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Suicide Linux (2009)

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121–130 of 183 posts

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#121

This could be turned into a really great security tool, akin to a deadman switch, which upon activation and incorrect use, deletes the contents of the users home directory. Example. In Mate Desktop. the default terminal is Mate Terminal. Upon installation of Suicide Linux, Mate Terminal could be modified to delete the users home, but provide no warning that it is running. For the user, they could use another terminal…

Hook it up to your WiFi driver so if your AP every goes away so does the evidence of whatever you’re trying to hide. But plug the computer and AP into the same UPS.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#122

Earlier 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…

Gosh I didn't expect to start anything more than a few smiles with this comment. I'm French, this is absolutely normal to say that where I'm from, and I can tell you that no German or Italian woman / man would take offense for what I said (angry Twitter mobs don't count ;)

I can't speak for Japanese people since I never met any.

I don't know if your reaction is representative of US culture, but having to tip toe around words and not say what you think doesn't scream free country to me.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lighten up. A friend of mine has an Italian partner and she is constantly joking that Italian women are mad and that she'll kill him if he does something wrong.

Let it not go unobserved that "lighten up" is the traditional rejoinder of those engaging in inappropriate behavior. This formulation means: those in a position of relative social power, expect those in subordinate positions to accept stereotyping etc. at the expense of their own and other subordinate classes. The humor, and this rejection of censure, is done to ritually encode and underscoring of the received power…

Japan, one of the world’s wealthiest nations and a successful exporter of soft power for decades now, is a “subordinate class”?

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#124

Earlier 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…

Are we going to cancel François Truffaut now? The “Japanese girlfriend” is a key part of his film Domicile conjugal, and once a stereotype has made it into canonic art, then how offensive can reiterating it be? The exception of course is when the stereotype deals with a population that is neglected, persecuted and impoverished, but it is hard to say that about Japan.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#125
post #27

> 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…

Actually worked on something similar about 16 years ago. The idea was an attacker could be led astray and then drop various behavioral clues to disclose their identity past a legally arguable threshold based on challenges and confusions selectively presented.

The guy I was working on it with dropped out of academics for a career of spirituality. He went off to a monastery so I also abandoned the project as well. We never even got a publication out of it :-/. These days you could probably make a very expensive product out of it.*

Someone else may have picked it up, I don't follow the literature anymore

---

* - I just realized maybe he went off to become a spook - I don't know how I never thought of that - even to this day many of my colleagues from the era work for these nebulous companies with names like "The Adirondack Group" who just have a basic website with a single email address. I never understood why they even try, just say "we are spies" - everyone knows it. Maybe it allows them to live otherwise normal social lives where they don't have to lie about the superficialities of their job? I dunno. It can't be actually project based - that'd be super retarded - instead of knowing "he works for the CIA" everyone would also know what project they work on - super dumb - that can't be it. I'll probably hit up one of my old friends to see if that monastery was real. He can probably say "yes" or "no".

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#126
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I too am from the left-liberal side of things, and I am always flummoxed when I see people on HN immediately generalizing every misstep they see to all developers, and only to developers. Why should developers be holier than the average population? But as for question, yes, we do say those things here. But I'm from the European mainland, and we do enjoy stereotyping each other. That has nothing to do with racism or b…

This is great, I just don't know why sometimes in the US everything is taken in the wrong way and everything has to be politically correct. We can make fun of ourselves there is nothing wrong and the more we accept the differences the easier will be to move on. And before anybody assumes I'm a white male, I'm a Mexican immigrant in the US.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#128
post #27

> 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…

I've actually wished for something that takes it the other direction: Technically, everything it does is allowed, but it's designed to stress-test your assumptions. So, a distro that replaces half of coreutils with busybox, the other half with toybox or BSD ports or something, the system libc is musl, build tools are patched to randomly switch between using gcc or clang (both of which have `-Werror` enabled by defaul…

Strange Linux

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#129
post #30
post #27

> 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…

This sounds like if the designers of the web made a Linux distro.

They have certainly made lots of money with that model. You could almost argue this stuff does not really matter because people are effectively forced to use it, as is.1 There is no alternative choice.

1. If you manage to "beat the system", and bend the web to your will, those invested in it will label you an outlier or accuse you of being like Richard Stallman.

The Suicide Linux idea, and in fact, all "rm -rf /" jokes, are still perplexing to me because I always made systems where one could accidentally rm -rf / (still have not done personally that after 20+ years) and would not lose anything of importance, because / is an overlay and any long-term user data is stored on external media, separate from executables, which I unmount after a periodic save completes. I guess I could describe it as a minimal system booted from USB and running in RAM, overlayed with a more complete system (downloaded from the network then extracted), also running in RAM, with a workspace consisting of 100% RAM. The only way to destroy the system is to mount the USB stick read-write, chattr -i on everything and then try to rm -rf /. Impossible to do that by mistake.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#130
post #27

> 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…

I've actually wished for something that takes it the other direction: Technically, everything it does is allowed, but it's designed to stress-test your assumptions. So, a distro that replaces half of coreutils with busybox, the other half with toybox or BSD ports or something, the system libc is musl, build tools are patched to randomly switch between using gcc or clang (both of which have `-Werror` enabled by defaul…

I once got an hdd from a mac user. It had trailing spaces in filenames. Leading spaces. Asterisks. Question marks. Colon. Forward slash. :c

I needed 2 computers to fix that one.

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