Date: 9 Jan 89 11:57:41 PST (Monday) Subject: Life 4.4 ------------------------------ Paper: the Curse of the Pharaohs ------------------------------ On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ------------------------------ "Mr. Spock, The women on your planet are logical. Yours is the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim." ------------------------------ There was this moron, see, and he was sad, so I said "Hey, why are you so sad?" He said that his father just died. "Yeah, but what's even worse", he says, "is that I just called my brother, and his dad just died, too!" ------------------------------ A Russian man loses his pet parrot. He looks everywhere, all around the neighborhood, in the park, everywhere. He just can't find the parrot. Finally, he goes around to the local KGB office, and tells the desk officer his problem. The desk officer is a little puzzled. "Look comrade, I'm sorry you lost your pet, but this is the KGB. We don't handle missing animal reports." "Oh, I know that", says the man. "I just wanted you to know, if you do happen to find my parrot -- I don't know where he could have picked up his political ideas." ------------------------------ Intelligence sources say that Soviet plans to build a memorial to the two workers who were killed in the Chernobyl disaster have been bogged down in arguments as to which two workers it was. ------------------------------ "The definition of diplomacy is saying 'Nice doggie, nice doggie.' until you can find a stick." -Will Rodgers ------------------------------ This week in the Rochester D&C newspaper there was a related article about a lawsuit brought by a woman who broke her back while sledding with her children at Ellison Park. Fortunately she did not win a big award, but to me any award in a miscarriage of justice. She won a few thousand dollars since the jury found that the park should have been posted with warning signs of some sort! Any intelligent adult should know the risks of riding down a bumpy hill at a high rate of speed on a sheet of flimsy plastic, without having a sign to warn them!! Before you know it we will find awards going to illiterate people who sue that the signs are not sufficient since they can't read them! ------------------------------ Why does a Purdue graduate put his/her diploma on the dashboard? So s/he can park in the handicapped spots. ------------------------------ How many Purdue engineering students does it take to change a lightbulb? One, and he gets three credit-hours for it. ------------------------------ Q: What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? A: There are skid marks in front of the dog. ------------------------------ A housewife, an accountant and a lawyer were asked "How much is 2+2?" The housewife replies: "Four!". The accountant says: "I think it's either 3 or 4. Let me run those figures through my spreadsheet one more time." The lawyer pulls the drapes, dims the lights and asks in a hushed voice, "How much do you want it to be?" ------------------------------ The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, 9/29/88, P. 20: At the beginning of this article I mentioned some of the pivotal technologies that the Chinese had invented, sometimes centuries before they appeared elsewhere. Another hundred inventions, all profoundly contributive to the progress of humanity, could have been mentioned. What caused this brilliant creativity and innovation to dim around the 12th century and not brighten again? Most Sinologists ascribe this cessation to the oppressive burden of an ever-burgeoning Chinese bureaucracy that finally permeated the smallest details of the citizenry's daily existence and crushed the ingenious spirit of the entire society. ------------------------------ In any case, as I heard it, the Rhinoceros Party was inspired by a south american election. The official in power took a dim view of contested elections, and had succeeded in discouraging any would-be competitors. Some foreign journalists, relatively immune to heavy-handed tactics, put forth their own candidate - the rhinoceros from the local zoo. It was a native of the country, of the proper age, etc. Come election day, the rhinoceros won! Of course, it was quickly found unfit for public office and replaced by the incumbent, but the events inspired a few people in Quebec to start putting up joke candidates for election. ------------------------------ We had a Lobster party in eastern Canada this last election. Their main promise was to stop the senseless slaughter of baby octopus for the little suction cups that were used to make shower mats and soap dish mats. They didn't get in! I wonder why ------------------------------ A guy walks into the psychiatrist's and says "Doctor, doctor, you've got to help me! I keep thinking that I'm a deck of cards!" The shrink says "Sit over there and I'll deal with you later." ------------------------------ While driving through South Dakota and reading some of the hundreds of billboard advertisements, one caught my eye. It was a couple of miles before a city, and in among the restaurant adds was one from a local full service station proudly featuring "24 hour toe service". ------------------------------ I've seen the "Toe Truck" in Seattle (WA, of course). It's a fully functional tow-truck with a huge pink toe sticking out from the back. Weird. Only in Seattle. ------------------------------ Graffito seen in San Francisco: 'Dyslexics untie!' ------------------------------ One of my cousins recently purchased a 4-Wheel drive Dodge Dakota pickup, and was giving a friend a ride in it while bragging about the "shift-on-the-fly" capabilities. His friend then suggested that they try it out on a nearby dirt road. Apparently Dodge claims that it is safe to shift into 4WD at speeds up to 55 mph, but to play it safe my cousin decided to try it out around 35 mph. When he put it into 4WD, an incredible sound of grinding gears accompanied the uncontrollable skid that the truck was put into as it slid to a halt. A tug at the 4WD lever confirmed that it was no longer connected to anything, and the local Dodge dealer was soon talking to an irate truck owner. They picked up the truck, lent my cousin a loaner, and had the truck ready for him to pick up two weeks later. They claimed that the factory has installed the wrong gear in the front transfer case, causing the gear ratios of the front and rear wheels to be incompatible. My cousin was happy to have his truck back, but didn't have th ------------------------------ phone messages: Here's one for the holiday season, sung to the tune of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" Oh I'm not here I'm prob'ly at the mall But if you're good I'll return your call So leave your name and number at the tone. Oh you know I might be sleeping I just might be away I might not wanna talk with you Oh I don't know what to say, 'cause I'm not here I'm prob'ly at the mall But if you're good I'll return your call So leave your name and number at the tone. Ho Ho Ho!! (When I recorded mine, I rang jingly-bells in the background. You have to sing FAST, tho, because it's about 23 seconds long.) ------------------------------ Here's another one for the off-season: Sung to the tune of "Home on the Range" Oh give me a phone With a person at home And not a machine answering Where seldom is heard A dumb beep at last word And Nancy here trying to sing. Not, not at this house 'Cause I'm an incredible louse So here is my beep (BEEP!) Hope you like them. Yeah, they're Colucci originals. ------------------------------ The more things change, the more they stay the same... ------------------------------ Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola (I believe it was) discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system (or it may have been CP-V's predecessor UTS). Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in "master mode" (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its "privilege level" byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open. Motorola quite properly reported this problem to XEROX via an official "level 1 SIDR" (a bug report with a perceived urgency of "needs to be fixed yesterday"). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as "Security SIDR", and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc. separately. Xerox apparently sat on the problem... they either didn't acknowledge the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch. Time passed (months, as I recall). The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take Direct Action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked, and just how thoroughly the system security systems could be subverted. They dug around through the operating-system listings, and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as "ghost jobs" (demons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them. So... one day, the system operator on the main CP-V software-development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following (as I recall... it's been a while since I heard the story): - Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job. - Disk drives would seek back & forth so rapidly that they'd attempt to walk across the floor. - The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a "lace card" (every hole punched). These would usually jam in the punch. - The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. - The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B. One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually. I believe that there were some other effects produced, as well. Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took place: !X id1 id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! (Robin Hood) id1: Off (aborted) id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men! id3: Thank you, my good fellow! (Robin) Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently-slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system. Finally, the system programmers did the latter... only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time image (the /vmunix file, in Unix terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at boot time... The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this problem. I believe that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. To the best of my knowledge, no serious disciplinary action was taken against either of these guys. Several years later, both of the perpetrators were hired by Honeywell, which had purchased the rights to CP-V after Xerox pulled out of the mainframe business. Both of them made serious and substantial contributions to the Honeywell CP-6 operating system development effort. Robin Hood (Dan Holle) did much of the development of the PL-6 system-programming language compiler; Friar Tuck (John Gabler) was one of the chief communications- software gurus for several years. They're both alive and well, and living in LA (Dan) and Orange County (John). Both are among the more brilliant people I've had the pleasure of working with. Disclaimers: it has been quite a while since I heard the details of how this all went down, so some of the details above are almost certainly wrong. I shared an apartment with John Gabler for several years, and he was my Best Man when I married back in '86... so I'm somewhat predisposed to believe his version of the events that occurred. ------------------------------------------------------------ 1995 Copyright by Henry Cate III All Rights Reserved The above collection can be forwarded for non commercial use as long as the signature file below is included The individual entries of the Life Collection are owned by the individual contributors who should be contacted if you wish to forward their entry. -- Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com] To learn how to get a MS Windows 3.1 Application with 15,000 jokes from the Life Humor collection, send E-Mail to life@netcom.com with "Info" in the Subject. Or check out http://www.offshore.com.ai/lifehumor
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