Malicious, targeted, OS updates. How likely do you think it is?

[James A. Donald]

On 1/19/2017 8:59 AM, John Newman wrote:
> lol i know, it becomes increasingly apparent how impossible a full audit of all the hardware and software that led to the software that is running your computer would be, even with a totally open source OS ;)


Well, of course, there is FORTH, the world's smallest operating system, 
development environment, assembler, compiler, and metacompiler.

You start by programming the bootstrap in binary, and the bootstrap then 
assembles and compiles an increasingly powerful assembler, compiler, and 
metacompiler.

Of course FORTH relies heavily on the developer to do tasks that are 
more suited to the operating system or the compiler, making it of 
limited value for programs larger than 32K or so and disks larger than 
ten megabytes or so, though Forth can theoretically address disks as 
large as two hundred and fifty six megabytes. Also file deletion in 
Forth is not really practical.  But if you have enough Forth related 
stuff that you need to worry about deletion on a ten megabyte disk, your 
Forth environment is already too big and complex.

But it would be not too difficult to have Forth compile a common lisp 
interpreter, the common lisp interpreter generate a C compiler, the C 
compiler generate a common lisp compiler and a C++ compiler, the C++ 
compiler and the Forth compiler generate an actually useful operating 
system, and there you are.