The Channel has similar video series on OS/2, VisiCalc, Microsoft Excel and early Windows (far from completion). The videos are generally very detailed and well researched, often contrasting accounts from different source or even reaching out to people involved.

The already slow pace of the channel has slowed down a lot. In an update video a while back, the author has announced that the background research for the IBM PC led down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole and his script eventually spiraled into an unfinished book that will now probably turn into a two-parter itself.

Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: ……

You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.

I know that other machines existed that used a similar system. I recall being asked, circa summer 2009 or so, to set up extensions on a quite old PABX that was configured that way.

The PABX was a huge electrical box full of giant PCBs stuck into a backplane (S-100 or maybe something proprietary?). I didn't get a good look tough, the box was mounted under the ceiling, directly above a desk with a terminal that you used for configuring it. There was a binder with laminated, typewritten cards, documenting "verbs" and "nouns" that you entered into a numeric keypad. As said, it worked like the Apollo DSKY, but the "display" was single slot that you had to squint through at just the right angle to make out faint numbers on a mirror, aimed downwards at some back projection thingy.

A blog post about this, published at the time: https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/03/linux-kernel-cna/

The title is editorialized (i.e. the OP made it up), the link simply goes to the kernel CVE mailing list archive.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951461

Points: 288

# Comments: 119

    ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

    ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
    (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
    ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
    ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
    (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) Users will not put up with it
    (X) Microsoft will not put up with it
    (X) The police will not put up with it
    ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
    (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
    ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

    ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
    (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
    ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
    ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
    (X) Asshats
    ( ) Jurisdictional problems
    (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
    ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
    ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
    ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
    ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
    ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
    (X) Extreme profitability of spam
    (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
    ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
    ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
    (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
    ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
    ( ) Outlook

    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
    ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
    ( ) Blacklists suck
    ( ) Whitelists suck
    ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
    ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
    (X) Sending email should be free
    (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
    ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
    (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
    ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

    (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Back in the day, you could read a stories on Slashdot practically every other week that usually went something like this: Company/institution does something stupid, somebody finds out, tries to be a good citizen and tells them. The organization then throws a tamper tantrum in the media, fires the legal department on all cylinders, screaming "hacker!" and throwing the book at them. The most egregious cases usually happened in the US, the CFAA happens to be a particularly strong book to throw.

People eventually got the hint and either talked to the press instead, or organizations like the CCC (at least in this part of the world) and let them deal with the organization and not talk to them directly.

At least in my perception/memory, it started improving over the 2010s, but stories like this are now starting to pop up again in recent years. I guess we have a new crop of computer enthusiasts who need to learn the same lessons again.

Of the top of my head, the CTF group in Malta comes to mind who gave a talk at (last years?) CCCongress. A badly worded E-mail asking about a bug bounty resulted in several arrests, house searches and ultimately a presidential pardon (https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...).

Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.

Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)

Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.

I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.

> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.

Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.

People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/help.html

From the site:

> The following films do not appear on the site because I believe the computers they feature are mock ups and therefore do not qualify.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693155

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

Yet the article goes about the most ass backward way of explaining 8086 segments and constructs a convoluted mental picture of dividing memory into overlapping chunks.

It's really, really simple: segments on the 8086/88 are 64k sliding windows into an 1M address space. You can move them around at 16 byte granularity.

You need more than 64k for code + data? No problem, the CPU knows when it's fetching an instruction vs when it's fetching data, you can have two sliding windows: code (CS) and data (DS). Split them apart, and it's not much different than a Harvard-style machine and gives you access to more than 64k at a time.

Still need more? No problem, the CPU has a hardware stack with dedicated push/pop/call/ret instructions and a base pointer for stack indexing. It knows when it's accessing the stack, so we can split the data window into regular data (DS) and stack data (SS). Oh, you occasionally want to copy stuff between segments or somewhere else in memory? Well, to encode 3 segments we need 2 bits anyway, let's throw in an extra data window (ES) and some DS-to-ES copy instructions.

Michael MJD did a video on this recently, showing off necessary modifications on a vanilla GameCube and the installation procedures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESV3Qib8eJI

Also, it's not Commodore but someone playing "Weekend at Bernie's" with what's left of the brand. The real Commodore went through bankruptcy and liquidation in 1994.

The version of the SYSLINUX bootloader that it uses had a bug in the fallback path if E820 memory information is not available from the BIOS, and the BIOS on my machine indeed does not support it, or E801 for that matter[3].

I have not gotten around to further testing and fixing the actual issue in SYSLINUX yet (also one of the RAM sticks has sadly developed a parity issue, so I'm stuck at 16M for now). However, I did manage to dig up a newer 486 machine[4][5]. From some testing just this weekend, the BIOS on that one does support INT 15h, AX=E820. I'll have to dig up more memory, but I'm looking forward to another round of trying to get this to boot on the actual hardware, once again :-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873814

[3] https://imgur.com/a/GCG9jO7

[4] https://imgur.com/a/am486dx4-retrotank-VUOTahf

[5] https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/zida-4dps

I'm pretty sure the people who have fond memories of growing up with a C64 or watching ToS are of an entirely different generation than those with fond memories of flip phones and cyber/color-puke ads for transparent plastic gadgets.

> BASIC Beige Edition

There's a missed opportunity for a better ToS joke here: "Beige... the final frontier"

> He is still shipping.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2

:-P

And of course, browser engines also do the same things for certain websites:

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496608

Points: 1

# Comments: 0