They told you ads are good for you? Think about it. I once google for "MILF" (really, I didn't know what the hell was it and I was JUST looking for its meaning), turn out it referred to something disgusting and I didn't even dare clicking into the search result. Immediate after that, the right side of my facebook were filled with dating services with senior women, and everyday they recommended me of pages of senior women. Even my subsequent search results were topped with similar ads. My coworkers now stayed away from me.

I wanted to call Google telling them that I AM NOT INTERESTED IN HAVING CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH OLD WOMEN PLEASE STOP...or I just go get an adblocker.

Look at what you're citing "light to moderate alcohol drinking had no direct protective effect on mortality" - not "no effect" but "no direct _protective_ effect". I.e. it is saying there is no evidence for the hypothesis that drinking _helps_ your health.

I'm very shocked that the death of Ian got so little attention or coverage. He died on Monday, but the world was notified until Wednesday, without any more detail regarding his death. All you guys talking about was criticising him being racist, what's wrong with this world?

The system is subverted, e.g. command.com has been modified, so that when Borland Turbo is loaded into memory it too is subverted. Alternatively, DOS 22h is replaced with a version that checks every disk write to see if it is the beginning of a DOS executable, and if so, subverts it. Alternatively, ... etc.

There are surely many ways. Otherwise, you are arguing that DOS is not vulnerable to a broad range of all-powerful subversions, which is patently untrue.

Not sure what car manifolds have to do with it - argumentum ad vehiculum.

Again, you're assuming that an old toolchain can only have old attacks. That's a flawed assumption. A modern attacker can subvert your system so that old toolchains are subverted to apply further subversions.

Are there practical steps we can take to raise the bar and make such attacks much harder to execute. Sure. Can we guarantee our system is free of such subversions, without either trusting others to some degree or building the system entirely ourselves: no we can't. Which was Thompson's point.

I'm not familiar with DOS exe format. However, there must be some well-defined entry point.

Thompson's attack doesn't mean that any subversion of the Borland 1.0 compiler is limited to when the Borland 1.0 compiler was created. Thompson was making an extremely general point about security in programmable systems: You either build pretty much all of it yourself, or else you must invest trust in others.

Good thing there are no well-known, stable hooks in programmes to allow code to be run in a generic fashion, as part of, say, binary file formats. Oh wait...

Perhaps I wasn't being explicit enough.

The CDROM might be read-only, but the software has to be copied into memory by something in order to run. As per Thompson's original point, it isn't sufficient to protect one piece of the system. As he stated, his attack implies that *every* programme that is involved in the handling of software must either be validated to the same level as having written it yourself OR you must invest trust:

In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program ..

(emphasis mine).

Indeed, his point on trust extends beyond just programme-handling programmes to all logic (soft or hard) involved in the handling and the running of software. Thompson mentions microcode almost after the text above:

As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

Since Thompson, we've had "Blue pill" rootkits that use x86 virtualisation features to effectively run themselves as microcode under the victim system (and unbeknownst to).

You can't run a compiler from read-only media though.

Why do you think a new trojan can not infect old binaries?

The Thompson attack is what we would recognise today as a class of virus. Indeed, as Thompson's point was a general one about the unavoidable need to trust others, if one did not build every component capable of basic logical manipulation oneself, to fully counter Thompson's attack you would have to be able to counter every possible kind of virus and rootkit - and not just of the software, but also of any other firmware and microcode that might handle or be involved in running your code. (Read his paper, he is clear he envisions his attack could be implemented in lots of ways and places in the abstract).

And the end of that comment still sounds more dismissive than I wanted... Take 2:

I'm not being dismissive of DDC. Distros regularly attempting to get reproducible builds with diverse compilers will raise the bar and make attacks harder if it can be done, and additionally it will help catch bugs. However, DDC does not fully counter Thompson's attack, and it is good to remain aware of the assumptions it operates under.

I.e. could be a very nice step forward, though it is important to note the "fully countering" isn't quite "fully" and there are limitations.

No he didn't prove it is infeasible. For one, that would require a method to prove that the compilers are indeed wholly independent, which hasn't been provided. Also, note that people in some sub-field of technology tend to move around. An engineer who has worked on one compiler is *more* likely to also work on another compiler at some stage than any random engineer. The DDC technique *assumes* that diverse compilers are independent - it takes it on trust. Wheeler's work if anything re-inforces the essence of Thompson's philosophical point, that we must either completely build and control every aspect of our system OR we must trust to at least some degree in someone else. Note also that someone can frustrate this technique by deliberately making their software not build reproducibly, for apparently innocent reasons (e.g. D Wheeler had such issues with using tcc for DDC). A fuller version of my critique of "Diverse Double-Compiling".

That sounds like I'm being very dismissive of DDC, but I'm not. It could be really useful, *if* it is feasible to actually regularly reproduce builds. Debian is working on this, and hopefully they'll get there - but it's not a trivial task either. However, DDC does not fully counter Thompson's attack - not in the normal absolute sense of the word "fully" at least.

Actually, you've got it the wrong way around.

The Concorde built on lessons learned from the *British* aircraft and (especially) jet-engine industry, which was world-leading at the end of the war and towards the 1950s. E.g. Concorde draws heavily from experience building the TSR-2. Concorde's engines were *directly* based on the TSR-2's Bristol Olympus engines, which draw heavily on mid-40s Bristol engine technology.

The US had to licence designs from the British to learn how to build jet engines. A number of different British engine designs, from the original Whittle engine, to later Bristol, Armstrong-Siddely and Rolls-Royce designs, were licensed to a number of US makers, including Curtiss-Wright, General Electric and Pratt & Whittney.

It would be far more fair to say the SR-71 drew from British aircraft industry R&D.

NB: I'm not British, and I don't have any great reason to talk up Britain over the USA.

Good to agree on that.

Yet, no one in the west has ever been prosecuted for double-tap strikes. Not even in the infamous "Collateral Damage" video leaked by Bradley Manning, where children are clearly visible through the window of the van of a random Good Samaritan who happened to stumble on the scene of a previous attack and stopped to help.