Radix Fidem Blog

The one thing Thad liked most was how they had managed to port almost every GUI application over to a TUI. Thus, while losing some of the buttons and toolbars, the backend was the same for web browser, office suite, text editor, integrated system utilities — everything he needed with far fewer distractions. Best of all, it was lightening fast on older hardware.
Excerpt from the Bread OS System Administrator’s Guide:

Bread OS is actually the underlying system, and Butter is the graphical user interface (GUI). Butter is little more than an advanced framebuffer display. For graphical and video work, choose some other operating system, as Butter engages very little of the 3D acceleration capabilities on most graphics chipsets. The purpose is to enable the use of low cost generic hardware.
There is little advantage in having a GUI on most server configurations. For this reason, the Toast server OS defaults to a Textual User Interface (TUI) called Jam. Jam will can run at the default pixel resolution for almost every chipset and screen display combination. It is fully mouseable, and works pretty much the same as a GUI. Yes, you can have your Bread or Toast with either Butter or Jam, or both.

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During his rather short stay in prison, Pete Jimmerson lost track of his nemesis. Upon release, he moved all his hardware to collocate with the server farm Brandon purchased from a failing ISP. This became the location of his physical office, too. He left two machines as before, one each NetBSD and CentOS, as bait. The other two were converted to Toast, but kept their old naming scheme for DNS.
Eventually the shadowy cracker found him again. It was about the time he was promoted to project manager, working directly with Brandon on a daily basis. Jennifer Runston retired and tapped him as her replacement. His passionate drive for Bread OS was a symptom of his still festering resentment. While Brandon mentioned he saw a haunting shadow in Pete’s eyes, he was satisfied the latter did not let it interfere with his loyalty. The results were better than even Brandon had envisioned, and Peter was frankly excited at the prospect of facing his enemy with much better weapons.
Pete had coded his two Toast servers to identify themselves, along with the standard networking ID protocols, simply as “I’m Toast!” Because access from outside the machine was based on explicit white listing, any unauthorized connection attempt would add to the end of any error codes: “No crackers, thank you. I like my Toast!” Aside from several notices in his logs of deflected attempts, the cracker seemed to have given up rather quickly on those two boxes.
Once the OS reached the release stage, Pete had more time for searching the old traces, but not much. He and Brandon made the trade show circuit, something Pete dreaded. His predecessor, even with her silver hair, was the next thing to a geek’s showgirl, quite charming. Peter was almost coherent in front of a live audience, though he did okay just chatting in the booth.
Every time they came back, his logs were silent for just awhile. He had almost given up when his firewall logs showed what he had hoped, that the cracker couldn’t get into his Toast boxes. Taking the bait with the other two, Pete offered the same resistance he had in the past, in cold calculation of pretending to have learned nothing. Quite the contrary, he had learned far more than any college courses could teach him during the forced period of concentration, earning respect and trust from the project leadership from his workstation in the prison. When in the office, he kept the same schedule he had then, meaning he paid no attention to meat space beyond the necessities of his job and his flesh.
This time the cracker was working on totally different ends. While still taunting Pete as before, including obscene personal references even to his prison stay, there was oddly no mention of the Bread Project. The intruder was obviously setting up a different operation than the petty crimes of the past. Pete’s logs showed the cracker always waited until his machines were idle. There would be quick penetrations through some means Pete did not yet understand, some code copied in, compiled, tested in some way, copied out, then deleted from his drive. It was all assembler code, and only once did Peter catch a glimpse, and did a quick screen capture before it was already done and gone. So far as he could tell from the few lines of code, it had something to do with manipulating the file system. Was that how his enemy kept getting in, a flaw in the file system calls or driver? Pete guessed this was something rather big and nasty brewing.
While the cracker left his taunting messages recorded in the logs as kernel message traffic, they also left just enough traces for Peter to discover at least one thing he expected: The traffic was coming through Tor. While he knew some people who might help him just a little with that, he decided he might get better results through one of the users. He had kept Thad Eyrie at arm’s length until now, but decided it was time to maybe make a deal.

For most of that week, Thad poked and prodded Bread OS. There was in the documentation a notice more popular applications would be ported eventually, but the basic set of workstation programs was almost complete. The desktop display was not really that different from old Windows 98, quite plain and simple. There were no toys, just tools most people used for office type work, plus a terminal emulator with many of the same tools you would expect for Unix. In other words, perfect.
He was a little angry with himself for not saving the links from the Electronic Runestones blog, but was glad to find a link to the author. It turned out the title was a play on the her name: Jennifer Runston. The name sounded familiar. He compose an email describing the nature of his project and what he discovered. He was hoping for a few more details so he could write a review. A few minutes after he sent it, the associations for her name finally surfaced in his mind.
Jennifer Runston was the belle of the ball for the older generation, a rare glamorous geek girl. It didn’t matter whom or what she represented at the various technology trade shows, with Jennifer on your PR team you never needed to hire booth babes. Best of all, she could write elegant code herself, so she could chatter with anyone. He never had a chance to make those shows while he was in the Air Force, and when he got out, things had changed. She got married, had a couple of kids and faded into the background. Thad remembered she was a few years older than he, so that meant she had to be over 60 now.
Later that day he got a reply. She thanked him for identifying another clean up task for her retirement. Retirement? She no longer worked for Brandon Breeze — another name he seemed to recall — and had been succeeded by a Peter Jimmerson. She had no comment on Bread OS, but would try to put him in touch with someone on the project. She warned him they had no interest in typical promotions, but were planning to market this in the corporate back channels. She didn’t say, but he assumed this had to do with avoiding public fights with some of the established corporate software companies.
After thinking it over, he decided it would be worth it simply to beg for a chance to keep using it himself. But regardless of their plans to slip in the backdoor of small business and local government agencies, he knew at least one old friend would really want to hear about this — Mantis Akibe.
Mantis was an old buddy from Air Force Basic Training. Thad was already in his mid-twenties, and Manny was just a kid out of high school. He came from a middle class black family, the fifth son who decided not to be a doctor or lawyer. They made fast friends during the training cycle, both having an interest in computers. After tech school, the natural course of things separated them, but they had remained in touch. Mantis completed his first term of service and switched to the Army on his next enlistment. When Thad decided he’d had enough after fifteen years, Mantis had just been promoted to Warrant Officer and was working in information management. He had picked up his degree while in uniform.
Thad knew Mantis was also working with the NSA. He was hardly permitted to discuss things, but had more than once offered Thad what amounted to a warning their communications would always be monitored. Thad was counting on that when he sent off an email describing Bread OS and how it seemed to address their shared frustrations with years of chasing Open Source.
From the Bread Project, Thad received permission to keep the system updated and to read, but not participate in, the email discussion lists. That was more than he had been hoping, so he gladly accepted their requirement he not promote the project in the typical advocacy-fanboy fashion. He did warn them he would be sharing with military technicians, to which they seemed indifferent. Over the next year, Thad became one of a handful of outsiders who actually qualified as a serious power user of Bread OS. He even played with Toast a good bit, and shared notes with his friend, Mantis, who seemed genuinely interested.