This small document shows what computer science looked like to me when I was just getting started: a way to make computers more efficient and smarter, to solve real problems. I wish more people who claim to be "computer scientists" or "engineers" would actually work on real problems like this (efficient file sync) instead of having to spend time learning how to use the new React API or patching the f-up NextJS CVE that's affecting a multitude of services.
If only those who claim to be "managers" enabled those "engineers" to do such work, but it's not in their interest to their product, their bottom line, or their performance review. At least in their mind.
…what? IC developers are a huge, huge contributor to the sort of over-complicated engineering and stack churn that’s at the heart of what’s being described here. Take an iota of responsibility for yourself.
6 characters or fewer passwords, if there were passwords at all. Phreaking still worked into the 90s, and all sorts of really stupid things were done without really thinking about the security at all. They'd print out receipts with the entire credit or debit card number and information on it, or carbon copy the card with an impression, and you'd see these receipts blowing around parking lots, or find entire bags or dumpsters full of them. Knowing an IP address might be sufficient information to gain access to systems that should have been secured. It's pretty amazing that things functioned as well as they did, that society was as trusting and trustworthy as it was, that we were able to build as much as we did with as relatively a tiny level of exploitation that happened.
If the same level of vulnerability was as prevalent today as it was back then, civilization might collapse overnight.
To be fair, back then it was relatively easy for anyone intelligent enough to be able to abuse any of that to have a well paying 'white collar' job with things like full health benefits, a pension, and more than sufficient income to support an entirely family SOLO. They even owned houses!
When your life is set like that why risk trying to defraud someone a the cost of a nice suit when that's something that can be done legally and written off as a business expense on taxes?
We still print the routing and account number in full on paper checks, and that's all that's needed to do an ECH transaction. Yet there's not an alarming level of ECH fraud.
In 1996? OpenBSD and Apache had been around for a year. PGP had been around for several years. HTTPS was used where needed. SecurID tokens were common for organizations that cared about security.
Admittedly SSH wasn't around, but kerberos+rlogin and SSL+telnet was available. Organizations who cared about security would have SecurID tokens issued to their employees and required for login.
Dial-in over phone lines, and requiring a password, was much less discoverable or exploitable than services exposed to the internet, today.
SSH was around, but not nearly as pervasive it is today. I have memories of having to shake my mouse around during the windows client installation to generate entropy. Fun times
I believe your recollection is off by several years...
What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.
The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...
The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.
> There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible.
On HN there's always a good chance you're talking to some of the people involved in those "negligible" installations. I know that I submitted some patches to Tatu Ylönen for Ssh to compile on Ultrix, so that must have been in 1995 or early 1996 because after that I didn't have access to any Ultrix machines. I may have been an early adopter, but it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world, at least among Unix system administrators; at Usenix within a year everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative and in terms of security it was a life-saver.
As for the RSA patent... I don't know what license the original Ssh was released under, but it was considered "freeware" when it came out and nobody cared about the US RSA patent. Maybe technically in the USA you shouldn't have used it? Nobody cared.
And the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux /dev/random device gave you a few bits at a time stingily, only after it had enough entropy, so it was common for programs that needed good randomness to ask you to jiggle the mouse because that was one of the sources of entropy, so bits random bits would come faster. I'm pretty sure that was still the case well into the Zips.
so I was running a SVN server in a decommissioned PC somewhere in a startup as an intern. whole company ends up using it and out of nowhere it used to freeze, I would go to check if it had rebooted or crashed and everything was fine.
it fixed by itself, without any fixes from my part. happened many times.
asked for help to a senior, guy ran strace and found a read waiting in /dev/random. and of course it solved by itself any time I checked because I was moving the mouse!
controversially but acceptably, we had linked it to urandom and move on
how fast that guy used strace and analyzed the syscalls inspired me to be better at linux
> it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world
That doesn't seem to be accurate. Wikipedia says, by the end of "2000 the number of users had grown to 2 million"
> everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative
I already listed TWO of the most popular alternatives.
> the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux
Parent specifically said "windows client installation." Putty was very common on Windows. PuttyGen specifically and prominently told the user to move their mouse... etc. etc.
Even back in 1996, OpenBSD emphasized security. By 2000 they claimed "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" at the very top of their website. Qmail was released in Dec 1995 and its security withstood scrutiny for quite a lot of years. I'd be interested in seeing just how many RCEs a modern security researcher could actually come up with from a 1996 release of BSDi, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, etc. I'd bet on just a handful.
I can understand how, if your whole world was Windows 3.1 and 95, you'd feel that way about security at the time.
This small document shows what computer science looked like to me when I was just getting started: a way to make computers more efficient and smarter, to solve real problems. I wish more people who claim to be "computer scientists" or "engineers" would actually work on real problems like this (efficient file sync) instead of having to spend time learning how to use the new React API or patching the f-up NextJS CVE that's affecting a multitude of services.