This comment is off topic, and you may freely moderate it so.

Once upon a time long ago I was intrigued by the rapid absorption of domain names and their escalating value. Particularly short names. And so I wrote a perl script to permute all possible 4-letter domains and look them up in the hope of identifying some interesting names to squat. I'm not really proud of that, but it was long ago when such stuff wasn't as abhorrent as the current day. I was sipping Maker's Mark on the rocks all night. I identified and registered a few, and one came up - iran.com, which could have been lucrative with the runner community. I was placing the order for the iran.com domain on Christmas eve when just then my wife came up, stroked my neck and said "come to bed." I got some. That was the most expensive nookie I ever got.

I admire the man. He's crazy, but he's mostly my kind of crazy. This is one spot where his crazy got in the way of doing what I like. I'm not going to give up on him for this because his kind of crazy works for me more often than the alternatives. In this he is doing his best to operate in a realm he doesn't understand and do the Right Thing even though he doesn't know what the Right Thing is. I prefer that to those who are willing to knowingly do the Wrong Thing for the Right Pay.

He needs a staff geek to school and filter him. Volunteers?

Anybody who wants to have a meaningful discussion on this subject needs to read Ken Thompson's 1984 ACM article "On Trusting Trust". In it he describes inserting rogue code into the compiler that recognizes when it's compiling a compiler and replicates into the executable of the compiled compiler - and so becoming persistent across a platform migration. This is just the transport mechanism. The payload is code that recognizes the Unix Login and subverts its security. Obviously, once the first compiler is compiled with this trojan the source code for it can be removed and all subsequent compilers compiled with this trojaned compiler will have the code no matter what platform it migrates to.

It doesn't just seem like we've been having this discussion for 30 years. We actually have. In order to have a compiler you can actually trust you need to implement its progenitor in machine language using a byte editor, and even then you need to manually compute a checksum for the mini-compiler that can be checked from a system running an OS not derived from it. Fortunately a minimum C compiler is pretty basic and it's not that hard to implement in binary. Starting with a basic assembler is even easier.

For those who don't know: Ken Thompson's CV includes the phrase: "I invented Unix" among many other valuable contributions. If anybody would be informative on this topic, he would.

800 Gbps fiber to the home, here we come!

Just kidding. But still... These high bandwidth innovations are going to have a stunning impact on some companies deeply invested in expensive transnational data transport. It's time to put away the notion of precious gigabits forever.