Top all-time · #154
David A. Wheeler
Personal blog · dwheeler.com · on HN as dwheelersecurityprogramming
David A. Wheeler's personal blog at dwheeler.com covers security and programming. Since 2008, 266 different Hacker News readers have linked it 456 times, most often “Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David A. Wheeler's essays on trusting trust and diverse double compilation, Unix filenames, Shellshock, secure programming, and software innovation.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called very interesting, lovely, a favorite, a good place to start, excellent, and seminal.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
David A. Wheeler's Personal Home Page
Most-linked posts?
- Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)38 people · 51 mentions · first linked 2018-10-12
- Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)27 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2010-02-05
- Fixing Unix/Linux/Posix Filenames (2009)21 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2019-01-17
- Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)14 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2009-03-26
- The Most Important Software Innovations9 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2009-09-09
- Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to Do It Correctly (2010)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-03-04
- The Apple goto fail vulnerability: lessons learned (2014)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- Ask YC: What is the SLOCCount output for your project?8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2008-03-03
- /readable/6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-01-26
- /essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-02-01
What Hacker News says?
https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html
Comment linking /essays/apple-goto-fail.html
on “Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations”Submitted Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004) as a story · 532 points
HN discussion- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Core - HEADLINE: restrict filename characters - DESCRIPTION: Adopt tighter rules for file names to improve ease of use, robustness, and security: https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.... - ROLE/AFFILIATION: sysadmin
Comment linking /essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
on “Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?”Submitted A Beginner's Garden of Chess Openings (2002) as a story · 304 points
HN discussionRelated: David Wheeler's Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
Comment linking /essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
on “I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old”Submitted The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017) as a story · 146 points
HN discussionThis image is now part of my presentation "Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) and Security" https://dwheeler.com/secure-class/presentations/AI-ML-Securi... ... as a nice example of why you should usually have humans review what AI systems do :-).
Comment linking /secure-class/presentations/AI-ML-Security.ppt
on “I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy”Submitted Ways to implement computer languages on 6502s (1994) as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI blog. Have for a long time. The key is to own your own domain. Then your works cannot be taken away, and they are visible to all instead of risking becoming trapped in a walled garden. It doesn't cost much and it is not that hard. See http://dwheeler.com
Comment linking /
on “If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs”Submitted Introduction to the Autotools (2012) as a story · 112 points
HN discussionThis seems to be the best here. As a side note: if someone does something more complicated and uses piping find output to xargs, there are very important arguments to find and xargs to delimit names with binary zero -- -print0 and -0 respectively. Very interesting article: https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.... .
Comment linking /essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
on “GitLab Database Incident – Live Report”Submitted Fixing Unix Filenames (2012) as a story · 107 points
HN discussionI mostly agree with you. I think it's going to take some rough years or decades before we re-architect all the things we have grown accustomed to. https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html
Comment linking /essays/apple-goto-fail.html
on “This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem”Submitted 6502 Language Implementation Approaches as a story · 105 points
HN discussionYou think no-one's tried recreating various distros' binaries from their published source, to check they're the same? E.g. Jos van den Oever did that for Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE here[1]. Which isn't to say that backdoors inserted into the binary that aren't in the published source are impossible, only that they need something more subtle than the crude/easily-detectable 'merge backdoor, compile, ship'. Somethin…
Comment linking /trusting-trust/
on “N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption”Submitted The Apple goto fail vulnerability: lessons learned (2014) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionI understand the sarcasm, but really, there are a lot of "real" websites, directly controlled by individuals who post what they want. I point you to my own website, https://www.dwheeler.com .... it's not the latest in CSS, no Megabytes of JavaScript, and no cross-site tracking either.
Comment linking /
on “Does anyone remember websites?”Submitted Fixing Unix/Linux/Posix Filenames (2009) as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI'm immediately reminded of Apple's "goto fail" bug, which was in part overlooked because of poor formatting and/or style: https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html
Comment linking /essays/apple-goto-fail.html
on “Software development topics I've changed my mind on”Submitted “Shellshock” as a story · 92 points
HN discussionI don't know why not? At the least, rather than Bash, you might consider Perl as a default, lowest common denominator for scripts that need to run anywhere. - It's nearly as ubiquitous as bash. - It has approximately the same kinds of file/path operations built in. - It has reasonably good support for strings/regexes/etc. all built-in, so you don't have to call out to tools like sed/awk/grep all the time and hope th…
Comment linking /essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
on “Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash”Submitted Fully Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (2009) as a story · 88 points
HN discussionPrograms built by different compilers aren't generally binary comparable, e.g. we shouldn't expect empty output from `diff <(gcc run-of-the-mill.c) <(clang run-of-the-mill.c)` However, the behaviour of programs built by different compilers should be the same. Run-of-the-mill programs could use this as part of a test suite, for example; but diverse double compilation goes a step further: We build compiler A using sev…
Comment linking /trusting-trust/
on “Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible”Submitted Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to Do It Correctly (2010) as a story · 85 points
HN discussionIndeed, and with the work done by Guix and the Reproducible Builds project we do have a real-world example of diverse double compilation which is not just a toy example utilizing the GNU Mes C compiler. https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/#real-world
Comment linking /trusting-trust/
on “Nixos-unstable’s ISO_minimal.x86_64-Linux is 100% reproducible”Submitted Sweet-expressions: A readable format for Lisp-like languages as a story · 85 points
HN discussion> And what about the hardware on which the build runs? Is it reproducible? ;) "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers" https://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ If the build is reproducible inside VMs, then the build can be done on different architectures: say x86 and ARM. If we end up with the same live image, then we're talking something ent…
Comment linking /trusting-trust/
on “Debian bookworm live images now reproducible”Submitted Email encryption is here – use STARTTLS everywhere as a story · 71 points
HN discussionHere's an example: https://dwheeler.com/essays/sight-reading.html It's funny (fascinating actually!) because it reads just like your typical highly opinionated software engineering blog post, only applied to music. Yet most of it, particularly the first three points, has no basis in reality. (E.g. point 3 - any music theorist will tell you there is a VERY valid reason for choosing a double-sharp over a natural in pa…
Comment linking /essays/sight-reading.html
on “What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)”Submitted Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) as a story · 65 points
HN discussion
