Sad passing of Dennis Ritchie

Saw a tweet earlier on today and it caught my eye.

Then learnt that the creator of the C programming language and also Unix, passed away over this weekend.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

On a more serious note, need to get this off my chest, and no dis-respect either in this regard to Apple’s Steve Jobs who also passed away last week, but…and this is what I find absolutely gob-smacked about, very little was mentioned of Dennis Ritchie (dmr). The twitter-sphere has been going on about Steve Jobs for the last week or so. The cruel twists of fate has been made… when you read on and realize…

But what the twitterers fail to grasp the concept and realization, there would have been no C language nor Unix for that matter, no applications/games that was possible in the 1980′s and 1990′s either, and no operating systems either.

When you think about it for a moment, the influx of different designs of operating systems was programmed in C, combined with assembler programming language.

Nor would the advancements  in chip design have been achieved, which is a catch-22 in this regard, some kind of a package to be able to program the logic flow of chips etc. Hell, even, there would be no mobiles/smartphones, no Android, no Apple OS….

Even in the telecommunications sector, without C, there would have been no improvements somewhat in the arena of phone switching etc, nor even a operating system to run, in the sense of to manage the telecommunications infrastructure either.

There would have been no internet (TCP/IP protocols which was formed on the backbone of the C programming language), or even would DARPA have existed only for that once when the gates to the internet world was opened up? What about web pages, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, the things that we take for granted now today in this electronic age where communication is even more emphasized.

And it was not Steve Jobs that is a legend either, for that matter, sure he pushed and raised the bar for Apple has become of today. No dis-respect to him either, without him, certainly, smartphones would not have been made possible in terms of features and raising of the bar for standards across the board.

The real legend was the quiet man who hacked away and coined the biggest revolution in his hands alongside with Brian Kernighan that totally changed the IT world forever.

You may object and say hang on… but I digress, sure it sounds a little one sided, but have you not thought of what the world would be like today without the Unix, C today.

What would have become if dmr did not pioneer  C, or Unix. What would the IT landscape be like without it, would Apple have existed, would Microsoft have existed, internet, tcp/ip protocols, Windows, you name it…

So for all people out there, I ask you to re-tweet a simple tweet of your liking to salute dmr for he totally changed and revolutionized the IT landscape right back in the late  1960′s/early 1970′s.

From me, who was a self-taught C programmer, and Linux fanatic, I salute you dmr, you’re the real legend!

Hardware Hacker Manifesto

Cody Brocious aka (Daeken) that I’ve chatted on IRC, is like wow, a genius when it comes to hardware hacking, posted a manifesto on hardware hacking, which I fully agree with and support, so show your support by linking to his blog posting on the matter. The more the merrier!!!! w00t

Hacker Monthly

I spotted something that was mentioned on Codeproject.com about a new magazine which is out now, a very interesting read of a downloadable PDF called ‘Hacker Monthly‘. This is based on the ‘Hacker News‘, nonetheless, this proved to be an interesting read, specifically, on development news, not the hacking as a phenomenon that was describedduring the days before the web and the internet took the world by storm.

I give it 10 out of 10 for publishing their first ever issue and look forward to reading more of their issues.

Best of luck and God-speed to the publishers.

ikee is never going to give you up

This is the caption that is displayed by a worm that infects Apple’s iPhones…a parody on Rick Astley’s 1987 hit ‘Never gonna give you up’ (a noteworthy cringing video!) The infection took place in Australia and it exploited the jailbreak’ed phones who have SSH password set to default as ‘alpine’.

ikee, (no not the swedish flatpack manufacturer!) shows a picture of Rick Astley when infected and stops the SSH daemon that resides on the iPhone. The mind boggles at the thought of how ikee was able to pick out other vulnerable jailbroken iPhones..unfortunately, the source code to the worm was withdrawn from googlecode.com…

If you happen to be infected, do not panic, there’s a chat transcript of an interview between JD (the interviewer) with ikee, that took place on IRC, the details of what needs to be done is in the transcript…ikee’s transcript on IRC.

Wonder what does Apple think of all of this? In fairness, since the underlying system of the iPhone is BSD variant of Unix, it is just another exploit waiting to happen through the usage of a weak and vulnerable SSH password that is common knowledge!

So, a thought, why does Apple not put in some measure, to put in the serial number of the iPhone as the SSH password hence making it unique to that iPhone?

Skype…

Skype has got some grave security issues Read more »