"A PAL -- a "Permissive Action Link" -- is the box that is supposed to prevent unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon. 'Unauthorized' covers a wide range of sin, from terrorists who have stolen bombs to insane American military officers to our allies who may have some of their own uses for bombs that are covered by joint use agreements. It's supposed to be impossible to 'hot-wire' a nuclear weapon. Is it?"
Fascinating reading, partly for what it is and partly as a reconstruction of classified technology from unclassified innuendo.
"The goal is not to keep Satan out. You want to invite Satan in, but without compromising your security. You don't want to choose between safety and the benefits of openness. You want both.
"Satan offers to prove to you that his class is safe by presenting an Authenticode certificate which will certify that Satan signed the class. You could verify that the signature is truly Satan's, but proof that it came from Satan is not proof that it is safe."
Very funny and insightful capability-based solution to Dijkstra's famous dining philosophers problem, in little-known language E.
"This is a small, simple, and fast single pass C compiler. It produces executable code directly from C source, with no intermediate steps. It understands almost all of the C99 standard, plus several extensions from gcc.
"Tinycc can produce ELF executables (and .o files, and shared libraries) for x86, arm, and c67 processors. It can also run C code directly, as a scripting language, via the "#!/usr/bin/tinycc -run" construct.
"Tinycc already builds a working version of itself. The current goal is to implement enough features to build an unmodified Linux kernel, uClibc, and BusyBox (or toybox) to create a small self-bootstrapping Linux system in only four packages. (See the Firmware Linux project for details.)"
Excellent.