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Suicide Linux (2009)
61–70 of 183 posts
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#62There used to be a few DOS shells which would do less than helpful stuff to you. One I liked would just offer insults instead of whatever it was you were attempting to do.
This reminds me of an early BIOS/BDOS patch for CP/M that would replace messages like "BDOS err on A:" with "Get that pizza out of my disk drive!"
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#63Bug report:
Does not honor the requirement to set --no-preserve-root by rm.
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#64> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…
> the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong
There is already a major OS with this characteristic.
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#65> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…
> the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. You're describing my (modest) experience with Javascript: it fails silently. I was describing it this way to a colleague: Javascript is a Japanese girlfriend, too polite to show you your mistakes so you have a hard time to know what you did wrong. I want a rigorous German g…
I am from the left-liberal side of things, including my choice of employers, and I am always flummoxed when I come into HN and see developers
a) make comments that are flagrantly bigoted and misogynistic
b) indicate that they make comments like these to their colleagues
Do devs really say horrible things like this at the workplace? If anyone on my team made jokes about Japanese vs. Italian girlfriends, either they would be fired or I would quit.
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#66This is like that time, last week, when I was having issues with do-release-upgrade and someone helpfully suggested to run sudo apt-get purge python* && sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get install python* Which I did without paying attention to what I was doing and it turns out that this is one of the worst things you could do ever on a Debian-based distro. Damn you, abu-ahmed al-khatiri.
I can one up you: Coworker was trying to remove node so we could install a new version, so he ran: rm -rf /usr/bin node -rf was due to muscle memory, and unfortunately he forgot the space. That was a fun one to clean up. We were able to use nc because that was in /bin and not /usr/bin, so we used that to pipe curl over through a socket and then used curl to install dpkg + apt, then ran apt update to fix everything an…
It always scares me when people automatically add -rf after typing rm no matter what they're doing. How do you even get into that habit in the first place?
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, just "rm" everything is far from enough, it needs to be a secure deletion. And the best way to implement secure deletion is using full disk encryption, this way, instead of wiping the entire disk, you just need to wipe the header, which contains its master key. head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sdX1; sync An even better solution is interfacing the motherboard with a small microcontroller and storing th…
What's wrong with using FDE and entering the key manually on startup? You could then just shut down when you detect suspicious behavior and all is well or am I missing something?
It depends on your threat model. The OP mentions bobby traps and self-destruction, so I assume the threat model here is not a typical model in personal computing, but a different one, which is similar to Dread Pirate Roberts' threat model, as explained below.
Self destruction has two advantages, comparing to shutting down the system. First, once the encrypted master key in the header has been wiped, the data is gone, it's technically impossible to recover the data anymore (your passphrase is only the key to decrypt the master key in the header). On the other hand, revealing the passphrase under pressure is always a possibility. Second, when an attacker tries to seize your system, a possible strategy is seizing your system alive in a surprise attack, giving you no chance to shut the system down, and using an USB mouse emulator to defeat the screenlock.
And the reason of using a hardware-backed key storage, is to prevent the clone of the encryption header (which makes the self-destruction useless), and to ensure the destruction of the key is complete. In modern SSDs, due to wear levelling, there's no guarantee that the physical sector the header belongs to is actually erased.
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#68This is like that time, last week, when I was having issues with do-release-upgrade and someone helpfully suggested to run sudo apt-get purge python* && sudo apt-get autoclean && sudo apt-get install python* Which I did without paying attention to what I was doing and it turns out that this is one of the worst things you could do ever on a Debian-based distro. Damn you, abu-ahmed al-khatiri.
I can one up you: Coworker was trying to remove node so we could install a new version, so he ran: rm -rf /usr/bin node -rf was due to muscle memory, and unfortunately he forgot the space. That was a fun one to clean up. We were able to use nc because that was in /bin and not /usr/bin, so we used that to pipe curl over through a socket and then used curl to install dpkg + apt, then ran apt update to fix everything an…
My teammate a couple years ago was writing a script that needed to clear a working directory, so `rm -rf $path/*`. He ran it during debugging and found one mistake - at some point the $path variable came in empty......
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#69> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…
That's a bit extreme. You should at least allow some error messages. Though those ones should just say "Oops, something went wrong :)"
Ohhh the horror...
:(
Re: Suicide Linux (2009)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. You're describing my (modest) experience with Javascript: it fails silently. I was describing it this way to a colleague: Javascript is a Japanese girlfriend, too polite to show you your mistakes so you have a hard time to know what you did wrong. I want a rigorous German g…
I am from the left-liberal side of things, including my choice of employers, and I am always flummoxed when I come into HN and see developers a) make comments that are flagrantly bigoted and misogynistic b) indicate that they make comments like these to their colleagues Do devs really say horrible things like this at the workplace? If anyone on my team made jokes about Japanese vs. Italian girlfriends, either they wo…
When I read it, the comment sounded like the emphasis was on stereotypes of the culture, not the gender. Maybe you're reading too much into it.