asciilifeform

AFAIK it's still owned by one John Mallery, a wealthy MIT prof with military and intelligence establishment connections.

My favourite "conspiratorial" hypothesis concerning this question is that the Symbolics IP was ordered to be perma-buried for "national security" reasons (as it threatens to make practical systems with capabilities much superior to today's state of the art, but running on early 1990s IC fab processes) and that Mallery (who, per rumour, purchased the IP for next to nothing via a backroom deal) was the designated undertaker.

AFAIK it is still unknown whether the chip die masks, source for (the parts not included on the tapes/CD) os/compiler/IC workflow -- was even preserved to this day.

I have 5 Symbolics Ivory CPUs (1 of which is in a working MacIvory III card.)

Recently I found that not far from where I live, one can rent time on an electron microscope for a very reasonable price. But the lab in question does not have the gear needed for decapping and delayering.

If someone knows of a reasonably-priced (mid five-figures or less) commercial facility that will do it with a good chance of success, I'd be interested. But I won't be sending these chips to some random person who may or may not be able to (or even make an honest attempt) to do the job, as I have only this small handful of units and currently no way to get more.

Indirect messages must be marked as hearsay, given as (barring the use of asymmetric crypto, which is AFAIK impossible to carry out at Gb+/s line-rate without specialized hardware) there is no way to verify, in any useful sense, their authorship.

The most that can be done to infer authenticity of indirect messages is to see whether such a message rejects the authorship of a known previous message having the same handle -- via the SelfChain. In virtually any case of handle collision, this will occur.

Re: floods -- a station only processes messages from a peer. So in fact in all cases the proximate cause of a flood is identifiable, and you can "UNPEER" and "GAG" him.

Flooding by a peer is annoying, but is not what people normally think of as "DDOS" (normally the term implies a flood of rubbish received directly from unauthenticated third parties.)

How liberally to peer -- is a matter for an individual station operator. Peering with every passing acquaintance has obvious down-sides.

> HTTPS on content only sides is primary about preventing people with tampering with the website

"people" here specifically excluding Verisign & its successor racketeers, the NSA (plus bananistani national equivalents thereof).

> in ways which potentially can hurt you from just opening them

Running shitware is optional.

> It doesn't prevent JS injected into your side from being executed

The only solution to malicious JS is... to switch off JS. Asking people you don't know to pay the cert tax does not somehow guarantee that their JS is not malicious.

> ... check the signature before loading/parsing any content it isn't secure.

"Secure content" is what you obtained from someone you actually trust and verified with a pubkey you received out of band (ideally -- meatspace). All other content may as well have been authored by evil martians, despite any pretense to the contrary.

> by now pretty much not-undoable not-decentralized HTTS infrastructure

What part of "Where I still have the freedom not to use the Reich's master-keyed pseudocryptographic garbage - I will not use it" is hard to understand?

IMHO it is quite strange that the "HTTPS-everywhere" nonsense isn't immediately understood by everyone for what it is -- simply Google's latest effort to stymie ad-blocking (with the applause of NSA, whose mission today consists largely of efforts to retard the development of actual - i.e. not masterkeyed and not escrowed - crypto.)

Only validly-signed (from one of the station's peers) messages move past the decoding stage ("prologue"), and of these only ones with timestamp +/-15min. of station's time; these finally searched for in dedupe queue; and at the end may be rebroadcast, if so marked, to the station's peers strictly.

You can be DOSed, so to speak, by one of your peers, but not DDOSed by a third party -- a reasonable machine can reject signature-failing or replayed-stale packets from multiple NICs at line rate, so long as your WOT is compact (i.e. less than 100 entries). This of course remains to be experimentally tested. Currently there is only an algorithm!

At the moment even the algorithm isn't finished.

This is correct, and is described in the article ("Kelvin versioning".) The concept is not original to the author.

"every message is rebroadcasted by everyone" is not factual per the spec.

Author of linked article speaking. (How it ended up here -- I have no idea, I'm rather surprised that it was of interest to more than the 3 people for whom it was written.)

This flame is doubly funny given how the article specifically concerns algorithms for possible decentralized cryptonets.

HTTPSism is deliberately broken on my WWW, to annoy unthinking servants of the PKI Reich.

For the thick: at the start, there is a PGP-signed copy of the text offered. And yes I in fact live and die by my PGP identity. And not Verisign et al's NSA-controlled PKI horror, no.

"V" is a very simple versioned publication system (there's an explanatory link in the article.)

Vpatches are backwards-compatible with ordinary gnupatch. (can simply execute "patch -p0 < nameofpatch" for the sequence.) "V" has nothing directly to do with Bitcoin.

I do have a multi-chapter series on constant-time integer arithmetic -- indeed tagged incl. "bitcoin", as it is meant to be used in (among other places) a rework of the client.

You evidently spent at most 3 seconds reading the link; wouldn't kill you to spend 5 seconds and see what is behind the tag.

One of the attractions of Hypercard was that a "stack" (document) was entirely self-contained; and would always behave exactly the same on any machine where HC could run.

Notably, would run without any need for servers (or, worse, the subscription-and-lock-in "services" ubiquitous today -- arguably the 1980s "computer revolution" was strangled in the cradle, and we've gone most of the way back to 1970s-style time-sharing now: how many phone apps etc. will run usefully without a net connection? The "smartphone" is essentially a small "glass TTY", rather than personal computer in the '80s sense.)

I've run HC stacks written 30+ years ago. How many current-day "web app" documents will be readable as-found 30 years from now? For that matter, I've paid for iOS apps that would no longer execute after half a year (on account of Apple's "API changes", or in some cases -- author's "call home" server fell down and did not get up, etc.) Permanence (in the most basic "I paid for this and it ought to be usable for so long as any compatible iron remains functional" sense) is no longer part of the software commercial culture, and one is likely to be laughed at for merely raising the question.