoriously kind of hard to describe... Norm Hardy provides a capsule summary which is fairly good. But also:The Browser is a very Confused Deputy is an excellent and fun video introduction.Norm Hardy's original Confused Deputy paper is still worth reading, and there is more to read hereAn example of a confused deputy attack against the Guile programming environment (which Chris helped uncover): Guile security vulnerability w/ listening on localhost + port (with fix). Note the way that both the browser and the guile programming environment appear to be "correctly behaving according to specification" when looked at individually!Another way to put it is that identity-oriented security approaches are also generally perimeter-based security approaches and (I'm paraphrasing Marc Stiegler here): "Perimeter security is eggshell security... it seems pretty tough when you tap on it, but poke one hole through and you can suck out the whole yolk."Capabilities: Effects for Free shows nicely how capabilities can also be combined with a type system to prove constraints on what a particular subset of code can do.What we haven't talked about as much yet is all the cool things that ocaps enable. A great paper on this is Capability-based Financial Instruments (aka "Ode to the Granovetter Diagram", or "The Ode"), which shows how, using the E distributed programming language, distributed financial tooling can be built out of a shockingly small amount of code. (All of this stuff written about a decade before blockchains hit the mainstream!)You might need to know a bit more E syntax to read The Ode; Marc Stiegler's E in a Walnut is an incredible resource, and has many insights of its own... but it's a bit more coconut-sized than walnut-sized, in my view.An enormous amount of interesting information and papers about object capability security on the E Wiki's Documentation page page (snapshot). Honestly you could just spend a few months reading all that.In particular, if you're mathematically minded and say "yeah but I want the proofs, gimme the proofs; I mean like real math'y proofs!" there's a whole subsection on Formal Methods (snapshot)But maybe you're worrying, is it possible to build secure UIs on top of this? Not One Click for Security does a lovely job showing how ocap principles can actually result in a more intuitive flow if done correctly... one smooth enough that users might wonder, "where's the security?" Surprise! It was just smoothly baked into the natural flow of the application, which is why you didn't notice it!And if you really want to spend a lot of time getting into the weeds of how to design ocap systems, maybe look at Mark S. Miller's PhD dissertation, Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control. Chris is pretty sure they're the only one with an autographed copy sitting on their desk.Finally, have we mentioned that Chris's work on Spritely is pretty much entirely based on extending the federated social web based on ocap security principles?

Active Quest Episode 68: Diablo 2 Remaster Rumors and Inside Xbox Next Gen Game Reveals  Joseph Yaden - twitter.com/josephyaden Josh Nichols - twitter.com/Mrjoshnichols Chris Penwell - twitter.com/PenwellWrites You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and Google Play. You can also subscribe through our RSS feed.  Follow us on Twitter @ActiveQuestShow Email us @ ActiveQuestPodcast@gmail.com Rate us on iTunes so we can continue to reach people, go to E3, get more review codes to provide coverage to you all and more. Reviews are so helpful for discovery and opening doors in the industry for us! Twitter: @ActiveQuestShow Get our official shirt! https://teespring.com/active-quest-shirt#pid=2&cid=566&sid=front We are proud to be a part of the HP Video Game Podcast Network!: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtistSeeAll?cc=us&dkId=4§ion=0&ids=1482427275 Music Theme Song made by Novila. He did an awesome job, so here’s a shoutout! https://soundcloud.com/novila-edm Quick Notes Tokyo Game Show 2020 Canceled, Digital Event Planned Nicole Carpenter https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/8/21251831/tokyo-game-show-canceled-2020-coronoavirus-pandemic Diablo 2 Remastered Rumored To Be Worked On By Vicarious Visions Rory Young https://gamerant.com/diablo-2-remaster-vicarious-visions/ Quick Upcoming Releases Mortal Kombat 11 Expansion Coming Brian Shea https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2020/05/06/aftermath-is-a-mortal-kombat-11-expansion-that-adds-a-new-story-and-more Disintegration Comes out in June Brian Shea https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/05/07/disintegration-new-shooter-from-co-creator-of-halo-gets-june-release-date Vader Immortal Comes to PSVR This Summer Mark S. Miller https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/05/04/vader-immortal-a-star-wars-vr-series-is-coming-to-ps-vr-this-summer/ News Inside Xbox - Next Gen Games Revealed Jeremy Winslow https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-2020-games-event-recap-assassins-creed-madden/1100-6476929/ April 2020 Top Downloads, Final Fantasy VII Remake On Top Jason Massongill https://blog.us.playstation.com/2020/05/07/playstation-store-aprils-top-downloads-4/ Animal Crossing Hits 13.4 million sales in six weeks Matthew Handrahan https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-07-animal-crossing-new-horizons-hits-13-4m-sales Switch Crosses 55 Million Sold  Matthew Handrahan https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-07-switch-passes-55m-lifetime-sales-in-a-strong-year-for-nintendo Listener Questions Greysun Morales - Favorite game shown during the Inside Xbox? Mine was Scarlet Nexus because it looks like a mix of Astral Chain and Devil May Cry mixed with plant monsters and I'm fucking here for it. Alex Derickson - Between Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk, why are genitals a benchmark? Josh from Indie Pod: So I think the most important question is of course, "How big is your cyberpunk virtual dong going to be?" The people need to know. What We’ve Been Playing                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Chris Tales of Crestoria Dread Nautical (review code provided for SwitchWatch) Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns Final Fantasy VII Remake Far Cry: New Dawn (Game #9 of 2020) Josh Gears Tactics

We were joined by Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist at Agoric. Mark is a computer scientist who has done ground-breaking work on many topics relevant to blockchain and smart contracts going back decades. We discussed his visionary 1988 Agoric papers, which explored how markets could be applied to the world of software. We also covered how his view of smart contracts, which focused on secure bilateral agreements complements and converges with blockchain. Finally, we covered his new company Agoric and their conceptualization of higher order smart contracts. Topics covered in this episode: Mark's effort to prevent the government from suppressing the discovery of public key cryptography in the 1970s The legendary project Xanadu and its attempt to create censorship-resistant web publishing Mark's Agoric papers and the vision of markets for computation Why AI hasn't changed the shortcomings of central planning The difference between his view of smart contracts and Nick Szabo's Their decade-spanning work on making JavaScript the best language for smart contracts Agoric's work on higher order smart contracting Episode links: The Agoric Papers Computer Security as the Future of Law - YouTube Capability-based Financial Instruments (2000) Distributed Electronic Rights in JavaScript – Google AI Agoric at SF Cryptocurrency Devs - Programming Secure Smart Contracts - YouTube The Duality of Smart Contracts and Electronic Rights by Dean Tribble at Web3 Summit 2018 - YouTube Sponsors: Azure: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks - http://aka.ms/epicenter Cosmos: Join the most interoperable ecosystem of connected blockchains - http://cosmos.network/epicenter This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/286

How the term open source was created, running FreeBSD on ThinkPad T530, Moving away from Windows, Unknown Giants, as well as OpenBSD and FreeDOS. This episode was brought to you by Headlines How I coined the term 'open source' (https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software) In a few days, on February 3, the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the term "open source software" is upon us. As open source software grows in popularity and powers some of the most robust and important innovations of our time, we reflect on its rise to prominence. I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group. This is my account of how I came up with it, how it was proposed, and the subsequent reactions. Of course, there are a number of accounts of the coining of the term, for example by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman, yet this is mine, written on January 2, 2006. It has never been published, until today. The introduction of the term "open source software" was a deliberate effort to make this field of endeavor more understandable to newcomers and to business, which was viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users. The problem with the main earlier label, "free software," was not its political connotations, but that—to newcomers—its seeming focus on price is distracting. A term was needed that focuses on the key issue of source code and that does not immediately confuse those new to the concept. The first term that came along at the right time and fulfilled these requirements was rapidly adopted: open source. This term had long been used in an "intelligence" (i.e., spying) context, but to my knowledge, use of the term with respect to software prior to 1998 has not been confirmed. The account below describes how the term open source software caught on and became the name of both an industry and a movement. Meetings on computer security In late 1997, weekly meetings were being held at Foresight Institute to discuss computer security. Foresight is a nonprofit think tank focused on nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and software security is regarded as central to the reliability and security of both. We had identified free software as a promising approach to improving software security and reliability and were looking for ways to promote it. Interest in free software was starting to grow outside the programming community, and it was increasingly clear that an opportunity was coming to change the world. However, just how to do this was unclear, and we were groping for strategies. At these meetings, we discussed the need for a new term due to the confusion factor. The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage. The problem was not that explaining the meaning is impossible—the problem was that the name for an important idea should not be so confusing to newcomers. A clearer term was needed. No political issues were raised regarding the free software term; the issue was its lack of clarity to those new to the concept. Releasing Netscape On February 2, 1998, Eric Raymond arrived on a visit to work with Netscape on the plan to release the browser code under a free-software-style license. We held a meeting that night at Foresight's office in Los Altos to strategize and refine our message. In addition to Eric and me, active participants included Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Todd Anderson, Mark S. Miller, and Ka-Ping Yee. But at that meeting, the field was still described as free software or, by Brian, "source code available" software. While in town, Eric used Foresight as a base of operations. At one point during his visit, he was called to the phone to talk with a couple of Netscape legal and/or marketing staff. When he was finished, I asked to be put on the phone with them—one man and one woman, perhaps Mitchell Baker—so I could bring up the need for a new term. They agreed in principle immediately, but no specific term was agreed upon. Between meetings that week, I was still focused on the need for a better name and came up with the term "open source software." While not ideal, it struck me as good enough. I ran it by at least four others: Eric Drexler, Mark Miller, and Todd Anderson liked it, while a friend in marketing and public relations felt the term "open" had been overused and abused and believed we could do better. He was right in theory; however, I didn't have a better idea, so I thought I would try to go ahead and introduce it. In hindsight, I should have simply proposed it to Eric Raymond, but I didn't know him well at the time, so I took an indirect strategy instead. Todd had agreed strongly about the need for a new term and offered to assist in getting the term introduced. This was helpful because, as a non-programmer, my influence within the free software community was weak. My work in nanotechnology education at Foresight was a plus, but not enough for me to be taken very seriously on free software questions. As a Linux programmer, Todd would be listened to more closely. The key meeting Later that week, on February 5, 1998, a group was assembled at VA Research to brainstorm on strategy. Attending—in addition to Eric Raymond, Todd, and me—were Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and attending by phone, Jon "maddog" Hall. The primary topic was promotion strategy, especially which companies to approach. I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable. Fortunately, Todd was on the ball. Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened. I went on alert, hoping for a response, but there was none at first. The discussion continued on the original topic. It seemed only he and I had noticed the usage. Not so—memetic evolution was in action. A few minutes later, one of the others used the term, evidently without noticing, still discussing a topic other than terminology. Todd and I looked at each other out of the corners of our eyes to check: yes, we had both noticed what happened. I was excited—it might work! But I kept quiet: I still had low status in this group. Probably some were wondering why Eric had invited me at all. Toward the end of the meeting, the question of terminology was brought up explicitly, probably by Todd or Eric. Maddog mentioned "freely distributable" as an earlier term, and "cooperatively developed" as a newer term. Eric listed "free software," "open source," and "sourceware" as the main options. Todd advocated the "open source" model, and Eric endorsed this. I didn't say much, letting Todd and Eric pull the (loose, informal) consensus together around the open source name. It was clear that to most of those at the meeting, the name change was not the most important thing discussed there; a relatively minor issue. Only about 10% of my notes from this meeting are on the terminology question. But I was elated. These were some key leaders in the community, and they liked the new name, or at least didn't object. This was a very good sign. There was probably not much more I could do to help; Eric Raymond was far better positioned to spread the new meme, and he did. Bruce Perens signed on to the effort immediately, helping set up Opensource.org and playing a key role in spreading the new term. For the name to succeed, it was necessary, or at least highly desirable, that Tim O'Reilly agree and actively use it in his many projects on behalf of the community. Also helpful would be use of the term in the upcoming official release of the Netscape Navigator code. By late February, both O'Reilly & Associates and Netscape had started to use the term. Getting the name out After this, there was a period during which the term was promoted by Eric Raymond to the media, by Tim O'Reilly to business, and by both to the programming community. It seemed to spread very quickly. On April 7, 1998, Tim O'Reilly held a meeting of key leaders in the field. Announced in advance as the first "Freeware Summit," by April 14 it was referred to as the first "Open Source Summit." These months were extremely exciting for open source. Every week, it seemed, a new company announced plans to participate. Reading Slashdot became a necessity, even for those like me who were only peripherally involved. I strongly believe that the new term was helpful in enabling this rapid spread into business, which then enabled wider use by the public. A quick Google search indicates that "open source" appears more often than "free software," but there still is substantial use of the free software term, which remains useful and should be included when communicating with audiences who prefer it. A happy twinge When an early account of the terminology change written by Eric Raymond was posted on the Open Source Initiative website, I was listed as being at the VA brainstorming meeting, but not as the originator of the term. This was my own fault; I had neglected to tell Eric the details. My impulse was to let it pass and stay in the background, but Todd felt otherwise. He suggested to me that one day I would be glad to be known as the person who coined the name "open source software." He explained the situation to Eric, who promptly updated his site. Coming up with a phrase is a small contribution, but I admit to being grateful to those who remember to credit me with it. Every time I hear it, which is very often now, it gives me a little happy twinge. The big credit for persuading the community goes to Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly, who made it happen. Thanks to them for crediting me, and to Todd Anderson for his role throughout. The above is not a complete account of open source history; apologies to the many key players whose names do not appear. Those seeking a more complete account should refer to the links in this article and elsewhere on the net. FreeBSD on a Laptop - A guide to a fully functional installation of FreeBSD on a ThinkPad T530 (https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop) As I stated my previous post, I recently dug up my old ThinkPad T530 after the embarrassing stream of OS X security bugs this month. Although this ThinkPad ran Gentoo faithfully during my time in graduate school at Clemson, these days I'd much rather spend time my wife and baby than fighting with emerge and USE flags. FreeBSD has always been my OS of choice, and laptop support seems to be much better than it was a few years ago. In this guide, I'll show you the tweaks I made to wrestle FreeBSD into a decent experience on a laptop. Unlike my usual posts, this time I'm going to assume you're already pretty familiar with FreeBSD. If you're a layman looking for your first BSD-based desktop, I highly recommend checking out TrueOS (previously PC-BSD): they've basically taken FreeBSD and packaged it with all the latest drivers, along with a user-friendly installer and custom desktop environment out of the box. TrueOS is an awesome project–the only reason I don't use it is because I'm old, grumpy, and persnickety about having my operating system just so. Anyway, if you'd still like to take the plunge, read on. Keep in mind, I'm using a ThinkPad T530, but other ThinkPads of the same generation should be similarly compatible. Here's what you'll get: Decent battery life (8-9 hours with a new 9-cell battery) UEFI boot and full-disk encryption WiFi (Intel Ultimate-N 6300) Ethernet (Intel PRO/1000) Screen brightness adjustment Suspend/Resume on lid close (make sure to disable TPM in BIOS) Audio (Realtek ALC269 HDA, speakers and headphone jack) Keyboard multimedia buttons Touchpad/Trackpoint Graphics Acceleration (with integrated Intel graphics, NVIDIA card disabled in BIOS) What I haven't tested yet: Bluetooth Webcam Fingerprint reader SD Card slot Installation Power Saving Tweaks for Desktop Use X11 Fonts Login Manager: SLiM Desktop Environment: i3 Applications The LLVM Sanitizers stage accomplished (https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_llvm_sanitizers_stage_accomplished) I've managed to get the Memory Sanitizer to work for the elementary base system utilities, like ps(1), awk(1) and ksh(1). This means that the toolchain is ready for tests and improvements. I've iterated over the basesystem utilities and I looked for bugs, both in programs and in sanitizers. The number of detected bugs in the userland programs was low, there merely was one reading of an uninitialized variable in ps(1). A prebuilt LLVM toolchain I've prepared a prebuilt toolchain with Clang, LLVM, LLDB and compiler-rt for NetBSD/amd64. I prepared the toolchain on 8.99.12, however I have received reports that it works on other older releases. Link: llvm-clang-compilerrt-lldb-7.0.0beta_2018-01-24.tar.bz2 The archive has to be untarballed to /usr/local (however it might work to some extent in other paths). This toolchain contains a prebuilt tree of the LLVM projects from a snapshot of 7.0.0(svn). It is a pristine snapshot of HEAD with patches from pkgsrc-wip for llvm, clang, compiler-rt and lldb. Sanitizers Notable changes in sanitizers, all of them are in the context of NetBSD support. Added fstat(2) MSan interceptor. Support for kvm(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added devname(3) and devname_r(3) interceptors to the common sanitizer code. Added sysctl(3) familty of functions interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added strlcpy(3)/strlcat(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Added getgrouplist(3)/getgroupmembership(3) interceptors in the common sanitizer code. Correct ctype(3) interceptors in a code using Native Language Support. Correct tzset(3) interceptor in MSan. Correct localtime(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added paccept(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added access(2) and faccessat(2) interceptors to the common sanitizer code. Added acct(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added accept4(2) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added fgetln(3) interceptor to the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the pwcache(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the getprotoent(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the getnetent(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the fts(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Added lstat(3) interceptor in MSan. Added strftime(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added strmode(3) interceptor in the common sanitizer code. Added interceptors for the regex(3)-style functions in the common sanitizer code. Disabled unwanted interceptor __sigsetjmp in TSan. Base system changes I've tidied up inclusion of the internal namespace.h header in libc. This has hidden the usage of public global symbol names of: strlcat -> _strlcat sysconf -> __sysconf closedir -> _closedir fparseln -> _fparseln kill -> _kill mkstemp -> _mkstemp reallocarr -> _reallocarr strcasecmp -> _strcasecmp strncasecmp -> _strncasecmp strptime -> _strptime strtok_r -> _strtok_r sysctl -> _sysctl dlopen -> __dlopen dlclose -> __dlclose dlsym -> __dlsym strlcpy -> _strlcpy fdopen -> _fdopen mmap -> _mmap strdup -> _strdup The purpose of these changes was to stop triggering interceptors recursively. Such interceptors lead to sanitization of internals of unprepared (not recompiled with sanitizers) prebuilt code. It's not trivial to sanitize libc's internals and the sanitizers are not designed to do so. This means that they are not a full replacement of Valgrind-like software, but a a supplement in the developer toolbox. Valgrind translates native code to a bytecode virtual machine, while sanitizers are designed to work with interceptors inside the pristine elementary libraries (libc, libm, librt, libpthread) and embed functionality into the executable's code. I've also reverted the vadvise(2) syscall removal, from the previous month. This caused a regression in legacy code recompiled against still supported compat layers. Newly compiled code will use a libc's stub of vadvise(2). I've also prepared a patch installing dedicated headers for sanitizers along with the base system GCC. It's still discussed and should land the sources soon. Future directions and goals Possible paths in random order: In the quartet of UBSan (Undefined Behavior Sanitizer), ASan (Address Sanitizer), TSan (Thread Sanitizer), MSan (Memory Sanitizer) we need to add the fifth basic sanitizer: LSan (Leak Sanitizer). The Leak Sanitizer (detector of memory leaks) demands a stable ptrace(2) interface for processes with multiple threads (unless we want to build a custom kernel interface). Integrate the sanitizers with the userland framework in order to ship with the native toolchain to users. Port sanitizers from LLVM to GCC. Allow to sanitize programs linked against userland libraries other than libc, librt, libm and libpthread; by a global option (like MKSANITIZER) producing a userland that is partially prebuilt with a desired sanitizer. This is required to run e.g. MSanitized programs against editline(3). So far, there is no Operating System distribution in existence with a native integration with sanitizers. There are 3rd party scripts for certain OSes to build a stack of software dependencies in order to validate a piece of software. Execute ATF tests with the userland rebuilt with supported flavors of sanitizers and catch regressions. Finish porting of modern linkers designed for large C++ software, such as GNU GOLD and LLVM LLD. Today the bottleneck with building the LLVM toolchain is a suboptimal linker GNU ld(1). I've decided to not open new battlefields and return now to porting LLDB and fixing ptrace(2). Plan for the next milestone Keep upstreaming a pile of local compiler-rt patches. Restore the LLDB support for traced programs with a single thread. Interview - Goran Mekic - meka@tilda.center (mailto:meka@tilda.center) / @meka_floss (https://twitter.com/meka_floss) CBSD website (https://bsdstore.ru) Jail and VM Manager *** News Roundup Finally Moving Away From Windows (https://www.manios.ca/blog/2018/01/finally-moving-away-from-windows/) Broken Window Thanks to a combination of some really impressive malware, bad clicking, and poor website choices, I had to blow away my Windows 10 installation. Not that it was Window's fault, but a piece of malware had infected my computer when I tried to download a long lost driver for an even longer lost RAID card for a server. A word of advice – the download you're looking for is never on an ad-infested forum in another language. In any case, I had been meaning to switch away from Windows soon. I didn't have my entire plan ready, but now was as good a time as any. My line of work requires me to maintain some form of Windows installation, so I decided to keep it in a VM rather than dual booting as I was developing code and not running any high-end visual stuff like games. My first thought was to install Arch or Gentoo Linux, but the last time I attempted a Gentoo installation it left me bootless. Not that there is anything wrong with Gentoo, it was probably my fault, but I like the idea of some sort of installer so I looked at rock-solid Debian. My dad had installed Debian on his sweet new cutting-edge Lenovo laptop he received recently from work. He often raves about his cool scripts and much more effective customized experience, but often complains about his hybrid GPU support as he has an Intel/Nvidia hybrid display adapter (he has finally resolved it and now boasts his 6 connected displays). I didn't want to install Windows again, but something didn't feel right about installing some flavour of Linux. Back at home I have a small collection of FreeBSD servers running in all sorts of jails and other physical hardware, with the exception of one Debian server which I had the hardest time dealing with (it would be FreeBSD too if 802.11ac support was there as it is acting as my WiFi/gateway/IDS/IPS). I loved my FreeBSD servers, and yes I will write posts about each one soon enough. I wanted that cleanliness and familiarity on my desktop as well (I really love the ports collection!). It's settled – I will run FreeBSD on my laptop. This also created a new rivalry with my father, which is not a bad thing either. Playing Devil's Advocate The first thing I needed to do was backup my Windows data. This was easy enough, just run a Windows Image Backup and it will- wait, what? Why isn't this working? I didn't want to fiddle with this too long because I didn't actually need an image just the data. I ended up just copying over the files to an external hard disk. Once that was done, I downloaded and verified the latest FreeBSD 11.1 RELEASE memstick image and flashed it to my trusty 8GB Verbatim USB stick. I've had this thing since 2007, it works great for being my re-writable “CD”. I booted it up and started the installation. I knew this installer pretty well as I had test-installed FreeBSD and OpenBSD in VMs when I was researching a Unix style replacement OS last year. In any case, I left most of the defaults (I didn't want to play with custom kernels right now) and I selected all packages. This downloaded them from the FreeBSD FTP server as I only had the memstick image. The installer finished and I was off to my first boot. Great! so far so good. FreeBSD loaded up and I did a ‘pkg upgrade' just to make sure that everything was up to date. Alright, time to get down to business. I needed nano. I just can't use vi, or just not yet. I don't care about being a vi-wizard, that's just too much effort for me. Anyway, just a ‘pkg install nano' and I had my editor. Next was obvious, I needed x11. XFCE was common, and there were plenty of tutorials out there. I wont bore you with those details, but it went something like ‘pkg install xfce' and I got all the dependencies. Don't forget to install SLiM to make it seamless. There are some configs in the .login I think. SLiM needs to be called once the boot drops you to the login so that you get SLiM's nice GUI login instead of the CLI login screen. Then SLiM passes you off to XFCE. I think I followed this and this. Awesome. Now that x11 is working, it's time to get all of my apps from Windows. Obviously, I can't get everything (ie. Visual Studio, Office). But in my Windows installation, I had chosen many open-source or cross-compiled apps as they either worked better or so that I was ready to move away from Windows at a moments notice. ‘pkg install firefox thunderbird hexchat pidgin gpa keepass owncloud-client transmission-qt5 veracrypt openvpn' were some immediate picks. There are a lot more that I downloaded later, but these are a few I use everyday. My laptop also has the same hybrid display adapter config that my dad's has, but I chose to only run Intel graphics, so dual screens are no problem for me. I'll add Nvidia support later, but it's not a priority. After I had imported my private keys and loaded my firefox and thunderbird settings, I wanted to get my Windows VM running right away as I was burning productive days at work fiddling with this. I had only two virtualisation options; qemu/kvm and bhyve. qemu/kvm wasn't available in pkg, and looked real dirty to compile, from FreeBSD's point of view. My dad is using qemu/kvm with virt-manager to manage all of his Windows/Unix VMs alike. I wanted that experience, but I also wanted packages that could be updated and I didn't want to mess up a compile. bhyve was a better choice. It was built-in, it was more compatible with Windows (from what I read), and this is a great step-by-step article for Windows 10 on FreeBSD 11 bhyve! I had already tried to get virt-manager to work with bhyve with no luck. I don't think libvirt connects with bhyve completely, or maybe my config is wrong. But I didn't have time to fiddle with it. I managed it all through command lines and that has worked perfectly so far. Well sorta, there was an issue installing SQL Server, and only SQL Server, on my Windows VM. This was due to a missing ‘sectorsize=512' setting on the disk parameter on the bhyve command line. That was only found after A LOT of digging because the SQL Server install didn't log the error properly. I eventually found out that SQL Server only likes one sector size of disks for the install and my virtual disk geometry was incorrect. Apps Apps Apps I installed Windows 10 on my bhyve VM and I got that all setup with the apps I needed for work. Mostly Office, Visual Studio, and vSphere for managing our server farm. Plus all of the annoying 3rd party VPN software (I'm looking at you Dell and Cisco). Alright, with the Windows VM done, I can now work at work and finish FreeBSD mostly during the nights. I still needed my remote files (I setup an ownCloud instance on a FreeNAS jail at home) so I setup the client. Now, normally on Windows I would come to work and connect to my home network using OpenVPN (again, I have a OpenVPN FreeNAS jail at home) and the ownCloud desktop would be able to handle changing DNS destination IPs Not on FreeBSD (and Linux too?). I ended up just configuring the ownCloud client to just connect to the home LAN IP for the ownCloud server and always connecting the OpenVPN to sync things. It kinda sucks, but at least it works. I left that running at home overnight to get a full sync (~130GB cloud sync, another reason I use it over Google or Microsoft). Once that was done I moved onto the fstab as I had another 1TB SSD in my laptop with other files. I messed around with fstab and my NFS shares to my FreeNAS at home, but took them out as they made the boot time so long when I wasn't at home. I would only mount them when my OpenVPN connected or manually. I really wanted to install SpaceFM, but it's only available as a package on Debian and their non-package install script doesn't work on FreeBSD (packages are named differently). I tried doing it manually, but it was too much work. As my dad was the one who introduced me to it, he still uses it as a use-case for his Debian setup. Instead I kept to the original PCManFM and it works just fine. I also loaded up my Bitcoin and Litecoin wallets and pointed them to the blockchain that I has used on Windows after their sync, they loaded perfectly and my balances were there. I kinda wish there was the Bitcoin-ABC full node Bitcoin Cash wallet package on FreeBSD, but I'm sure it will come out later. The rest is essentially just tweaks and making the environment more comfortable for me, and with most programs installed as packages I feel a lot better with upgrades and audit checking (‘pkg audit -F' is really helpful!). I will always hate Python, actually, I will always hate any app that has it's own package manager. I do miss the GUI GitHub tool on Windows. It was a really good-looking way to view all of my repos. The last thing (which is increasing it's priority every time I go to a social media site or YouTube) is fonts. My god I never thought it was such a problem, and UTF support is complicated. If anyone knows how to get all UTF characters to show up, please let me know. I'd really like Wikipedia articles to load perfectly (I followed this post and there are still some missing). There are some extra tweaks I followed here and here. Conclusion I successfully migrated from Windows 10 to FreeBSD 11.1 with minimal consequence. Shout out goes to the entire FreeBSD community. So many helpful people in there, and the forums are a great place to find tons of information. Also thanks to the ones who wrote the how-to articles I've referenced. I never would have gotten bhyve to work and I'd still probably be messing with my X config without them. I guess my take home from this is to not be afraid to make changes that may change how comfortable I am in an environment. I'm always open to comments and questions, please feel free to make them below. I purposefully didn't include too many technical things or commands in this article as I wanted to focus on the larger picture of the migration as a whole not the struggles of xorg.conf, but if you would like to see some of the configs or commands I used, let me know and I'll include some! TrueOS Rules of Conduct (https://www.trueos.org/rulesofconduct/) We believe code is truly agnostic and embrace inclusiveness regardless of a person's individual beliefs. As such we only ask the following when participating in TrueOS public events and digital forums: Treat each other with respect and professionalism. Leave personal and TrueOS unrelated conversations to other channels. In other words, it's all about the code. Users who feel the above rules have been violated in some way can register a complaint with abuse@trueos.org + Shorter than the BSD License (https://twitter.com/trueos/status/965994363070353413) + Positive response from the community (https://twitter.com/freebsdbytes/status/966567686015782912) I really like the @TrueOS Code of Conduct, unlike some other CoCs. It's short, clear and covers everything. Most #OpenSource projects are labour of love. Why do you need a something that reads like a legal contract? FreeBSD: The Unknown Giant (https://neomoevius.tumblr.com/post/171108458234/freebsd-the-unknown-giant) I decided to write this article as a gratitude for the recent fast answer of the FreeBSD/TrueOS community with my questions and doubts. I am impressed how fast and how they tried to help me about this operating system which I used in the past(2000-2007) but recently in 2017 I began to use it again. + A lot has changed in 10 years I was looking around the internet, trying to do some research about recent information about FreeBSD and other versions or an easy to use spins like PCBSD (now TrueOS) I used to be Windows/Mac user for so many years until 2014 when I decided to use Linux as my desktop OS just because I wanted to use something different. I always wanted to use unix or a unix-like operating system, nowadays my main objective is to learn more about these operating systems (Debian Linux, TrueOS or FreeBSD). FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete operating system, i.e. the project delivers kernel, device drivers, userland utilities and documentation, as opposed to Linux delivering a kernel and drivers only and relying on third-parties for system software; and FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux.“ But why do I call FreeBSD “The Unknown Giant”?, because the code base of this operating system has been used by other companies to develop their own operating system for products like computers or also game consoles. + FreeBSD is used for storage appliances, firewalls, email scanners, network scanners, network security appliances, load balancers, video servers, and more So many people now will learn that not only “linux is everywhere” but also that “FreeBSD is everywhere too” By the way speaking about movies, Do you remember the movie “The Matrix”? FreeBSD was used to make the movie: “The photo-realistic surroundings generated by this method were incorporated into the bullet time scene, and linear interpolation filled in any gaps of the still images to produce a fluent dynamic motion; the computer-generated “lead in” and “lead out” slides were filled in between frames in sequence to get an illusion of orbiting the scene. Manex Visual Effects used a cluster farm running the Unix-like operating system FreeBSD to render many of the film's visual effects” + FreeBSD Press Release re: The Matrix (https://www.freebsd.org/news/press-rel-1.html) I hope that I gave a good reference, information and now so many people can understand why I am going to use just Debian Linux and FreeBSD(TrueOS) to do so many different stuff (music, 3d animation, video editing and text editing) instead use a Mac or Windows. + FreeBSD really is the unknown giant. OpenBSD and FreeDOS vs the hell in earth (https://steemit.com/openbsd/@npna/openbsd-and-freedos-vs-the-hell-in-earth) Yes sir, yes. Our family, composed until now by OpenBSD, Alpine Linux and Docker is rapidly growing. And yes, sir. Yes. All together we're fighting against your best friends, the infamous, the ugliest, the worst...the dudes called the privacy cannibals. Do you know what i mean, sure? We're working hard, no matter what time is it, no matter in what part in the world we are, no matter if we've no money. We perfectly know that you cannot do nothing against the true. And we're doing our best to expand our true, our doors are opened to all the good guys, there's a lot here but their brain was fucked by your shit tv, your fake news, your laws, etc etc etc. We're alive, we're here to fight against you. Tonight, yes it's a Friday night and we're working, we're ready to welcome with open arms an old guy, his experience will give us more power. Welcome to: FreeDOS But why we want to build a bootable usb stick with FreeDOS under our strong OpenBSD? The answer is as usual to fight against the privacy cannibals! More than one decade ago the old BIOS was silently replaced by the more capable and advanced UEFI, this is absolutely normal because of the pass of the years and exponencial grow of the power of our personal computers. UEFI is a complex system, it's like a standalone system operative with direct access to every component of our (yes, it's our not your!) machine. But...wait a moment...do you know how to use it? Do you ever know that it exist? And one more thing, it's secure? The answer to this question is totally insane, no, it's not secure. The idea is good, the company that started in theory is one of the most important in IT, it's Intel. The history is very large and obviously we're going to go very deep in it, but trust me UEFI and the various friend of him, like ME, TPM are insecure and closed source! Like the hell in earth. A FreeDOS bootable usb image under OpenBSD But let's start preparing our OpenBSD to put order in this chaos: $ mkdir -p freedos/stuff $ cd freedos/stuff $ wget https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img $ wget https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos-linux.zip $ wget https://download.lenovo.com/consumer/desktop/o35jy19usa_y900.exe $ wget http://145.130.102.57/domoticx/software/amiflasher/AFUDOS%20Flasher%205.05.04.7z Explanation in clear language as usual: create two directory, download the minimal boot disc image of FreeDOS, download Syslinux assembler MBR bootloaders, download the last Windows only UEFI update from Lenovo and download the relative unknown utility from AMI to flash our motherboard UEFI chipset. Go ahead: $ doas pkg_add -U nasm unzip dosfstools cabextract p7zip nasm the Netwide Assembler, a portable 80x86 assembler. unzip list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive. dosfstoolsa collections of utilities to manipulate MS-DOSfs. cabextract program to extract files from cabinet. p7zipcollection of utilities to manipulate 7zip archives. $ mkdir sys-freedos-linux && cd sys-freedos-linux $ unzip ../sys-freedos-linux.zip $ cd ~/freedos && mkdir old new $ dd if=/dev/null of=freedos.img bs=1024 seek=20480 $ mkfs.fat freedos.img Create another working directory, cd into it, unzip the archive that we've downloaded, return to the working root and create another twos directories. dd is one of the most important utilities in the unix world to manipulate at byte level input and output: The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output, applying any specified conversions. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output. We're creating here a virtual disk with bs=1024 we're setting both input and output block to 1024bytes; with seek=20480 we require 20480bytes. This is the result: -rw-r--r-- 1 taglio taglio 20971520 Feb 3 00:11 freedos.img. Next we format the virtual disk using the MS-DOS filesystem. Go ahead: $ doas su $ perl stuff/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos.pl --disk=freedos.img $ vnconfig vnd0 stuff/fdboot.img $ vnconfig vnd1 freedos.img $ mount -t msdos /dev/vnd0c old/ $ mount -t msdos /dev/vnd1c new/ We use the perl utility from syslinux to write the MBR of our virtual disk freedos.img. Next we create to loop virtual node using the OpenBSD utility vnconfig. Take care here because it is quite different from Linux, but as usual is clear and simple. The virtual nodes are associated to the downloaded fdboot.img and the newly created freedos.img. Next we mount the two virtual nodes cpartitions; in OpenBSD cpartition describes the entire physical disk. Quite different from Linux, take care. $ cp -R old/* new/ $ cd stuff $ mkdir o35jy19usa $ cabextract -d o35jy19usa o35jy19usa_y900.exe $ doas su $ cp o35jy19usa/ ../new/ $ mkdir afudos && cd afudos $ 7z e ../AFUDOS* $ doas su $ cp AFUDOS.exe ../../new/ $ umount ~/freedos/old/ && umount ~/freedos/new/ $ vnconfig -u vnd1 && vnconfig -u vnd0 Copy all files and directories in the new virtual node partition, extract the Lenovo cabinet in a new directory, copy the result in our new image, extract the afudos utility and like the others copy it. Umount the partitions and destroy the loop vnode. Beastie Bits NetBSD - A modern operating system for your retro battlestation (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-retro) FOSDEM OS distribution (https://twitter.com/pvaneynd/status/960181163578019840/photo/1) Update on two pledge-related changes (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=151268831628549) *execpromises (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=151304116010721&w=2) Slides for (BSD from scratch - from source to OS with ease on NetBSD) (https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-bsd/) Goobyte LastPass: You're fired! (https://blog.crashed.org/goodbye-lastpass/) *** Feedback/Questions Scott - ZFS Mirror with SLOG (http://dpaste.com/22Z8C6Z#wrap) Troels - Question about compressed ARC (http://dpaste.com/3X2R1BV#wrap) Jeff - FreeBSD Desktop DNS (http://dpaste.com/2BQ9HFB#wrap) Jonathon - Bhyve and gpu passthrough (http://dpaste.com/0TTT0DB#wrap) ***