In the 1980s there was a project hosted at ISI called "MOSIS", which supported researchers around the country who wanted to create their own experimental chips according to their own specifications. They would send chip descriptor files to MOSIS, and MOSIS would grind out a run of chips according to those specs.

Unfortunately, some of those researchers were connected via CSNET, the world's first ISP, where I worked at the time. CSNET did provide reasonably high-speed IP access to customers who could afford it, but these were broke-ass researchers we're talking about here, and they could only afford dial-up email. Now, MOSIS did support accepting chip description files by email, but these were three megabyte monsters and dialup did not like them AT ALL. They took 3-4 hours to transfer over the phone, and something would go wrong and the phone call would drop nearly every time. We had to rip those monster files out of the queue by hand to get communications with the researcher's site working again. I remember those days not so fondly, but silver lining: this sort of faux pas was responsible for the "Ask Mr. Protocol" column in CSNET's newsletter, which in turn gave rise to a column of the same name that ran in the trade press for twelve years thereafter.

I wonder if they're going to use the SCIPS interplanetary internet protocol Vint Cerf has been pushing, or regular TCP/IP? If the latter, they're going to have to modify a few timers, I bet...

I momentarily read the article title as, "Humans Having Sex With Neanderthals Gave Us Protection Against Ancient Academics". This is plausible on so many levels that I rather think someone should write that article.

We have a type of surge protector/powerboard sold commonly in California called a âoeSquidâ. It resembles a squid: it has an oval body and five short cords of varying lengths, each one ending in a female power socket. It can power five wall warts at once regardless of their egregious size.

I've been doing UNIX since about 1974. I started out on research version 5 on a PDP-11, because that's the only architecture UNIX ran on in those days. v6 was the version that was much more widely distributed to academics, and v7 was the even more widely distributed update that led to the BSD derivatives.

v5 was pretty damn raw. There were no shell variables. "ed" was still written in assembler. Etc. Uphill through the snow both ways. Still, it was FAR better than any of the vendor OSes, no matter what people say about RSX-11. So I founded the first UNIX User's Group Software Distribution Center, purely so I could get my hands on all that goody-poo software. I also produced the very first T-shirt with a UNIX demon on it, for the Urbana, Ill. UNIX meeting - the first national meeting of UNIX users. I gave one to Ken Thompson, one to Dennis Ritchie, and kept two for myself. I still have them. If you've ever seen early USENIX T-shirts with a PDP-11 with pipes, demons, pitchforks, and a barrel labeled NULL, well, that was me (art by Phil Foglio to my design).

Letters of Marque and Reprisal, as I've heard it. And "reprisal" is certainly closer to the mark (no pun intended).

I saw the incident from my back yard. I was out there working on a Mr. Protocol column when I heard a particularly loud single-engine plane take off. What caught my attention was a sound I've only ever heard in the movies: the engine stuttered once, then stopped dead. I got up and looked to see if what I'd heard was really true, and saw the plane, with prop not moving, bank sharply in a 180 degree turn and start gliding back to the airport. I listened for a crash, since he was rather low, but didn't hear one. I'm glad he made the golf course and missed the neighborhood. (Look at a map: it's pretty obvious that the sole purpose of the Penmar Golf Course is to catch planes that don't make it. It happens often enough that I've wondered if they have course rules for playing around temporary obstacles with wings.)

Or as Gene Wolfe called it in The Book of the New Sun, "Fuligin, the color that is darker than black." And since Wolfe didn't make up any new words, that means "fuligin" is a real word from some older time.

All the crypto software I've looked into depends on big internal arrays of special numbers to do its work. If those numbers are compromised (which is what NSA contracted RSA to do, basically), then the whole end-to-end crypto channel is compromised.

And that's the problem. You can build an open-source hardware router with open-source software, to keep the possibility of hardware backdoors to a minimum, but if the basic crypto algorithm you use has been compromised from the get-go, none of it matters. I think that's going to be the next really difficult intellectual load to lift: vetting ALL of the current crypto algorithms in use today to make sure the algorithms don't have built-in compromises. Since that vetting has to be done by crypto experts, not just software engineers, that pushes the trust back up one step: which crypto experts do you trust?

Actually, it looks more like a DECtape.

Two points:

1) The proposal (which is indeed from a private citizen, as many are) points out that ham radio cannot be used, at least in this country, to carry certain kinds of emergency traffic, because, for one thing, medical info about a particular patient can't be put out over the air UNLESS it's encrypted, due to HIPAA.

2) Encryption of ham traffic is already allowed in two specific instances: a) control of a satellite in space, and b) control of certain kinds of model craft.

So the ice has been broken, and the current proposal attempts to overcome certain legal hurdles in carrying emergency traffic. It's not just encryption for no reason, and it wouldn't be allowed for normal traffic.

This is exactly right. Turn off your phone, and put it in one of those RFID-proof containers, and it doesn't matter if spooks have modified it or not. Write off all incoming texts or calls, of course.

Except, of course, for the original UNIX team, which wasn't a thing like this. Thank God. And thank god I don't have to deal with brain-damaging interpersonal relations like those shown here these days. Retirement is good.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al. were much nicer people to work with.

The Internet was "commercialized", in the sense of being opened up to commercial entities and anyone else who was willing to pay the freight, in the early 1980s. Of course, there weren't many such people then, since most people had never heard of the Internet, and the societal infrastructure to make it worthwhile for ordinary folks to use it just wasn't there. The government, by which I mean just about everybody concerned in running the ARPANET and designing and building the nascent Internet, knew it would have to be a self-sustaining commercial enterprise in order to succeed, and that the government just doesn't do that sort of thing, and terrible things happen when it tries. So, a very delicate balancing act was necessary.

The CSNet Project, aka the Computer Science Research Network, was an NSF-funded project run through NCAR to see if it was possible to sell access to a TCP/IP-based Internet, and turn a profit doing it. There were four institutions involved: The University of Wisconsin, The University of Utah, The RAND Corporation, and BBN. The Network Operations Center was at BBN. By special dispensation, CSNet and its users were legally allowed to use the ARPANET as a backbone transit net (had to, it was the only national TCP/IP net around at the time). So, commercial traffic on the ARPANET was allowed, starting in the early 1980s...as long as the traffic came from CSNet. CSNet also came up with its own method of encapsulating TCP/IP packets in X.25 packets, so that people could buy commercial X.25 access (which was available) and run TCP/IP over it, communicating with the ARPANET and the rest of the nascent Internet using gateway machines run by CSNet.

CSNet was a success. Not a huge one, but they proved it could be done, and with all the inefficiencies of a government project, too. At that point, commercial entities were willing to stick a toe in the water, and some of CSNet's customers turned around and became Tier 1 providers. NSFNet followed on, CSNet was rolled into BITNet and eventually rolled up entirely.

In 2009, CSNet was awarded the Jon B. Postel Service Award by the Internet Society.

(Full disclosure: I worked on CSNet almost from the beginning.)

I stuck a much more modern GPU into my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1, but I bet the 32-bit firmware won't be supported by Mountain Lion anyway. A pox on them all. For the first time I'm seriously considering gutting a Windoze box I don't use any more and turning it into a Hackintosh. Anything future editions of OS X don't like about THAT box, I can upgrade away from piecemeal. Including the mobo.