Re: Rewriting Java

["Andrew N. Nishigaya" <anishi@example.com>]

On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> I hope to God that Sun is more than a "little bit uptight" about
> security.

They sure are.  They understand the importance of this to gain wide 
spread use and popularity.  Java meets a great many needs, and is 
positioned to redefine the net and the use of the net.  With the Corba 
and other distributed object systems coming into popularity, the 
potentials are amazing (IMHO) :-)

> enhancement.  Did you look carefully at the security implications of
> your changes?  Are you sure that you didn't accidentally disable some
> of the other security features in the process of weakening the one
> that Sun is "excessively paranoid" about?

Our use of the hacked portions of Java are localized to the application 
we developed for NTT Internet.  So the security issues are not really 
that critical.  We  did not rewrite the java interpreter because normal 
Netscape and Appletviewer must be able to use it, but we rewrote some of 
the stock Sun classes to "enhance" the loading of remote objects -- in 
this case from the NTT Internet server.  The black magic involved is a 
little beyond me, as one of our brilliant wizards worked the magic.

> I don't see anything wrong with doing this in principle, by the way.
> I'm very much in favor of people making the system work to their own
> specs.  But if such hacked versions become common currency, I can see
> lots of not-so-hackerish newbies losing their TurboTax files to
> crackers (or the IRS, which is worse :-).  Just as long as you label
> your home-brew Java "here be dragons (maybe)".

We only distribute compiled binaries (java byte code), so there is very
little chance of the casual hacker reverse engineering what we did and
using it elsewhere.  If they could do that, they should have enough brain
power to recreate what we did on their own.  :-)


-- nori

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