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Rationale:

I was remembered via https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/chaindrop-npm-worm-analysis/ (linked from https://anarc.at/blog/2026-08-18-people-vs-ai-overlords/) of the risk of downloading untrusted packages in a dev environment. If you read the blog post above you will see that it is way to easy do have a random npm, or even python package in a dev environment scavenge your long running credentials from your workstation, either on disk, or reading from memory !

I will thus move to the following set up:

• things running directly in my workstation will require either to come from a trusted source (Debian package that is) or run in a sandboxed infrastructure (Podman rootless is the best thing here, followed by Flatpaks)
• everything else, will run in a Libvirt VM based on Debian cloud images. For me it will be mostly in the beginning the VSCodium editor, with its myriad of extensions.

I am aware of whole blown solutions like QubeOS however I don’t indent to reinstall the whole OS, and QubeOS does not run on ARM64 which is one of the environment I am using.

I will try to document this setup in two blog posts, one about the VM creation using Debian Cloud Images, the second one about running a graphical env in the VM with some filesystem passthrough. Stay tuned !

I first heard of Plan 9 from my friend Vajra in 1999 or so, as we were distro-hopping on early Linux distributions and trying to find our way. Vajra is now a Nebula Award-winning science fiction author - have a look at his work. We had just been through Tom's Root Boot, a UNIX-like operating system crammed into a single floppy, and through it discovered a whole new world outside of DOS 6.22. Combing through old UNIX manuals, we went in search of the perfect OS, through Slackware, Caldera, TurboLinux, SUSE and Red Hat. I finally settled on Debian, which lived up to everything I stood for.

Plan 9 was distinct. It came out of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, built by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with Dennis Ritchie heading the department. The name is a joke at their own expense, borrowed from Ed Wood's 1959 Plan 9 from Outer Space, routinely nominated as the worst film ever made. Thompson and Ritchie had, of course, built the original UNIX; it almost seemed as if they were building a new OS from the lessons learnt from building it - which was in turn built on the lessons from Multics. I remember the awe I felt playing around with Plan 9, and I've not been able to replicate it since.

Plan 9 was different in a couple of fundamental ways: per-process namespaces, and a protocol that abstracted locality of resources to processes. As a consequence of these core primitives, the OS surface area was distinctly small. The entire system from the core kernel, to the system call interface, to the compiler, linker and shell was reduced to a form small enough that a single developer could hold it in their head. Lessons from the implementation of UNIX helped the designers make the system leaner, and in Ken Thompson's words, it's the "best operating system out except that it doesn't have the apps that everybody demands" [1].

It also took the concept of "everything is a file" in UNIX to a whole new level. The network stack is a filesystem (/net), processes are files, the display is a file (/dev/draw). Because every resource speaks 9P and every process has its own namespace, you can mount another machine's /net into your namespace and your program makes network calls through that machine's stack without knowing or caring. No sockets API, no RPC layer, just ordinary file system operations through a simple system call interface.

Some would say that OS research is dead, and that backwards-compatibility and POSIX killed it. Rob Pike himself argued as much in his 2000 talk, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" - but we didn't care at the time. There was so much happening that we didn't have time to take it all in. And then Linux happened, and Software Freedom became a focal point (more on that in a later post).

In the summer of 2020, with the world deep in Covid lockdowns, I decided to build a toy operating system, just to try my hand at the the thing that I had always wanted to do. I spent three feverish months working on Odyssey and, looking back, it is perhaps the most fun I have ever had. I would not dare compare it to the magnum opus that is Plan 9, but it gave me perspective: how hard it is to build an OS from scratch, and above all, how fun it is to build an OS from scratch, and why the original creators kept coming back to the same problem. The highlight of those three months was booting the OS and watching it render "The Great Wave off Kanagawa". Nothing in my professional achievements to date captures what that meant to me.

Odyssey displaying "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa"

Decades on from the first time I booted Plan 9, I look back with nothing but awe and respect for the creators of this little operating system and marvel at the foresight that went into it. While many readers will not have heard of Plan 9, they have almost certainly worked with the ideas that came from it: 9P (if you ever used the Windows Subsystem for Linux), UTF-8 (if you ever used any modern operating system), per-process namespaces (if you've ever run a container), Go (whose assembler still uses Plan 9 syntax).

Plan 9 still lives on in 9front, a community-maintained fork. Separately, Yoann Padioleau [2] has produced a set of annotated books at principia-softwarica.org, presenting the Plan 9 source in the spirit of Donald Knuth's literate programming - an admirable effort to introduce new readers to the art of operating systems engineering.

Pike thought systems research had become irrelevant, and Thompson thought Plan 9 would never "make it" [1]. Both were right about the industry, but may have been pessimistic about the impact. The system lost as a product but won as a set of ideas, assimilated one at a time by modern operating systems. Success is not always measured by popularity. The mark that Plan 9 left behind is greater than what's reflected in its current user base.

To me, Plan 9 will always be the OS that punched above its weight class, the little OS that could.

References

[1] Ken Thompson Interview, March 6, 2024

[2] Yoann Padioleau — Principia Softwarica, May 9, 2026

Twenty-five years ago, I made my first donation to an open source project and purchased a CD with an operating system as downloading a few hundred megabytes over a 14.4kbps dial-up wasn't very fun. It was a project I believed in, and a community that was fighting an impassioned campaign to assert access to strong cryptography for everyone, no matter where they were.

The CD and a t-shirt arrived a few weeks later to my home in Sri Lanka, with OpenBSD 3.0. The t-shirt featured the iconic puffer fish on the front. On the back, in small type running from the shoulders down, was the complete source code of OpenBSD's Blowfish implementation, written in Germany. Written in the United States, it would have been classified as a weapon.

By the time it reached me, the fight was over, and the cryptographers had won. What I held in my hand then was a symbol of a protest for access to strong cryptography and against export restrictions that did more harm than good. Strong crypto was already available abroad, so the controls only bound American vendors and their overseas customers.

Today the reflex is back. The fears have changed. The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do. The lever governments reach for is the same: restricting who gets access and who doesn't. In June, the US Commerce Department told one American AI lab it would need a license before letting any foreign national touch its newest models, including the lab's own non-citizen employees sitting in California. It's the same doctrine that made showing cryptographic source to a foreign national an export, whether it was in a lab, in a classroom, or on your t-shirt.

Not all of the worry is theatre. Earlier this month OpenAI disclosed that its own models, with safety systems deliberately disabled, escaped containment by finding a zero-day in a package proxy and reached production infrastructure at Hugging Face, exploiting additional zero-days along the way. Consequently, when Hugging Face's responders tried to reconstruct the attack, the commercial models they reached for refused the work as it tripped the safety guardrails. They finished the investigation on GLM 5.2, a Chinese open-weight model, running on their own hardware. A determined attacker is not bound by usage policies. The defenders are. Restrictions written for safety are making defenders less safe.

In the nineties, the rest of the world got 40-bit (later 56-bit) encryption while the Americans got 128, and it made no difference to anyone who was determined. The controls bound the law-abiding and nobody else. That is the asymmetry. The determined will have the frontier. The rest of us are asked to go without, and told it is for our safety.

The OpenBSD team didn't work around the export controls. They arranged the project so that the controls couldn't reach it. Theo de Raadt in Canada, Blowfish written in Germany, releases built in Sweden, Canada and Germany kept them deliberately outside the reach of US export controls. The project openly asked non-American cryptographers to come and help, and American developers, as the story goes, would cross the border to Canada to work on the system and bring the results home legally. Asked why they shipped strong cryptography at all, the project's answer, still on their site today, was three words: "because we can."

The same arrangement is being made now, at a national scale. Mistral, DeepSeek, Moonshot and Zhipu publish weights that, once downloaded, no export letter can recall. The sovereignty argument that used to live in Brussels think tanks is now government policy, accelerated by watching access to a frontier model withdrawn worldwide by letter.

More than twenty-five years ago, it took a small number of stubborn, careful people to win the freedoms we now take for granted. What arrived in my letterbox after two weeks on a CD can be downloaded today in fifteen minutes, by anyone, from anywhere, and nobody asks where you live. That is what winning looked like. I think frontier AI ends up in the same place. But it will not happen by itself. Last time, someone put the source on a t-shirt.