If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a tape labelled ...

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

The Rust implementation sudo-rs now shows asterisks by default when typing passwords. A break with long Unix tradition.

The Unix operating system is one of computing's most significant technologies, providing the framework that the familiar Linux and Mac OS X operating systems were developed on. Unix can be a viable ...

The “What’s the difference between UNIX and Linux?” question can be answered similar to the analogy section that many of us had to complete on the SAT test; UNIX is to DOS as Linux is to Windows. That ...

Early Sunday morning in Greenwich, England, the clock that keeps Universal Time will strike 01:46:40 -- the 40th second of the 46th minute in the second hour of Sept. 9, 2001. That instant will be an ...

Most breaches don’t start with malware or zero-day exploits. They start with a login.  An attacker gets hold of a password, maybe through phishing, reuse, or a leaked credential dump. They test it ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

COMMENTARY--Whoever said the first casualty of war is truth would be surprised to find that apothegm quoted in a dispute between systems vendors. But it is an apt description of current events. The ...

Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest.