UNIX: A Virus Masquerading As An Operating System

In the never ending coverage of the latest WikiLeaks thing I keep hearing the word “backdoor”.

That is interesting.

The first time I ever heard (actually I saw it in print) that term was in a book of a name that I can’t remember.

It was a quote from somebody of whom I had never heard and therefore whose name I can’t remember.

But I thought it was fairly profound.

And now it’s all coming home to roost.

I can’t remember all the details of what the book was about.

But I remember that it was about a kid of average intelligence in Portland  - in the late Twentieth Century - who, between what his average intelligence allowed him to figure out, along with the help of a community of on line hack type people who were willing to humor him with suggestions, was able to accomplish getting into a lot of major computer systems; I think some were DOD systems, but I can’t remember for sure..

He accomplished quite a bit.

I can’t remember all of the sites he hacked.

But I do remember that he was able to download the source code for Sun Microsystems, among those that he hacked – using a computer in his bedroom and a link to the computer at Portland State University.

That’s a big deal; source code is the code that can be modified, re-compiled and then stored and executed.

I never heard that Solaris had been modified by him, but, with source code he could have modified it.

And that would have meant that the OS of one of the major computer vendors of the day would have been performing according to the whims of a kid in Portland.

And the whole thing was possible because of UNIX.

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Back in the long ago dark ages of computing some engineers at Bell Laboratories needed an easy to use and infinitely flexible operating system.

They cobbled together something they called UNIX.

And they gave it a “back door” so that they could get in if they wanted to get into applications written under it and change stuff.

And they made it available to the computing world of those days for a pittance of a one time license fee.

The computing community paid that fee and started using UNIX in droves.

They came up with their own fully licensed and re-named versions of UNIX.

Solaris was only one of the most successful UNIX based operating systems.

There were and are lots of them.

What a deal!!

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Due to that confluence of computer technology and economics, most non IBM operating systems (IBM already had a whole shitload of operating systems, none with back doors) are children of UNIX.

It should therefore  be no surprise that things like iOS, Android and Windows have security problems.

They all have massively proliferated a virus: UNIX.

They all have back doors that magically seem impossible to close.

At least based on what I keep hearing form the Children of UNIX community.

And, surprise, surprise, the CIA knew that and went right in the back doors of those operating systems.

The good news is, all of the CIA’s systems are probably UNIX based.