are USB floppies toxic?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 05:01:28PM +0100, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> 2014-10-30 16:21 GMT+01:00 Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl>:
> 
> > Also, I myself would not use L4. No bad feelings about it but, sounds
> > a bit too huge for this task, meybe? Since I don't know too much about
> > all this stuff, I guess I'd start with C or Forth on bare metal. I had
> > not enough time to make sure I could develop for it using Linux/BSD,
> > since other OSes are no-no.
> >
> 
> For me the reason for a kernel is existing drivers and a proven
> infrastructure. You want to make the protocol and data as non-native as
> possible, change it around as much as you can, to remove potential
> exploits. There's just too many exploits though :(... No way to protect
> against an exploited PDF, unless you want to reformat the PDF's (maybe into
> JPG?). You could theoretically do that on the fly with L4, but with
> bare-metal you'd be hurting yourself a lot.

Oh I see. Using L4 makes sense then. But, if concern goes as far as
files prepared with hostile intent, I again mused myself once (what a
muser I am) with idea of filtering this stuff through
software/converter running on non-386 emulator, like PDP-10 (simh or
something, running TOPS-* is optional), vax (again simh, some modern
bsd should fit) or even S/380 (modified Hercules emulator, modern
variation on S360 mainframe, hobby project, gnu software ported to
MVS/380 which itself descends from one commercial mainframe os, which
at one point of time became public domain - if memory serves, of
course).

Since those are all musings and no hard work, I cannot claim any kind
of success or if this makes any sense or not at all. Seems doable,
requires time and reading some old manuals written on typewriter and
scanned, and the font is ugly and scales poorly on 6'' ebook reader...

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **