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Comment by jamesfmilne | Hacker News Reader

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jamesfmilne

I bet the MCRN Rocinante’s computers are running OpenBSD.

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To be pedantic, it was only the MCRN Tachi. "Now" it's just the Rocinante.

It's legitimate salvage!

It has a signed plaque and everything!

Given how easy the Rocinante can be hacked to explode or arbitrary change transponder codes, I'm not sure if it's good advertisement for OpenBSD.

Like OpenBSD, it’s user friendly, but it’s particular about who it’s friends are.

to extend that to its logical conclusion, if you have full access to the hardware, many things are possible. so you've stolen a desktop computer and it has unbreakable full disk encryption, but you don't care about the data, you just want to use the computer? remove the M.2 NVME SSD and replace it with your own, install a new operating system.

or boot the thing from a dban ISO and wipe the SSD, re-use it.

Some in-show evidence that there may not be much variety in computing platforms is that several screens we see in different ships have the same graphical elements but have been localised to english and lang belta respectively.

Judging from our past several decades of network effects, I'd guess earth-origin operating systems will still dominate, with perhaps a long tail of poorly-adopted alternatives (as with, on the language side, BELTABOL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTGjy9KeW4cqagXHlVDwKmcZ1mE... ).

Wouldn't something like Secure Boot help against that though?

without going into too much spoiler like detail, at one point a martian marine who presumably has admin access over the ship, gives an order to the ship to give the equivalent of root to everyone on board. presumably this would be like copying a dm-crypt/LUKS secret key or similar.

It's the only OS the protomolecule couldn't breach.

Doors and corners...

So, what you're saying is that 2307 is going to be the year of the OpenBSD Desktop? (on Mars at least, the Earthers probably use NetBSD and the Belters FreeBSD).

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