This week, some of the brightest subject matter experts from across the U.S. and beyond gathered virtually to talk about women in cybersecurity, recognizing that the internet is filled with both opportunities and risks, and that it’s up to all of us to defend, protect and secure critical internet infrastructure.
(more…)
vBSDcon, hosted by Verisign, brought more than 100 attendees from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) community together for a series of plenary talks, educational sessions and networking opportunities earlier this month.
“This biennial conference has been particularly special to us because of the grassroots effort within Verisign to be sure we do our part to help advance BSD,” said Verisign CTO Burt Kaliski.
Verisign is excited to announce that we are hosting the second vBSDcon event, taking place Sept. 11-13, 2015, at the Sheraton hotel in Reston, Va. We welcome all members of the various Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) communities, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and others, to join us for a series of plenary talks, Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussions, educational sessions and best practice conversations, as well as the opportunity to network with one another in person.
Fascinating tour of C compiler evolution by David Chisnall http://vrsn.cc/1dUb5rY @Verisign‘s #vBSDcon. Compatible with DOS or VAX?
— Burt Kaliski Jr. (@modulomathy) October 26, 2013
I began my journey into computer science as a high school freshman coding on a TI-59 calculator. Later in my high school years, I wrote computer chess games on a PDP-11/34 minicomputer in BASIC and, for speed, in assembly language. I might have contributed inadvertently to the Y2K problem with some FORTRAN and COBOL programs I wrote in the early 1980s. In college, I learned LISP and CLU on a MULTICS operating system, and had a part-time job where I programmed on a VAX-11/750. But eventually I did get around to coding in C on a Unix box.
So this is a little more information than 140 characters would allow, which may explain why I found David Chisnall’s opening talk at the recent vBSDcon so fascinating. DOS and VAX are to computer professionals what the classics are to the liberal arts: our Iliad and Odyssey. And C and Unix, in their various forms, are the living languages that preserve the connection to the early days – the contemporary variants of Koine Greek. The art of building C compilers as well as operating systems continues to advance skillfully.
“There never were in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity”
–Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne (1533–1592)
Diversity is a central design principle of the Domain Name System. With respect to the DNS root, it’s the reason that there are 13 separately managed root servers with 12 independent operators. It’s the reason Verisign operates the two root servers we’re responsible for – the A and J roots – as well as other name servers – at multiple locations around the world. It’s also the reason that within these locations operated by Verisign, multiple physical servers handle the incoming traffic. And it’s the reason that among these multiple servers, we use multiple hardware and software platforms, as well as multiple network providers.
In other words, diversity is one reason the DNS industry in general, and Verisign in particular, doesn’t do everything the same way and in the same place.