NEWS@Shane Land - Everything you need in five minutes (tm)
A little note to let you know I've been updating my new NEWS@Shane Land page. The idea of this page is to create a task-managed space where you can find out news easily and quickly. Important news is intended to be one click away. Most of the news is provided by BBC, though I also link to CNN, EURONEWS, JAPAN TIMES and CHINA DAILY. Oh yes, and BLOOMBERG. I'm curious to know if people find this page useful, or if it's just a mild distraction. Comments to my email please :)
An updated from an updater
As some of you will have noticed, the Shane Land site is being transformed utterly! After some months of neglect (sadly impossible to avoid due my changing lifestyle) I've finally got around to changing the site to reflect what's happening.
Shane Land is now going to be much more focused on what I am up to, and the projects I am involved with. This is a move away from our previous primary focus of publishing eBooks and eArt. The eBook thing has really fizzled out since about 2001, and I think that there is no real point in continuing with the venture. Of course, all the previously published books will remain online. I'm busy creating a new space called "Other people's work", which will showcase all the work we've published in the last five years. I'll also make sure to keep the old message board, with it's hundreds of poems, online. The "Other people's work" link will be active real soon.
So, what now?
Well, Shane Land will gradually be updated with information to fill all the links to the left of each page. Each project will be explained, and all my personal information will appear online. It'll be a way to keep track of my life, and to allow people to check out both my latest news and my history since coming to the UK. This blog, sadly neglected over the previous months, will have a starring role in all that. It'll be the first point of NEW SHANE NEWS contact. Thrilling, I am sure.
Mainly I want to get a lot of photos and movies from my life online to share with all the people I know around the world. Tomorrow is officially "image day". I'll try to scan a heck of a lot of stuff and plonk it online.
Comments? Send to the usual address... shane@shaneland.co.uk. Questions? Direct them to the same place!
Okay...other news...
I'm off to see an ex-classmate today. His name is Ian, and he believes he has a new theory of socio-political-interaction to bring forth. We'll chat it over this evening. I'll update you all if I learn any gems.
Audrey is as busy as heck in Taiwan. I talked with her a little today. She is feeling grumpy. Of course, that's not entirely unusual for our little Taiwanese angel. :P I miss her though. Lots and lots.
I have no idea what's happening to Alin. She was in China a little while back, and now she's in Thailand. I sent an email but have got no reply so far. Hm. But Alin is never big on the old email thing. I hope she's well. I miss her too!
Oh ALRIGHT! I miss everyone! Come back to the UK! Keep me company!
Zoe is stressing about her library job. I guess I'm stressing about my job with First Option/Last Minute.com. I wonder does anyone have a job that's not stressful? Perhaps we misuse the word stress. Maybe LIFE is stressful. Ho hum.
Have a nice day ya'all.
The end!
Okay, my dissertation is done. Apart from adding a few preformatted bits to the bibliography and looking at the final paragraph ONE LAST TIME to make sure it's okay I am finished. Bed for a few hours now, and then I go to print the evil bastard.
Yay.
Rest.
I cannot remember what it feels like.
Seventh NetBSD Reply
shane,
On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 11:38:36AM +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I am currently developing a mock-up system that will be using a *BSD distro
> for an automated install. The system wil have a carefully selected set of
thats an easy bit to do.
> packages, but will not be intended to do a 'Linux' and litter the place. It
> will be built to boot into a GUI (test machines will run KDE 3.1.4 with
> XFree), and to do so automatically after install. KDE will include KOffice
> and OpenOffice on the test machines.
thats a bit of heavy duty code reviewing ..
> The brief is to create a minimal Unix system based on a solid core. It
most of the bsd will do that, pity bsdi bit the dust and is no longer
doing buisness, this project would be much easier with them on board as
a partner.
your probably think 'where is this moron going with all of this
just hang in a bit more ... ok.
> would be intended to run desktop machines and workstations, and to be
> a small and light as possible. It should have the option of
> installing a 'server kit' module to put all the bits needed to run an
> Apache server onto it, and it should be ready for the development of
> a 'security kit'. The security kit is the key part.
ok, this is were the rubber hits teh road, teh petrol vapour gets
compressed in teh cylinder chamber and teh coil gets ready to deliver
teh ignition spark ... its alive, its alive ... sorry about that its
early in teh morning and i get a bit melo-dramatice about this time of
day.
> It is intended for the commercial development
commercial development, not a problem anybody with a computer, a desk a
quiet room in teh house attic, or out the back as we in australia like
to put our garage converted, sheds, work rooms, hide away from teh
wife, kids and so on. oops nearly forgot stinking hot nas, or is it san
server in teh corner to hold the gui dev kits to cover the microsoft
basic elements ... oh you said unix, ummm even teh militry uses
microsoft why do you think they have so many publically embarasing
glitches, just do some search of teh public archives no, not google,
rather teh real meta data searching servers ... sorry i cannot remember
the 3 or 4 that exist in australia, but just find a reasonably good
university site and start difing through the toolkits and you will
eventually find it .. its used by teh phd students and thier revieers
to check the work being done/handed in etc etc.
if you want i'll dig up the article and fwd'd it you latter, after i've
woken up, yes ?
> of military-grade
this is teh real question, do you ... i'm not meaning to offend you,
but to this point in time you have not made any noises that sound like
you mifht have even a basic understanding of what you are involved in
or getting ready to do ...
militry-grade do you know your orange or for that matter blue and or
white book securityu levels, and how they are expected to be
implemented, and, the bigest killer especially if you expect to
actually sell your dev kit to virtyally any militry or for that matter
govt entities that have anything to do with the militry at any level is
to have your software security grade c3 certified ...
microsoft nt is certified c3 secure so that it can be sold to militry
org's and govt dept's that work with militry orgs and or have need of
security clearences ... oh the small print that most peopl fail to read
is that nt is c3 secure as long as it is not connected to anouther
computer by an form or networking .. i think that, that means 'sneaker
net' or even by serial cable and absolutely not by any form of tcp/ip
or netbui/netbios or whatever microsoft called their netmanager
software kit all those years ago.
umm you see non of teh bsd's are certified secure at any orange book level
even c3 etc, etc, etc al all. to do this requires lot and lots of
money. numbers in teh hundred of thousands last time i looked at this a
decade or two ago.
are you still interested ???
> defensive and offensive tools.
> It's a conceptual puzzle at the moment, though I hope to have perhaps a test
> machine active before the end of October.
conceptual financial and educational puzzle, one need find out what
kind of environment one is swiming in before they get too far from
shore, the return might prove to be fatal.
i used to be a system analyst, now i am a full time card carrying
invalid pensioner. i worked with people doing govt contracting,
development in national importance infrastructure projects and a few
other stuffs that i had to sign our national (fedral govt) secrets acts
which lasts for some 50 years after i have died ... i'm 50 odd now and
still going stron inspigth of the doctors, my invaliding disabilities
and other bits and piceses here and thier.
ummm please excuse teh typing i've been a practicng dsylexic for some
51 yeasr now, what teh dsylexia misses the damaged neurology rounds up
and managages to mangle into a pretty meaningless mess ... grin.
with kind regards and best wishes.
sincerely
jonathan
My reply:
Well, firstly I'm not even slightly interested in the US or primary European
markets (or Australia). These countries can afford to spend a whole
kaboodle on software like NT. I'm looking at developing nations.
Secondly, I do have a relatively high awareness of network and system
security. Enough to know it's a muddle (understatement). My current
university work is on cyber warfare.
Thirdly, I have looked at these books before, and must say that I conclude
they are not very useful. The world is networked. The computers we will
use are network. Warfare's future is networked. I think we need to work
from there.
I'm interested in developing a 'clean' base system with high ease-of-use and
then trying to get sponsorship. Unix with niceness, if you will. The idea
is that you can bang it on computers easily (to upgrade existing machines),
and drop in a highly secure module for network operations. I envision
sandboxes being of more and more important, and I have a concept for signed
and encrypted file sharing that should provide a framework for LAN and WAN
(at the same time with different access for different people) systems. The
key would be getting all the machines running the OS and security module
(even if they were too low-powered to run the GUI) so that they could be
part of the trusted network system. I don't like the hardware (US
dependent) security coming with Windows Longhorn. I think we'll need
something else.
Regards
Shane
Musing about creating a new operating system
This was originally posted on my personal blog on the 12th of September:
I continue my musing about the construction of NextGEM, a Unix-based OS for i396 and perhaps other platforms (PPC?). The idea is to try and impliment the ease-of-use design principles of GEM into the Unix platform, and to marry it with high security.
Q: Why do we need another operating system?
A: Windowsis still bug prone, insecure and closed. Linux is still too hard to set up and use (and it's too targeted at geeks and technical types), and MacOS is too limited regarding the hardware it will run on.
Q: So what type of operating system do we need?
A: We need something that works on multiple layers. It needs to have a small, portable and stable core. It needs to be highly secure and expandable. It needs to have an interface and functions that make it as transparent as possible to the end user. It needs to be MacOS meets military-grade Unix, with the flexibility traditionally found in the i386 platform.
Q: How can something like that be built?
A: By building on existing and proven opensource technology, and introducing closedsource improvements to allow for market capture. An example is to use something like NetBSD to create a core, Xfree86 and KDE on top for the enviroment, OpenSSL and GnuPG providing security and so on. Two versions of the operating system could be created. An opensource version and a special 'high security' version. This way the operating system can be developed in the opensource community, and at the same time special closedsource security modules can be added for commercial sales.
Q: Wouldn't this make it yet another closedsource operating system?
A: No. The operating system would be opensource and highly secure without the closed modules. The closedsource modules would be intended to meld military security with ease-of-use, and would be targeted at governmental and military users. Given the portability and multilingual nature of NetBSD and KDE, many developing nation's could be targeted, and healthy revenue obtained without making the end user suffer.
Q: So it would be an easy-to-use Linux with high commerical potential?
A: Well, basically yes.
I have decided to play with NetBSD as the core of this OS, as NetBSD seems to be small, supports many systems, and is highly secure (and proven).
Now I am thinking about what to load on my test machines. Initial thoughts lead me to conclude that two models should be tested. They are as follows:
Model one - High power, integrated interface (including encryption)
NetBSD
(on BFF? Can it run on XFS? What about Reiser4?)
XFree11
KDE
KOffice and tools
GnuPG
Snort GUI
EFS? (encrypted FS?)
Model two - runs on slower machines, application directory potential
NetBSD
(on BFF? Can it run on XFS? What about Reiser4?)
XFree11
Sawfish
Rox desktop
Abiword and other Gnome tools
GnuPG
Snort GUI
EFS? (encrypted FS?)
The idea is to create a minimal system, work out to make it do an automatic install, and try to create a boot CD. This would comprise release 0.2. At this stage I'd like to do testing and iron out bugs. It would be a public test release. The question is which model to follow. That's where 0.1 comes in. That'll be where I privately evaluate both systems, and decide which offers the greatest degree of ease of use and stability. Perhaps others would be interested in helping out during this evaluation stage?
Anyway, I have NetBSD 1.6.1 now, so that's what NextGEM 0.1 (0.2 etc) will be based on. Before release 1 of NextGEM is out NetBSD 2.0.0 may have arrived. I'll keep it in mind.
Testing testing testing. And configuring. It's early days yet (and NetBSD documentation stinks).
Sixth NetBSD Reply
My last three firewalls deployed in a commercial environment have been
NetBSD. YMMV. :)
Cheers,
Al
Interesting. Seems I have proof it can do commercial stuff.
Fifth NetBSD Reply
Here is number five:
I don't know that I would break down the differences between NetBSD and
FreeBSD as being primarily "academic" and "commercial" in that sense.
I think NetBSD could be a very excellent base for your project. However
there are some known limitations w.r.t. hardware support in
NetBSD-1.6.1, especially on i386, and for those reasons FreeBSD may make
a more practical base for your project.
(I use NetBSD as the basis for similar types of projects, though my
applications are much more server oriented and I also desire much more
architecture independence than FreeBSD currently offers.)
--
Greg A. Woods
My reply:
I may regret asking this, but what known limitations are likely to come and
bit me (especially on the i386 flavour of the system)?
I notice a problem with ISA network cards and a USB setting in BIOS which
can cause trouble, an issue with monitors going to standby and PCMICA model
problems (all fixable)...is there something else?
Regards
Shane
http://gem.shaneland.co.uk
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