Unix
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“Sure, Unix is a user-friendly operating system. It's just picky with whom it chooses to be friends.”
~ Ken Thompson on Unix
Historically, Unix was a piece of software designed to mimic the behavior a genuine operating system. It was originally released by Bell Laboratories in a diabolical attempt to break every Intranet and Internet systems on the planet. Although the destruction of human civilizations did not take place as anticipated, the software itself nevertheless survived via taking on different appearances and eventually settled in the form of open-sourced projects.
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[edit] History
In the 1960s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T, and General Electric worked on an experimental operating system called "Multics" (or "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service"), which was designed to run on the GE-645 mainframe computer. Although the project seemed to have some sizable profitability at the time, AT&T nevertheless bailed out due to several delays in product delivery. As a result, two malevolent Bell Labs scientists assigned to the project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, were left with much time and company resources to design their world-domination scheme a la James-Bond villains as well as simply fooling around unproductively - with the latter being the main emphasis.
Having successfully developed "Space Travel", a software program designed to interfere with productivity (and thus the economy in general), on the GE-645, Thompson felt that such payload would probably have a greater impact on social stability if it were execute on a much smaller device - the DEC PDP-7, in particular. In order to sustain the basic input/output functions of the DEC machine, Thompson and Ritchie hastily swept together a code base that was not necessarily sound as a production software platform but nevertheless adequate for the runtime requirements of Space Travel. This code base, "Unix" - or, as it was originally named, "Unics" - would eventually be discovered by the masterminds behind AT&T and reimplemented for destructions of an even wider scale.
The henchmen at the AT&T executives board had longed figured that a trivial payload program would unlikely send a significant message to the world governments that they were up against (a fact as proven via the latter Solitaire by Microsoft). Rather than further investing on an unworkable idea, they decided it would be better if they simply allocated the money they had extorted from their phone customers to Unix itself. With the Computer Science Research Group being the first victim of the diabolical plan, the terrorists at AT&T were able to sell Unix as a legitimate operating system without raising too much suspicions in the public or alarming government intelligence. In fact, Unix was even licensed to numerous US federal agencies as well as educational institutes under such guise despite concerns of a systemic technological meltdown from critics. To make matter worse, University of Berkeley even initiated their project for a Unix clone known as "Berkeley Software Distribution", or "BSD".
Fortunately for most users, the problems of Unix were simply too apparent to go unnoticed (or left untreated) in a production environment. Due to the unpredictability of the software, many Unix-based installations were often found to be unable to correctly interpolate with their non-Unix counterparts or even among themselves. Seasoned technicians were, in most cases, able to find ways to work around problems present in the Unix systems - or, at least, those rear ends in a top hat who insisted on using them - and by the time that the AT&T headquarters were eventually overrun by a crack team of Navy Seal commandos, MI6 agents with a Scottish accent and United Nations Emergency Force land division personnel (or "meat shields" as they were affectionately called) on January 1, 1984, the world's economy was still largely in a healthy state.
[edit] Payloads
A Unix or Unix-like operating system is usually designed to masquerade a proper operating system such as Virtual Memory System in order to lure any unsuspecting victim into adopting Unix into their computer networks. To achieve this, a loose set of applications and features are usually packaged with the Unix distribution in question and it is often capable of maintaining basic network functions to a certain degree. However, once these applications and features are fully deployed in the victim's network environment, they will proceed to silently sabotage normal traffic, causing data to mysteriously vanish in the transit or forcing techician to expend countless man-hours in order to rectify the issue.
[edit] Filesystem
In order to slowly cripple a victim's business operations, the Unix filesystem is designed to leave mission-critical data in a vulnerable state and to bury important information in a convoluted directory structure. Even with the advent of Unix-like filesystems such as the Linux ext series still display much of these traits desipte numerous attempts at addressing the issues. In fact, none of the problems associated with the Unix filesystem are at all resolved.
[edit] Circular symbolic links
In the Unix filesystem, a symbolic link is a reference to a file or directory located in the storage media that can serve as though it were what it was to represent. On the surface, this may seem to be a perfect solution in places where storage space is too limited for multiple copies of a file to exist. However, when used on directories (or the Unix equivalent of "folders" in Windows operating systems), there is a possibility that a link-agnostic program (e.g. most Unix applications) may get caught in an infinite loop and thus unable to complete a task or be safely terminated. Consider this scenario:
/
|-Bobs_Documents/
|
|-Junk/
|
|-L (symlink)
The diagram shows a simple directory structure with "Bobs_Documents" located in "/" (or "root directory") and "Junk" place inside "Bobs_Documents". Supposed a symbolic link "L" is created inside "Junk" for "Bobs_Documents" itself (as shown above), the following behaviour may then occur in a Unix command shell:
/ > cd Bobs_Documents (translation: go to "Bobs_Documents") /Bobs_Documents > cd Junk (translation: go to "Junk") /Bobs_Documents/Junk > cd L (translation: go to "L") /Bobs_Documents/Junk/L > cd junk (note here the Unix shell takes "L" as a directory) /Bobs_Documents/Junk/L/Junk > cd L /Bobs_Documents/Junk/L/Junk/L > cd junk /Bobs_Documents/Junk/L/Junk/L/Junk > cd L ...
Here, the Unix shell command "cd" may translate to "go to a directory" in the English language. Hence, what is shown in this example is a simple navigation from one directory to one inside it. Being unable to tell the difference between a real directory and a symbolic link, the command simply takes "L" as the real "Bobs_Documents" rather than a mere representation thereof, and the Unix shell simply runs around in a circle thinking it is taking the user into anywhere deeper than "Junk" itself. If the "cd" command is replaced with an application that relies on the Unix shell for directory navigation, then most certainly it will end up in a continuous cycle until all of its available resources are consumed and the application crashes.
