Random notes
"Today I'm one of the half-dozen or so most influential people in that movement; in fact, a lot of people would put me among the top three, with Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman." (http://www.catb.org/~esr/who-is-ESR.html) - eric should start motavational speaking.
- "an armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein (via esr blog)
- girls == "Piece of huff"
Art of UNIX programming - Donald Knuth - Art of programming - http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/taoup.pdf
- fancies himself as a standup comic - Jerry Seinfeld reference?
- Eric on stage, spotlight around him with microphone telling bad OSI jokes
- tee totaller
- VA Linux moral compass
- Jargon file modifications - pro war
- only one of the three not to have a biography written
- Bertrand Meyer
- "disruptive asshole"
- "jeopardize the interests of our entire tribe"
- "I explained that I have no desire to punish the perpetrators of 9/11; what I want is vengeance and death. Vengeance for us, death for them. Whether they experience ‘punishment’ during the process is of little or no interest to me." - no parachutes
- "I had a miserable childhood," says Raymond, who was born with cerebral palsy. "Being a short kid with a limp was not the easiest thing in the world. Children can be vicious." He retreated to the outcast existence of a computer nerd.
- In addition to these social burdens, in his teenage years Raymond was saddled with the belief of some mentors that he was a math prodigy. "They might have been right, too, but I wasn't able to deal with it," Raymond says. He left the University of Pennsylvania after 2 1/2 years and never returned.
http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html - bashing Linus
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/06/msg00138.html - ESR ncurses argument
"People who spew bad poetry and/or make a fetish of writing in all-smalls and/or traffic in fuzzy images of mediocre avant-garde art should slit their wrists or join a commune or do anything else that will keep their self-indulgent sludge off the Web." - http://www.catb.org/~esr/html-hell.html
Esr editing his own Wikipedia page to remove criticism? - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eric_S._Raymond&action=history
Eric loses $30 million - http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/stories/2004/06/12/eric-s-raymond.html
"Larry Wall, its creator, is rightly considered one of the most important leaders in the Open Source community, and often ranks third behind Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in the current pantheon of hacker demigods." ESR modesty. From an article about python python - http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
"I guess that’s me, then. I’m a hard-core gamer from ten years before you were born, and my expectations weren’t formed by computer games. I don’t do twitch games at all, and fancy graphics don’t interest me much. Gimme interesting game logic and repeated play value, and I’m happy." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=280#comment-35789
"I’m already as famous and respected as anybody gets in this racket." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38668
"the most important thing is that I know what I’ve done, and I can look around me and see that I changed history with my code and my words and my example." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38668
"My revenge for all the personal shit I’ve had heaped on me is that the shit-throwers will live the rest of their lives in the shadow of my deeds. If they never know it, because the shadow is too large for them to comprehend, that only sweetens the dish." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38668
"In particular, the text: “Other libertarians may fail this test. I will not.” In typical esr style, this is written as though he’s questing to destroy the One True Ring. Similarly, when esr talks about gun ownership he acts as though he’s acting bravely to protect, whereas what he’s doing is about as utilitarian as wearing makeup." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38610
"I was pointing out that he’s deluded and insecure about physicality in general, and that this comes through in his writing. Witness his melodrama regarding terrorism." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38610
"Eric will engage in an arguement, while others, such as Russ Nelson turn tail and hide behind their SMTP server. Nelson’s response is that of a coward, Raymonds is that of someone with enough self-conviction to stand and fight. For these reasons, I find myself with a growing respect for Eric, despite his tendancy to over-claim." - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38615
"Do you claim that Eric’s posts about terrorism don’t read as though he’s on a quest? If this isn’t your claim, do you claim instead that this does not qualify as conceit? Do you claim that Eric isn’t boastful? How many times does he have to tell people they’re “relying on [his] code” before it qualifies as obnoxious bragging? (VA shares incident, anyone?)" - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=289#comment-38731
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/28/47 - Al Viro on why "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is junk.
http://zork.net/~nick/mail/esr-god-of-teh-open-source If you carefully examine the intercal package (which was not available for a month depsite emails about it being a 404), you will discover that . is in ESR's PATH.
Doesn't understand the privilege model in Linux:
Eric believes that keystrokes/form data cannot be captured without wheel: esr> Malware needs wheel for one of its functions, which is covert keylogging to capture things like credit-card numbers. To do that in any useful way (for very malicious values of useful) you need to be able to subvert the kernel or the system-default browser. That takes wheel. marshal>All you need to ’subvert’ the browser is to attach a debugger (ptrace), which on the default installation of xubuntu can be done without wheel. esr>Ah, now you’ve said something interesting. I’ll try this on Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) and see if it works. esr>Not just any old ptrace attachment will do, however. You’d need to (a) induce the user to execute the ptraced binary under the belief it was their normal browser, and (b) somehow inject keylogger code, Even the first part wouldn’t be easy - I can’t think of a way to do it without root, offhand, unless dot is in the user’s path and you can con them into running the browser from a shell prompt in a directory of your choice. marshal>You don’t need to induce the user to do anything - you can simply watch for instances of Firefox and attach them as they are launched. All that is necessary to read text off a form is to break-point the appropriate place and read some values out of memory (this does not require root). This kind of thing is bread-and-butter for “crackers”. esr>No sale; you can’t ptrace across a privilege boundary like that (I checked). I would have been astonished if it were otherwise. marshal>What privilege boundary? Firefox runs as your user. Attach GDB and breakpoint a function and read some values out of memory. It will work. esr>I’ll test, but I still see serious problems with this approach. One is selinux; another commenter has already suggested a policy that would stop it cold. marshal>There are still loads of ways to ’subvert’ the browser, such as patching a copy of the browser on disk and changing links on the UI to point to the copy. There is nothing magical about either kernel-space or root; it’s simply a matter of scope. Eric is yet to address this point.
- When the discussion is revisited, Eric totally reimagines the conversation:
Marshal, for example, apparently thinks ptrace is a magic wand that can subvert processes across security boundaries, and cannot be prevented from doing this by SELinux capabilities.