Being safe on the internet (was Re: Here we go again - ISP DPI, but is it interception?)

[Peter Tomlinson]

Tom Thomson wrote:
> Roland Perry wrote:
>   
>> It seems to be worse than that... why are these products so susceptible
>> to vulnerabilities? For example, one that used to occur over and over
>> again was "buffer overflow". Surely there must be programming (or memory
>> management) techniques that could eliminate them entirely?
>>     
> There are indeed appropriate techniques, but these techniques involve either or both of using hardware which supports memory management (as implemented by old-fashioned mainframe providers and some old-fashioned mini-computer providers) and programming in languages whose operational semantics requires bound checking and separation of code and data.  Systems using the technologies developed in the late 1960s and the 1970s by companies such as Burroughs, ICL, and even CTL could not have suffered from most of the vulnerabilities that we see today.  
>   
The memory stirs, taking me back to 1968 when I designed the very simple 
memory management hardware for the ICL 1904A (and in the process fixed 
an error in the 1906A's MMU). Took the software people another 2 years 
to get George 4 running. So that was old-fashioned, was it, Tom? It was 
state of the art then, in the commercial environment that soon after 
took a wrong turn...

Peter