It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

For the record, I just paid (too little too late) a license for Reddit Is Fun (RIF).

If Reddit goes through with their plan, I will delete RIF from my phone and never go on Reddit again, which is probably just as well, since it is a huge waste of time.

They [OpenBSD] have a track record. A lot of people who work in computer security look up to them.

Unlike you, random /. user named "polotheclown".

And you think the NSA is interested in helping YOU secure YOUR Windows installation?

Oh, you swet summer child...

I play a dangerous hacker on TV, but that's about it.

In production, pretty much anything that has to run reliably and without a hitch for years.

Firewalls, routers, DNS server, Email server, all of these running CARP to cluster these functions and prevent service interruption. SSH boxes as well

On OpenBSD, you don't have 'apt', you have 'pkg_add' for applications (pkg_add -i vim to install vim, for instance) 'syspatch' to apply security patches and 'sysupgrade' to upgrade from one version to the next. I have just used sysupgrade to upgrade machines from 7.2 to 7.3 - super smooth.

Everything that you do with OpenBSD, you can do with Linux, including having a hardened security installation - it just comes 'out of the box' with all the security bells and whistles, and the whole system is of a very high quality, very well put together, very well documented. Try it, you may like it.

Same here - 1st OpenBSD machine updated from 7.2 to 7.3, without a hitch and without any issue. Beautiful OS, through and through, way more reliable than any Linux out there.

This. 1000 times this. Use OpenSSH? You are using something that is part of a great OS, named OpenBSD.

Yeah, sure, and you are a security expert.

Let me put it this way: if you take a look at some mailing lists like OSS, where people discuss things they actually know, you will note OpenBSD is one of the OS they go back to constantly.

And the refrain is: "Oh yeah, OpenBSD disabled this, or corrected this, or implemented this 3 years ago".

Maybe you don't like OpenBSD programmers or BDFL for their abrasive personalities, but they are way ahead of Linux in many ways.

I am sure you a great security expert, just like 99% of people on /.

Slackware has never enabled CONFIG_SMB_SERVER in any kernel.

Thus spake the master programmer:
                "Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to
                be maintained."
                                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Clearly it's Large Hadron Colliders all the way down.