[codezero]

My favorite part of this was:

That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments

—

The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s. The code ran perfectly well thanks to modern optimizing compilers and having moved from Vax to Linux in the 90s, it was a surprisingly seamless transition.

It reminds me of a conference talk I’ve referenced before “do over or make due” basically implying rewriting large amounts of mostly functioning code was not worth the effort if it could be taped together with modern tools.

[kimixa]

Ha, I worked for a company that until ~2012 still used RCS-backed SCM, absolute hack job on a shared file share that wrapped RCS with a "project file" to allow a tree of specific revisions for a "project". "MKS" it was called. And by the sound of it the "old" '90s version, not the java EE rewrite.

That meant the files has the entire "$Revision: 1.3 $" nonsense and "file changelog" at the top too - though many newer files never bothered to include the tags to actually get RCS to replace them. Inconsistent as hell.

And while the "family" of devices the software was for traces it's origin to the mid '90s, functionally none of the code was older than ~5 years at that time.

Naturally even with only a few tens of engineers it regularly messed up, commits stepped on each other's toes and the entire tree got corrupted regularly. For fun I wrote a script that read it all and imported the entire history into git - you only had to go back a few years before the entire thing was absolute nonsense.

I have no idea why that was still being used then, but I assume it had been in use from the very start of that entire hardware family. Perhaps as it was fundamentally a "hardware" company - which until surprisingly recently seemed to consider "source control" to be "shared folders on remote machines" - "software" source control wasn't considered a priority.

[anthk]

RCS->CVS and from that you can convert it to GIT or SVN.

[kimixa]

The issue was the rcs files were simply corrupt - no matter what tool you used the older deltas were just bad. Just people didn't notice/care as they were "old" revisions.

And I couldn't find any tool that supported the mks "project" files that linked multiple rcs revisions into a single "commit", so something a little custom was needed anyway. At least for the ancient mks version used.

Quite a bit of effort was put into it during the "official" migration, but they eventually gave up too as even the oldest backup archives they could find had the same issues.

[beejiu]

If you're using R in 2026, you're probably invoking code compiled from Fortran from the 70s/80s somewhere along the line. It's a foundation for a lot of numerical computing.

[jmalicki]

Same for SciPy (At least the last time I dove into it around 10 years ago).

A lot of the C code you see for numerics is a straight up f2c run checked in.

[tptacek]

Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.

[ajju]

My favorite part of the paper is that the “attack” isn’t just exploiting a bug — it’s exploiting how different components interpret the same input. Modifying an executable as it’s loaded into memory is one example, but the deeper pattern is the mismatch.

What’s interesting about the malware in this post is that it goes one step further: instead of exploiting mismatches, it corrupts the computation itself — so every infected system agrees on the same wrong answer!

More broadly: any interpretive mismatch between components creates a failure surface. Sometimes it shows up as a bug, sometimes as an exploit primitive, sometimes as a testing blind spot. You see it everywhere — this paper, IDS vs OS, proxies vs backends, test vs prod, and now LLMs vs “guardrails.”

Fun HN moment for me: as I was about to post this, I noticed a reply from @tptacek himself. His 1998 paper with Newsham (IDS vs OS mismatches) was my first exposure to this idea — and in hindsight it nudged me toward infosec, the Atlanta scene, spam filtering (PG's bayesian stuff) and eventually YC.

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/Ptacek-N...

The paper starts with this Einstein quote "Not everything that is counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted", which seems quite apt for the malware analyzed here :)

[Tepix]

Just curious, are you purposely mocking the LLM writing style?

[DANmode]

That’s how everybody in academia, tech, and published authors in general used to write.

Where do you think the LLM is getting it from? ^_^

[red-iron-pine]

the full on em dash requires a different character than - or --

it was generated that way, or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen.

in 2026, at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

On Linux, with a compose key, it's <compose><-><-><.> (at least with the settings I have, I don't think I overrode that one). "⸻" is even more fun. You can even make your own sequences, e.g. I've got <compose><O><h><m> for "Ω", and <compose><m><u> for "μ", very handy for electrical stuff like "160μA at 1.8V needs a resistance of 1.25kΩ, dissipating 288μW".

[macintux]

On a Mac, at least, the "correct combination of buttons" is trivial and easy to remember, even for someone like me who rarely uses em-dash. (But, I want to start using it more because I'm sick to death of people treating it as a scarlet letter.)

[IAmBroom]

Microsoft Word changes "--" to an em-dash, by default.

[DANmode]

> or else this person happens to know the correct combination of buttons to make that happen.

Yes, some people care about maximum impact of their words.

> at least 20-40% of social media traffic is bots (and probably higher with better LLMs), so it is usually safer to just assume.

Look around you. If you see 40% bots in HN comments, find a therapist.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> People used RCS well into the 2000s!

I still use RCS today. It's certainly not my preferred option, but my collaborator likes it, and it's not too annoying for me to use.

[NitpickLawyer]

> used to be skeptical of the government provenance

Do you mean skeptical on which government was responsible or that it was in fact a government effort?

I can see how attribution could be debatable (between two main suspects mainly), but are / were there any good arguments against this being a gov effort? I would find it highly unlikely that someone other than a gov could muster up so much domain knowledge, source pristine 0days and be so stealthy at the same time.

[tptacek]

I didn't want to give bumptious government CNE teams that much credit, and also a lot of the indicators people were giving of state origin didn't seem all that predictive. I don't agree with your premise that it takes a state-level adversary to collect the domain knowledge needed to do this stuff, and I certainly don't agree about the "pristine zero days".

[codezero]

I do wonder if these breadcrumbs were also left intentionally. “Oh look, we are using old stuff, don’t be afraid!” Or for some other reason. It is a little surprising to pull off such a sophisticated attack and miss details you could find running ‘strings’ unless I’m missing something and this part was encrypted.

[tptacek]

I think that in the time period we're talking about, RCS wasn't really even all that old. Like, RCS is old, sure, but it was also in common use especially by Unix systems people; it's what you might have reached for by default to version your dotfiles, for instance.

[codezero]

Yes, but even back then I was aware of the sections in executables (wasn’t this where it was found?) and any neckbeard from the 70s and 80s might be even more so aware. That said, yeah, sure, it’s a very possible and understandable oversight, but I’m weary because of all the text in viruses and such as indicators. Seems like a pass over ‘strings’ would be obvious. Though. TIL, strings doesn’t necessarily scan the entire executable.

[breppp]

The same binary has encrypted strings so I assume there was a pass, but if you look at the source control strings they seem to decrease the appearance of maliciousness, even today they are out of place for malware

[hnthrowaway0315]

Does that mean that three-letter agencies were/are able to recruit from the fields for each type of malware? For example, fast16 might actually be written by someone who used to write scientific calculation software, while Stunex was written by someone who used to work for Siemens?

[mike_d]

Don't think of it as a materials simulation engineer being recruited and trained on how to write complex malware.

Rather this was developed by a team of 6-8 people. Maybe two or three of them working on the implant, another engineer handling the exploits and propagation, and yet another building the LP and communications channels. They are supported by a scientist with deep knowledge of the process they are messing around with (say developing nuclear weapons), and a mathematician that knows how to introduce subtle and undetectable errors.

[hnthrowaway0315]

Yeah I think this makes more sense. After all they need some domain knowledge but the key is to write and deliver that payload.

[codezero]

I doubt you will find an answer here, but a few bits of anecdata:

1. CIA had recruiting events that invited STEM majors at my university, I suspect they do this very broadly.

2. Our funding came partially from the Air Force and part of the rules was our data and source had to be open. We know from conversations and other details from integrating with Air Force partners that they had models like ours that were an order of magnitude more accurate because they amalgamated models from all academics in our field and had their own career scientists on staff (often coming up through military ranks)

[eth0up]

Try to remember how hypothetical everything tended to be before Snowden. And 'twas a meager pittance that was revealed. They have toys that'd blow minds and people yee'd swear weren't people. It's all fun and games to poke fun, but holy shit those guys are NTBF'dW.

Every academic institution, every school, all under the radar of recruitment and more. It's difficult to believe, but the network is real.

There are certainly people here on HN who've been solicited, most who'll never mention it.

It's fun to imagine, though, what tight groups of highly motivated, stupidly intelligent people can do when they collectively commit to doing so - and with a hefty budget to assist.

[Schlagbohrer]

Fun to imagine that and painful to think of what we could have if such efforts and budgets were put toward education, healthcare, social welfare, public infrastructure + reliability, etc.

But then I am getting too utopian

[eth0up]

Exactly. But there's ideology, and there's reality. You know how pervasive and colossal the black budget is. We could be, as a society, almost unimaginably advanced of where we are, sans such things, sans the modern patent system, sans greed, sans corruption.

But we are, precisely where we are

Edit: I thought it prudent to leave a reminder, that the US military operates beyond patent regulations. If they want or need something, the silly games end there. And they do what they will.

[hackrmn]

Re-factoring code is a _panacea_ -- it's more likely factors that contributed to the code needing re-factoring in the first place, are very much in place still to contribute to the same condition repeating eventually, and another round you go. The factors that produce the causes of re-factoring, usually border on psychological causes embedded deeply within the brains of the developer or developers that are owners of the code. Habits, beliefs, convictions, even "professional traumas". Related here is Conway's Law, where the team, for all individual capacity and capability, cannot but build software that mimics the structure of the developers' ultimate (larger) organisation, thus tying the success of the former to the success of the latter. Re-factoring will only largely repeat the outcome if the organisation hasn't changed.

The exception being obviously a team approaching someone else's codebase -- including that of their predecessor, if they can factor in for Conway's Law -- to re-factor it.

But the same person or persons announcing re-factoring? I always try to walk away from those discussions, knowing very well they're just going to build a better mouse trap. For themselves.

Don't get me wrong, iteration of your own then-brain's product is all well and good, but it takes _more_ to escape the carousel. It takes sitting down and noting down primary factors driving poor architecture and taking a long hard look in the mirror. Not everything is subjective or equivalent, as much as many a developer would like to believe. It's very attractive to stick to "as long as we're careful and diligent, even sub-optimal design can be implemented well". No, it won't be -- this one is a poster-child exception to the rule if there ever was one -- your _design_ is the root and from it and it alone springs the tree that you'll need to accept or cut down, and trimming it only does so much.

[Schlagbohrer]

Did you mean to say placebo?

A panacea is a cure-all. So if code refactoring is a panacea then we should refactor code often.

[hackrmn]

I mean to write "not a panacea", my bad. That it's not the universal cure people think it is. And people _do_ think that re-factoring will magically solve problems, while it doesn't do all that much in practice, less so when you factor in the costs spent on re-factoring.

[drysine]

>in 2006 was still using svn

Perhaps you meant cvs? Subversion was released in 2004 and git appeared in 2005.

[mjg59]

Subversion 1.0 was released in 2004, but it was already widely used before then.

[codezero]

We used cvs, but did switch to svn before/around 2006, but I could be mixing that up. We did not switch to git even by 2012 when I left.

The reference to the 70s and 80s code didn’t imply it was version controlled before svn/cvs though if that’s what you meant, but by that time it was and still had old timestamps commented in the text files.

[drysine]

I just wanted to say that "still using svn in 2006" sounds odd when talking about version control system that existed just for several years and what turned out to be its replacement was 1 year old.

gcc, for example, transitioned to subversion in 2006 and switched to git only in 2019 [0]

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GitConversion

[mzs]

I miss the days of knowing who last touched every source file and precisely what version it was:

  $ what /usr/bin/file
  /usr/bin/file:
   PROGRAM:file  PROJECT:file-106
   $File: apprentice.c,v 1.309 2021/09/24 13:59:19 christos Exp $
   $File: apptype.c,v 1.14 2018/09/09 20:33:28 christos Exp $
   $File: ascmagic.c,v 1.109 2021/02/05 23:01:40 christos Exp $
   $File: buffer.c,v 1.8 2020/02/16 15:52:49 christos Exp $
   $File: cdf_time.c,v 1.19 2019/03/12 20:43:05 christos Exp $
   $File: cdf.c,v 1.120 2021/09/24 13:59:19 christos Exp $
   $File: compress.c,v 1.129 2020/12/08 21:26:00 christos Exp $
   $File: der.c,v 1.21 2020/06/15 00:58:10 christos Exp $
   $File: encoding.c,v 1.32 2021/04/27 19:37:14 christos Exp $
   $File: fsmagic.c,v 1.81 2019/07/16 13:30:32 christos Exp $
   $File: funcs.c,v 1.122 2021/06/30 10:08:48 christos Exp $
   $File: is_csv.c,v 1.6 2020/08/09 16:43:36 christos Exp $
   $File: is_json.c,v 1.15 2020/06/07 19:05:47 christos Exp $
   $File: is_tar.c,v 1.44 2019/02/20 02:35:27 christos Exp $
   $File: magic.c,v 1.115 2021/09/20 17:45:41 christos Exp $
   $File: print.c,v 1.89 2021/06/30 10:08:48 christos Exp $
   $File: readcdf.c,v 1.74 2019/09/11 15:46:30 christos Exp $
   $File: readelf.c,v 1.178 2021/06/30 10:08:48 christos Exp $
   $File: softmagic.c,v 1.315 2021/09/03 13:17:52 christos Exp $
   $File: file.c,v 1.190 2021/09/24 14:14:26 christos Exp $
  ...
 
  WHAT(1)                     General Commands Manual                    WHAT(1)
  
  NAME
       what - show what versions of object modules were used to construct a file
  
  SYNOPSIS
       what [-qs] [file ...]
  
  DESCRIPTION
       The what utility searches each specified file for sequences of the form
       "@(#)" as inserted by the SCCS source code control system.  It prints the
       remainder of the string following this marker, up to a NUL character,
       newline, double quote, `>' character, or backslash.
  
       The following options are available:
  
       -q      Only output the match text, rather than formatting it.
  
       -s      Stop searching each file after the first match.
  
  EXIT STATUS
       Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, otherwise 1.
  
  SEE ALSO
       ident(1), strings(1)
  
  STANDARDS
       The what utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 ("POSIX.1").  The -q
       option is a non-standard FreeBSD extension which may not be available on
       other operating systems.
  
  HISTORY
       The what command appeared in 4.0BSD.
  
  BUGS
       This is a rewrite of the SCCS command of the same name, and behavior may
       not be identical.
  
  macOS 26.4                     December 14, 2006                    macOS 26.4