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   Goblin (goblin@crispsandwi.ch)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 04:18:33 JST Goblin

   Sometimes people ask me why I like #OpenBSD so much.

   Over the weekend Theo de Raadt the founder of the whole project emailed me and my PhD student to say he liked our paper (and that it was 95% correct). We have never interacted with him before and the paper was published in a tiny workshop and on arXiv. He just stumbled on it.

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     Goblin (goblin@crispsandwi.ch)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 04:19:03 JST Goblin

     in reply to

     My student was terrified, but he spent the evening emailing back and forth with him discussing things, and Theo was kind enough to have a look at another of my students papers and gave comments.

     He also gave a load of historical context for how pledge and unveil had been developed and where seccomp had got it wrong.

     This never happens. It’s rare enough that your scientific work gets read by anyone—nevermind one of the most influential security experts working today.

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     Goblin (goblin@crispsandwi.ch)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 04:19:12 JST Goblin

     in reply to

     The (open access) version of the paper is here, if anyone cares. Turns out OpenBSD gets a lot more use of its sandboxing mechanisms in its packages than other OSs (and maybe theres a reason for that…)

     https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06447

     (4/3)

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     Goblin (goblin@crispsandwi.ch)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 04:24:01 JST Goblin

     in reply to

     The student has been running around with a massive grin on his face since. He even phoned his mum to boast proudly.

     Contrast this with what happened when he found a small bug in Debian and the devs laughed at him.

     I love #OpenBSD, but a random act of kindness by its devs like this, giving time and attention to a student is remarkable, and unheard of from any other project.

     Dunno what it is but the BSDs are just friendly and I’m happy to be a user of such a friendly OS. Its just fab.

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     Blurry Moon (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 04:27:21 JST Blurry Moon

     in reply to
     @goblin OpenBSD has a reputation because historically, their mailing list but I have interacted with the community multiple times and found it very friendly and helpful. They are just very allergic to time wasting and bike shedding. If you respect their time they are great.
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     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 05:28:58 JST feld

     in reply to
     @goblin I had Theo de Raadt email me too once! On the public bugs list! And called me a "fucking American pig" for requesting that a severe crash fix be included in a patch for the current stable release and demanded that I "stop using the software".
     
     So I gladly emailed him back when we migrated our route reflectors off of OpenBSD to Junipers to let him know I "stopped using the software".
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     Chris (nightclaw@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 10:17:18 JST Chris

     in reply to

     • feld

     @feld which list?

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     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 10:17:18 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Chris
     @nightclaw you know I found the thread on an archive, and two emails are missing.
     
     You know for years I thought that email was public and it always bothered me. I wonder if he sent it off-list. I may be able to recover that email as I think my email archival system goes back that far. I'm traveling for the weekend and don't have time to find it tonight but I should be able to pull it with full headers