Hacker News: Suzuran

New comment by Suzuran in "Legal action forces Facebook whistleblower to sit in silence at Hay festival"

Suzuran — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:52:21 +0000

Freedom of speech exists to protect politically useful tools. That means the nazis and the Klan so long as they remain such. When they are no longer useful, the protection will pass to another useful tool.

New comment by Suzuran in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

Suzuran — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:42:18 +0000

That has always been the goal. There is, has, and always will be a powerful caste system to ensure that they are gods and we are trash. "Stay in your lane" / "Know your place" / etc. have been watchwords for thousands of years.

New comment by Suzuran in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

Suzuran — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:19:25 +0000

Mainframes can LPAR dynamically. When you want to test if your production system will IPL cleanly, you clone your production environment to an isolated LPAR and IPL it. No impact to production and you get your test.

New comment by Suzuran in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

Suzuran — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:21:11 +0000

In my case, it's always been because the native terminal emulator had issues actually emulating terminals when connected to remote systems, it was intended to be only a terminal-shaped wrapper around the host system's shell.

New comment by Suzuran in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

Suzuran — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:10:15 +0000

America is not rich. A handful of Americans are rich. The rest of us are not, and can never be allowed to become rich because that would not be in the interests of the aforementioned handful.

New comment by Suzuran in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

Suzuran — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:47:59 +0000

Another thing I should point out is that the CSP instruction set was not documented to the customer. The CSP software was called "Microcode" and the customer was not told about the CSP's design or how it worked. The documented instruction set for the System/34 and System/36 is that of the Main Storage Processor or MSP, which was an evolution of the IBM System/3.

New comment by Suzuran in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

Suzuran — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:45:44 +0000

You may not be looking for the right thing. On the aforementioned CSP, the instruction that performed XOR was called "XR" and not "XOR". My source is firsthand knowledge; I was a CE and performed service calls on the System/34, System/36, 370, and 390.

In any case, I am describing equipment built mostly in late 60s through the late 70s at IBM Rochester and Poughkeepsie. The IBM PC was developed by an entirely different team at IBM Boca Raton, and IBM didn't design its CPU.

New comment by Suzuran in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

Suzuran — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:39:46 +0000

On some of IBM's smaller processors, such as channel controllers and the CSP used in the midrange line prior to the System/38, the xor instruction had a special feature when used with identical source and destination - It would inhibit parity and/or ECC error checking on the read cycle, which meant that xor could be used to clear a register or memory location that had been stored with bad parity without taking a machine check or processor check.

New comment by Suzuran in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

Suzuran — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:47:50 +0000

Could be. You could also have been thinking of the 11/730, which was a cost-reduced 11/750 and thus the second-slowest VAX model DEC ever sold.

The slowest would be the 11/725, which was a cost-reduced 11/730 that had a reduced clock speed and half of the bus slots filled with epoxy to limit expansion. The 11/725 was so slow that using it was an act of masochism; It was slower than your 11/23+.

Those models were pretty rare though. Even though they were cheaper than an 11/750 the performance drop from the 750 to the 730 was too severe to justify even the reduced cost. If that were all then maybe replacing PDP-11s being used in industrial applications might have saved it but the 730 was still too expensive versus the existing PDP-11 products, and the 725's limited expansion made it less attractive than those same PDP-11 products. The PDP-11 thus outlived both the 725 and the 730.

New comment by Suzuran in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

Suzuran — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:06:05 +0000

It looks entirely made up because the procedure described is also entirely alien to me, and I had professional experience with both VMS and Ultrix when they were still supported by DEC. (And it's certainly not BSD...)

New comment by Suzuran in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

Suzuran — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:40:23 +0000

"We'll fix it eventually" is not good enough. If a human can find a flaw, then a bot can find the same flaw, and the bots are always watching and always testing. If someone can't commit to immediate security response when running a public-facing internet service then they should not be running that service, because the rest of the internet will not forgive them when their machine gets popped and becomes everyone else's problem.

If they can't commit to a hard timeline of less than a few days, then publish. What happens next is not your fault - it was inevitable anyway.

Edit for clarity: This is just in general, not specifically SDF or small orgs or large orgs. The internet does not care about the difference. The internet just does not care period. Nobody is going to give anyone else any breaks, and especially not a botnet.

New comment by Suzuran in "SDF Public Access Unix System"

Suzuran — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:34:55 +0000

There was no 11/380 but there was an 11/780.

New comment by Suzuran in "Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos"

Suzuran — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:17:50 +0000

If you have relays, the easiest RAM is just a bank of latching relays and the easiest ROM is a resistor board. Core rope is only for density.

New comment by Suzuran in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"

Suzuran — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:54:01 +0000

The company doesn't get the choice. If they fire you or cut your pay over jury service, or even just threaten to to do so, and you can prove it, they can be arrested immediately. I have personally witnessed a judge issue a bench warrant for the arrest of a retail manager who told an employee that if she failed to get out of jury duty before her shift started that she would be fired. When the manager was brought in and questioned by the judge he tried to argue that it was his right to deny jury service by his employees. He was given 90 days in jail for contempt of court.

New comment by Suzuran in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"

Suzuran — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:39:57 +0000

The problem is punishing the uploader doesn't remove the upload. Once the public has it, it has it forever. It doesn't un-contaminate a jury pool, and there's no later retraction if whatever that was uploaded is found to be lacking context, false, or outright fabricated. Once that kind of damage is done, it can't be un-done.

New comment by Suzuran in "What’s on HTTP?"

Suzuran — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:40:09 +0000

Using HTTP does not guarantee your content can be read, since it can be modified in transit. Your content could be replaced entirely and you would never know unless someone reported it to you.

New comment by Suzuran in "What’s on HTTP?"

Suzuran — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:35:42 +0000

I must correct myself; The DNS challenge is indeed being discouraged in the future, but it is because the DNS-01 challenge is being replaced by the DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge which addresses deficiencies in DNS-01.

The trust and security issues associated with maintaining intranet resources vs. outsourcing to a dedicated professional cloud service provider remain, but are not related to whether any SSL certificates used are issued through DNS-based verification or not.

New comment by Suzuran in "What’s on HTTP?"

Suzuran — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:50:14 +0000

But, as we learned with the telnet filter going into place, we exist on the network at the pleasure of everyone else. Their concerns must come before ours. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

New comment by Suzuran in "What’s on HTTP?"

Suzuran — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:43:37 +0000

It is my understanding that DNS challenges are discouraged and/or being deprecated due to the challenge results being less trustworthy than more stringent verification methods. There is also the operational overhead that arises as SSL certificate lifetimes shorten; It is my understanding that there is now a case being made for SSL certificate lifetimes shorter than 24 hours.

New comment by Suzuran in "The Day the Telnet Died"

Suzuran — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:08:01 +0000

I meant rewriting it for IPv6 instead of IPv4.