Poul-Henning Kamp

If you like Poul Henning-Kamp, also see the following by him: - "NSA Operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report": https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fosdem/2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_operation_ORC… - The bikeshed email: https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/

He influenced my career as much as Dennis and Ken did. Our "nanokernel" paper brought NTP into the nanosecond domain and gave FreeBSD "timecounters". But our true shared passion was Loran-C Dave even invented the 16-pulse "tactical Loran-C" during the Vietnam War. I borrowed his ISA card Loran-C receiver (serial #1 & only) and later I built two generations of SDR receivers, and he was so proud when I showed him this dancing pulse received with a cheap ARM chip: https://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation2.gif And boy was he pissed when USA shut down Loran-C, he really loved his "loudenboomers" RIP

Follow-up posts here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html And the actual project: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed

I would first check with my manager or my accountant, that I am not doing something that would violating my employment contract. I.e. my manager is quite open about 20% of time arrangements, and we are working on several open-source projects at work, but I am not sure if taking money for working on something extra wouldn't violate something. It might be worth it to have it clearly spelled out in the contract. On the other hand, a.f.a.i.k. in what do you do in your free time on your own hardware should be no concern to your employer, so accepting patreon donors should fall into that category as well? Alongside patreon, I would attempt to introduce something like Varnish Moral Licence [1] as well. It looks like Mr. Kamp figured a nice way how to get a open-source sponsorship from big corporations (because from the procurement's perspective it still looks like a licence you get an invoice for even you don't promise them anything in return :-) [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/vmlfaq.html#isn-t-this-more-a-sort-of-sponso…

For those unaware, PHK created (amongst other things) the MD5crypt password hashing algorithm ($1$…). It came before bcrypt (1999), scrypt (2009), SHA2crypt (2016), etc, and was committed in 1994: * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libcrypt/crypt.c?revision=424… * https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/3b2b7f71deba2a4efbd218d2… * https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp

At a quick skim this looks like they reinvented something very similar to phkmalloc, but they didn’t cite phkmalloc nor include it in their benchmarks. https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/phkmalloc/ https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c?h=stable/4

Even though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates. I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens. https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/

That's puttering, tinkering, or experimenting. It's a good thing. Bikeshedding is wasting time on trivial and pointless efforts or discussions. It's a bad thing. :) https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

The author stops at an intuitive leap before developing the idea into something easily put into practice. Actually doing what the author describes is often impossible except in an intuitive way. How could you know a priori which decisions might have big impacts? On a project of any complexity you need either deep specific experience or a very accurate working model of the entire project. You aren’t likely to have either. This has been previously covered in depth, even in software, although of course it could possibly be improved. Painting the bikeshed is one example: http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/

Arguing about colors is literally bikeshedding. https://bikeshed.com/ http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/

That is a phony argument. You blamed all Jews for Israel's actions. That was antisemitic. You don't need to wait for Israel to become better before admitting that. Many people have criticized Israel, sometimes very harshly, without needing to say things like "I hold Jews collectively in contempt". Your blog post on the matter [1] would have looked more dignified if you'd said "I was wrong" not just "I didn't express myself artfully". [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/israel/

BSD jails date back to FreeBSD 4, which was released in 2000. Edit: I started questioning my memory of this, so I poked around some. Poul-Henning Kamp did the initial work in April, 1999, here is the commit: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=46155 More details from him about it: http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/jails/

Yes, you probably shouldn't use any kind of binary trees. This has been a sort of open secret for years. I first learned about it from phk(Poul-Henning Kamp)'s 2010 article, "You're doing it wrong". See http://phk.freebsd.dk/B-Heap/queue.html.

Aren't all the goals already met by e.g. http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20151212.html ?

Bikeshedding, in its current usage, stems from the FreeBSD mailing list. It is not from psychology. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html In Parkinson's original and fictional example, members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. This is not a matter of sequence or independence. With respect to similarity, I will equate priority and weight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality Parkinson himself is a historian and not a psychologist.

What's the status of phk's ntimed? The planned release dates on http://nwtime.org/projects/ntimed/ were quietly shifted from 2016 to 2017 a few weeks ago, and I'm not seeing much happening at http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/ .

> If an organization is in a position to confiscate the camera from a journalist, they're almost certainly ALSO in a position to extract the encryption password from the journalist. This is basically why GBDE exists. See s.s. 4.1 "Protecting the user" of http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcon-03.gbde.paper.pdf The drawback is that GBDE is for cold storage protection (which I imagine could be okay in a camera).

Md5crypt Password scrambler is no longer considered safe by author: http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt_eol.html Also a better way to explain hashing algorithms to the lay person is to call them fingerprinting algorithms.

The email that started it all (at least in the software world): http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html

I'm surprised Poul-Henning Kamp isn't involved. Linux Foundation have been throwing money at him for the past year[0] to work on an ntpd replacement[1] and he's well-known for his time (and security) nuttery[2]. [0] http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html [1] https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

Perhaps these guys should talk to PHK who's also implementing an NTP dæmon: · http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/ · https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed

The most straightforward thing is to just run the CPU with an accurate clock frequency. You'll have to replace the Quartz next to the clock-generation chip next to your CPU/Chipset by something which is very accurate. http://phk.freebsd.dk/soekris/pps/ https://deltafabri.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/under-60-ns-an-atomic-stra… For the cost, it's about $150 or so for a used GPS with precise 10 MHz reference frequency output, there's a different PLL IC (different from the ClockBlock module) from Silabs which is available from Adafruit for <$10, but I don't know if the xtal there can be exchanged for a 10 MHz frequency. The C-revision of the used IC can be, though... https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-si5351-clock-generator-breakout/ov…

You forgot the part where FreeBSD 4.0 added jails in March 2000 [1]. You could argue that jails were inspired by chroot(), and that's correct, but that's hardly any isolation. [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf

His post announcing his "from the scratch" effort: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html The problem with all such initiatives ("we start clean") is that they typically never even reach the feature set of the previous software (implementing features takes orders of magnitude more time than some simple "proof of concept") and that they often make the same errors the older software already solved. JWZ wrote nicely somewhere about that effect (something like "it's not 'hard to read code,' those are the actual features implemented") but I can't find the link.

Check his series of posts on the subject: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html (TL;DR: Yes, he thought things through and are ntimed is implementing a few new tricks.)

Too bad openntpd isn't standards compliant. Fortunately, phk is already fixing ntpd. http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html

PHK has been working on a rewrite of ntp sponsored by the Linux Foundation. He has posted a couple of entries about his progress so far: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html In the meantime Miroslav's chrony is a good alternative: http://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ If you are looking for the fixed version you can grab 4.2.8 from archive.ntp.org which is still responding to requests: http://archive.ntp.org/ntp4/ntp-4.2/ntp-4.2.8.tar.gz

FreeBSD timecounter in detail: http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/timecounter.pdf

Good one. More context on the ideas and proposal Poul-Henning has put on the table: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html

I did watch, thanks, but anyone in a hurry can get just the slides here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2014.pdf I particularly appreciated the "QUEEN success example: SSC" (self-signed certificates, starts at slide 23), which also got a good laugh from the audience ... (if you're just watching the video, this is the text of the second slide in the PDF, not shown at FOSDEM: """ What is this ? This is a ficticious NSA briefing I gave as the closing keynote at FOSDEM 2014 The intent was to make people laugh and think, but I challenge anybody to prove it untrue. Playlist spoiler: Electric Light ORCHESTRA: Confusion ABBA: Money, Money, Money Backman Turner OVERDRIVE: Taking Care Of Business QUEEN: Bicycle Race Beastie BOYS: Sabotage PASADENA Roof Orchestra: Pennies From Heaven """ )