A path not taken

[kengr]

While reading a story with yet another naturally talented hacker a bit of inspiration struck and gave me a different take on some ideas I'd been playing around with. Other than the first paragraph, the rest is subject to a lot of change

"Kid, where I come from, your computers wouldn't even be considered junk. they'd be classed as hazardous waste. a positive danger to anybody who tried to use them"

I tried to explain how it'd happened. there was a book on this Earth that had some hints of it. The Adolescence of P-1. But we'd had our P-1 fighting with something someone else that was trying to infiltrate computers. Theories abound as to where it came from. The soviets? Hackers? Organized crime? aliens?

By the time the dust settled, we had a bad crippled AI who'd proven he was at least somewhat trustworthy. and whole new take on computer security.

He helped where he could but part of our new criteria for systems was that the code be thoroughly vetted. Ditto for the design. It took a lot longer, and cost billions. But it really was worthwhile in and of itself.

P-1 was allowed to have a lot of systems as they were replaced by the newer, more secure system.

Eventually it grew into a semi-independent network. he'd do work for anyone who was willing to trust their stuff to him. And he did his own research in other directions.

Meanwhile "mainstream" computing was focused on machines that would do what they were supposed to do, and not have any overlooked vulnerabilitys in the hardware or software.

----

Basic idea is someone or someones starting up a company that proceeds to build market share in strange ways. They are producing computers with their own OS. But it can run Linux, Windows or OS/X as virtual machines. and isolate them *really* well. As in crashes don't affect other sessions, viruses, trojans etc can't break out of the sandbox, etc.

Worse (from the viewpoint of Apple & Microsoft (to say nothing of Intel, AMD and others)) the virtual machines are running faster than most other systems on the market.

They also have a section(?) that's releasing "patches" for software. They started out by claiming it was an exercise in showing how fast their systems were as well as demonstrating their skills at analyzing software.

"Patched" versions of various OSes and programs from the early days of personal computers are one thing. Certain companies started getting worried when the patches started to be for "obsolete" version of stuff that was still in use. Especially since they'd been sent "courtesy" lists of what had been done wrong to cause the bugs being fixed. Many of which they'd not noticed!

But the 'new guys" are careful. they never *add* features. They jusyt make sure that the documented ones will work right. and that dsecurity bugs are gone...

Having them be from an alternate Earth works nicely.

*Why* they are here and doing this.. all sorts of possiibilitities

But given that their *normal* practices are the sort of stuff that our world only uses for the most critical systems. Thus the opening comment. They consider practically every computer and related device to be using horribly flawed designs, and highly insecure software (and hardware).

Comments

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Neat!