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Top 10 List of Week 02

  1. The C Language (AKA Medieval Torture)
    The C Language is one of the most widely used programming languages. It is considered a bridge between high level languages and lower level languages, as it remains relatively user-friendly and readable compared to machine language, yet provides programmers with reasonably powerful low-level access over the machine. The C language was designed as a successor to the B programming language, and is an imperative procedural language, which means that it lacks the object-oriented features we’ve come to recognize in higher level object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, and Python.

  2. Security in Operating Systems
    Security is a measure of confidence that the integrity of a system and its data will be preserved. This means that how we determine Security in operating systems is by measuring how well said system protects its hardware and software resources such as the CPU, Memory, Storage, etc. This is done via authorization and blocking off parts of the system that should only be accessed by certain processes or by superuser permissions.

  3. What is Privacy?
    Privacy can have various meanings and take on a myriad of forms, however one of the definitions of privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or their information such that they are able to choose to reveal themselves selectively, and not be monitored without express permission. In the field of computers, we should keep in mind to keep various things private, such as our personal information (obviously), account passwords, and other such data that could otherwise be used for malicious purposes.

  4. What We Should Secure Ourselves Against
    There are many malicious individuals that can pose a threat to our systems and data. These attacks can take on many forms and attack via various means. An example of such attacks is ransomware, in which our system is breached and our data gets encrypted, then we may be forced to send payment to the attacker in order to gain access to our data.

  5. The Morris Worm
    The Morris worm was one of the first ever computer worms that infected systems via the internet. It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, whom the virus was named after. Its creator claimed that the worm was originally written not to cause damage, rather to highlight certain security flaws within computer systems. However, a critical error caused the worm to spread through around 6000 UNIX machines. One of the people who helped fight the worm remarked that this showed the danger of monoculture in computer systems, as if all the systems on ARPANET ran on Berkeley UNIX, the worm could have disabled all fifty thousand of them. Now, the floppy disc containing the source code for the worm is stored in the Computer History Museum.

  6. Encryption
    Encryption is the act of encoding information. This is done by processing said information and scrambling it such that it can only be deciphered by obtaining the encryption key that was generated during the process. Modern encryption schemes make use of the concepts of public-key and symmetric-key. This ensures security, as modern computers are inefficient for brute-force cracking methods.

  7. User Authentication
    Authentication is the act of proving one’s authority over a certain action. In operating systems, this is usually done in order to secure certain tasks or to access certain parts or files in a system. There are many ways to authenticate a user in this day and age, such as passwords, biometrics, etc. Someone implementing an authentication system may also choose to implement multi-factor authentication, which utilizes multiple authentication factors (for example, something you have such as a bank card, know such as a PIN, or are such as your mother’s maiden name).

  8. Access Matrix
    An Access Matrix is a security model of the protection state in a computer system. This matrix defines the right of each process within the domain with respect to each object. This type of matrix is useful as it shows us which process has what rights so that we can get a better understanding of the rights of each process in our system.

  9. Checklist 02
    Read OSC10 Chapter 16 (OK) and Chapter 17 (OK)
    Generated my own GnuPG Key Pair (OK)
    Imported the operatingsytems@vlsm.org Public Key (OK)
    Exported my public key (OK)
    Ranked 3/10 of my neighbors (OK)
    Updated top 10 list (OK)
    Written a simple bash script (OK)
    Made SHA256SUM and signed it (OK)

  10. What else did I do?
    I moved to Manjaro! This started as a spontaneous decision as I didn’t have an image of Windows 10 lying around to install onto my new computer (a lend-me-down from the old family computer) so I decided to install Manjaro Linux (again, after already trying it once before). I thought it might be an opportunity to better understand operating systems, especially that of GNU/LINUX. (plus i was getting bored of win10)