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> There's a whole world of solid, reliable, but unbelievably boring "institutional computing" out there that hackers usually don't touch because it's... well... boring.

I can imagine if the salaries would be sufficiently (i.e. very) high and the complete culture would not be openly hostile towards the values of the hacker culture, I can easily imagine that hackers would be willing to touch it.




(1) These systems were built from the ground up with security in mind.

(2) Mainframes are usually buried deep within an organisation behind many firewalls.

I would love to see a z/OS system at a Defcon conference. After all Windows and MacOS seem too easy these days.

Having said that, I found this... "Follow me on a journey where we p0wn one of the most secure platforms on earth." Quite a cool presentation (https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2025/DEF%20CON%2025%20pre...) with a good mainframe intro.

IBM zEC13 technical specs: • 10 TB of RAM • 141 processors,5 GHz • Dedicated processors for JAVA, XML and UNIX • Cryptographic chips...


But would you want hackers to touch it?




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