Thank the relevant deity. Now I can sleep at night. The restless nights can now end and I can resume a normal life again. Whew!
It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need an email account in order to join a mailing list, so get one of those. Your ISP probably gives you one, but you can also use one of the more obscure email providers like yahoo or gmail if you want. I'm a fan of fastmail on my own domain. Once you have an email address, this content is now available to you! Most mailing lists are free and easy to subscribe to.
I understand where you coming from, but I don't think this "modern web-user" is unfamiliar with what email is, so the sarcastic tone is a bit over the top and usually not appreciated on HN. Instead you could have spent time explaining a better way of browsing the content, or what to consider when reading. Instead of assuming this person doesn't know what a email address is.
He was doing it in the style of the WWW of the past, it wasn't sarcastic, it was a fun and friendly joke.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#33I inadvertently had this on a Sun. I was entering a new password from a remote terminal and accidentally hit a lower case letter where I wanted an upper case one. Reflexively I hit backspace, and the Sun used DEL, so it stored a ^H in the password. I was then unable to change it because while getty or login could handle it, passwd wouldn’t accept it as my existing password.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#34I inadvertently had this on a Sun. I was entering a new password from a remote terminal and accidentally hit a lower case letter where I wanted an upper case one. Reflexively I hit backspace, and the Sun used DEL, so it stored a ^H in the password. I was then unable to change it because while getty or login could handle it, passwd wouldn’t accept it as my existing password.
Anecdotally pressing ^v triggers quoting so the next character is taken verbatim. So ^v^h should have worked.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#35Plato terminals had a custom keyboard* which included buttons for super and subscripts. The administrator for our school district's account had special privileges including the ability to create new users, give others the right to create lessons, more disk space and was highly coveted. It didn't take too long for someone to figure out Mrs. Kennedy's password was man. Of course my password instantly became yellowmarine.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google can't monetize this content so it ends up on page 5 behind all the irrelevant SEO links.
If enough legit and important articles linked to it , it would be at the top.
If that were true there wouldn't be so much bullshit on the first few pages. Try doing a Google search that gets lots of low-effort ad-stuffed "top x" or "best x of 2019" lists or similar garbage and changing the date range to limit results to before 2008 or thereabouts. It's incredible how much more useful, and easier to quickly evaluate, the results often are.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#37The current title ("It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson") I assume is in reference to Ken's password being cracked two weeks ago. The title is not correct. Ken's password was cracked. Bill Joy's password has now also been cracked, but not disclosed w/o getting permission from Joy to do so first. Discussion from two weeks ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21202905 Message posting /etc/password entrie…
Does anyone else find it a bit off-color to crack a password at all without permission? It seems to me like taking a photograph of a person in the shower then saying "yeah but we'll only publish the nude photo with permission." Yeah the password is no longer secure and bad people do bad things like this ilegally all the time - so don't be one of them, it's just yuk. Have some respect for privacy and don't invade it without permission FIRST.
Maybe a correct title is creeps crack Bill Joy's password without permission - or did they get permission first?
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#38A guy I worked with did this once, but on an esxi machine through the web interface. Took a very long time of figuring out what characters to press on an ssh connection from a mac to get the same, then to translate that to windows keyboard. Password changes often warn (or flat-out deny) if your password is too short, similar to username, etc.; maybe they should do so for control characters.
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#39I inadvertently had this on a Sun. I was entering a new password from a remote terminal and accidentally hit a lower case letter where I wanted an upper case one. Reflexively I hit backspace, and the Sun used DEL, so it stored a ^H in the password. I was then unable to change it because while getty or login could handle it, passwd wouldn’t accept it as my existing password.
Anecdotally pressing ^v triggers quoting so the next character is taken verbatim. So ^v^h should have worked.
There was a ton of wizardry I didn’t know at the time
Re: It was Bill Joy's password, not Ken Thompson's, that had a control character
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally pressing ^v triggers quoting so the next character is taken verbatim. So ^v^h should have worked.
There was a ton of wizardry I didn’t know at the time
I hear you. The very first system Unix system I had root to ended up with two etc directories. It took a really long time to figure out I hadn't corrupted the filesystem but instead had created one directory named /etc which was an unprintable character.