Re: HTTP in practice

[Anton J Aylward <anton () the-wire com>]

At 11:50 PM 23/09/97 +0000, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
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> portability problems in writing attack applets. I'm starting to get
> crazy in my old age and am increasingly afraid that the Windows
> juggernaut is going to kill us through lack of biodiversity against
> future bugs and worms.

I know its just a throw-away line, Marcus, but I've long preached 
that one of the strengths of UNIX is its hetrogeny.   I preach 
this very loudly in homogeous IBM shops, DEC shops and HP shops.   
They don't like it, but I maintain they are vulnerable not just 
to attacks but to vendor specific weaknesses.

We all have out pet agronomists who will tell us the dangers of 
monocroping, and stockmen of the danger of inbreeding.  Yes, you
breed for a trait, and all the lethal recessives that come with it.

Perhaps you WANT a pentium running LINUX as your front end firewall
just to draw off all the attackers and divert attention from the real
fw, which runs on a custom built AMD 29000 with a custom designed
instruction set for a semi-RPN 1+1 architecture.......  I'd be
delighted to design one and write the compiler for it  ;-)

The sig line says it all.

/anton

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