Malicious, targeted, OS updates. How likely do you think it is?
James A. Donald
jamesd at echeque.com
Wed Jan 18 18:57:58 PST 2017
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.
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