He was in panic mode and planning to take down the server to boot from the installation CD in order to fix it. That would have resulted in a few hundred people unable to work for a while. I had the idea of writing a quick program on another workstation and copying that to an NFS share that was mounted by that server. The program would copy 'ldd' from another disk to '/bin/ldd' but the catch was that it could not load any system libraries, it had to be static linked with the correct version of each library it required. The bigger catch was that I had a deadline of under 5 minutes to get it working.
It worked
The FOSS movement should work to educate such people. Perhaps we should call it Bespoke Handcrafted Libre FOSS because some people equate "free" with "cheap and nasty"
Many governments have warned industrialists not to discuss secrets when using a mobile phone near the country borders. Only the radio channels are encrypted in GSM, lawful interception happens on the wired network that interconnects the base stations so eavesdropping on A5/1 is mostly used when lawful interception is not an option, e.g. listening to the GSM traffic of other countries.
I have worked in information security for 25 years and am always amused when people say something is "physically impossible". There is almost always a way. I have worked on forensic engineering for chip manufacturers, finding production faults by etching off layers using warm nitric acid and reading the secrets out of the circuit using a microscope. That technique can be used to make many copies of a card but nobody bothers because it's too time expensive and there are easier ways.
Ross Anderson's group in Cambridge are real experts in the chip and pin technology, they know that security implementation flaws often make cards vulnerable, for example see http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2012/09/10/chip-and-skim-cloning-emv-cards-with-the-pre-play-attack/
Many parts of the world still use only the magnetic strip. For years while Europe waited for the US to deploy chip and pin we saw European CC numbers being used in the US. Now NFC will make it easier for US based cloners to get just enough data from your cards to send to their cousins in other countries.
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait. -- Frank Tyger
