Another Mole Bites The Dust, sort of

Cannot recall what triggered this, earlier I had heard a radio comment that "Nothing ever dies on the internet", especially earlier versions of your current Self that keep popping up later in life. Anyway I tried googling myself during an idle moment and was taken quite by surprise by a new entry in the search results.

Sometime in March 2019 the National Security Agency (NSA) security moles decided to migrate one of their network reverse engineering tracker applications from their hidden cloisters into the open internet, for hosting at the GitHub platform.

Now GitHub is an interesting version of Open Source practice. One should know that all open and free portal services out there have a Paywall edge, you only need to look a little carefully to find it and not fall into it by accident. Of course I should also add that some others should jump in gladly if passing through that paywall door serves better than any other alternatives available. But with GitHub, just browse for their contributing author regret disputes around unintended and unexpected leaks of private IP into the public domain.

Getting back to my gist, the NSA reverse engineering tracker goes by the alluring Hindustani name" GHIDRA". And what was the unexpected connection to me, I wondered? So I followed the search link and found a Java Compiler Compiler (JavaCC) example grammar for the C and C++ computer language preprocess translators that I had contributed back in 1999, to the now defunct Sun Microsystems offshoot Metamata, also now defunct.

I remember then, when I decided to post my 'CPP.Preprocessor' example grammar which is text formatted into a .jj file (CPP.jj), I cleaned up my working grammar file and placed a copyright header request just as University of California (Berkeley) does in their Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) heading copyright notices, stating that the receiver may do as they wish with it except excise the notice itself.

So there it was, in the GHIDRA source repository, my CPP.jj grammar file, buried from twenty years before at NSA's deep cover mole yard. Now before we get carried away, let me assert now that my contribution to the Metamata tutorial war chest was a miniscule bit that was mostly ignored by the Metamata team; Java does not even support processing of Macro statements, but there was a gap whereby there were sample grammars for C and Cplusplus that Metamata posted in their tutorial samples but excluded the 'CPP' pre-processor, and all I did was to add one. I also remember that they eventually threw it out of their Examples package at JavaCC version 2.2 or thereabouts for being a travesty to Computer Science grammar purity.

During its brief glory in the heyday of Metamata distribution I fielded CPP.jj queries from as far away as Latin America on the workings of my CPP.jj file against real machine address definitions. I eventually provided them generic advise to simply run their native machine-aware compilers with the -E command line option to emit its pre-process outputs and avoid using my barren CPP.jj sample in a real world machine code compilation task. I should also note that it is perhaps the parsing of UNIX shell-like command line options into the CPP.jj output into Java code that I used in the sample that could have been the item of specific interest to the GHIDRA folks, rather than any CPP.Preprocessor grammar feature.

I should add here for historical context, that Sriram who I mentioned in the CPP.jj file, was the lead at Metamata, and the brains behind JavaCC and was, or should I say is, a pre-eminent example of the English language human brain drain from India to USA. And it does not stop there with migrant labour. The business founder of Sun Micro-systems was one young "Vinod Khosla", a Stanford MBA also hailing from India's fertile technological education nursery (IIT, I think), together with American mid-westerner MBA, also at Stanford, named "Scott McNealy", as its founding CEO.

I should also add that the "SUN" in Sun Micro-systems stood for Stanford University Network, where a young German PhD candidate "Andy Bechtolsheim" built as part of his thesis under Vaughan Pratt, a fully functional re-entrant hardware system to support multi tasking and multi-user computing built from off-the-shelf Integrated Circuit components. Finally the last founding member of the Sun Micro team was one "Bill Joy", a post graduate student at Berkeley next door to Stanford.

Bill Joy was the one who was able to help modernize Ken Thompson's AT&T UNIX(R) Kernel to also interact with screen-based virtual terminals and not just teletype (TTY) terminals. Thompson had gone to Berkeley with his UNIX Kernel source code for a one year sabbatical from Bell Labs, and Bill Joy's who was there then in person represents the beginning and end of what BSD means in the Unix world. But his Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was part of his contribution to inter-university resource sharing of his Pascal Compiler developed in conjunction with his Masters degree research. Well, the Sun Team at Stanford decided they could not launch Sun without Bill Joy, and Vinod led the nascent delegation to Berkeley.

The rest, as they say is history, and for them as Sun Computers, all they had to do is to mass produce Andy's mother board and bulk purchase components for assembly to launch the new era of serious micro-computing using Bill Joy's BSD OS. Pratt did not feature much in the external skirmishes of Sun, but is recognized as its conceptor since he is recognized within Stanford as the mind behind the SUN workstation project there. I first ran into Sun computers at my last Alma mater City, University of London where the university CS department bought a load of them, but with the motive of also helping MG White Chapel, a Sun clone get global exposure.

I close with the footnote that Scott's successors made major IP gaffes when they let the Google hoards just use their Java without license restrictions (just don't say its Java! in the name, as you use it). So Android forked a weird DEX emulation layer to obscure the real Java beneath, which, thanks to Larry Ellison at Oracle, (who bought Sun Micro systems at its commercial demise), that layer is now exposed in the courts of law.

So whither hence? The turning of proprietary and forensic GHIDRA out of the ordinance domain to near-public domain is rather interesting. The few comments I gleaned around GitHub was that NSA has turned lame, handing ordinance to their professed adversaries, Joe Public et al.

The March 2019 outing of NSA's GHIDRA coincides with the loud noises the US White House has made against one specific company that has been highly successful commercially, mainly because it does not only do communication Endpoints (telephones), not just Switches, nor Servers, not just the Interlinks, but every net-end thing! Its the peacock branded Huawei. And their complaint, is that Huawei will be in a position to spy on every one and internet of things on the planet if their citizens were not prevented from purchasing Huawei's 5G routers, Communication switches, SLAMS (terrestrial inter-carrier switches), Base stations, Transmitters, Cell phone handsets and whatever else, and because the 5G spec has essentially sent GHIDRA and its ilk to the graveyard.

But what has been most enlightening to me is the list of who Huawei detractors are and who is leading their charge? The USA, off course! France - the Franco bites Lingua bait just like Anglo does theirs, and then there's Australia who were publicly cited bemoaning the loss of Anglo world intellectual leadership to Hun mandarins in the communications sphere.

Perhaps what the Trumpists need to understand is that intellectual breeding is also selective in the evolutionary sense, and if one cared to look at the composition of the American University's intellectual breeding stock, it is sustained by Hun intellectual plasma. My own University of Illinois Chicago Alma mater even publicized about a year ago, a financial Hedge instrument based on revenue projection from enrollment fees from Mainland China students; and they number in the thousands, and even tens or hundreds of across all the country's universities. That would be another wall to invoke on top of the dead NAFTA one.

Historical times have changed; what wall was then built as buffer against outsiders is now the link to the rest of the world, for the next highway bridge over land, sea and even space!