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OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

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Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#11

Post by kenkam »

It's a shame, the fact that he decided to rm -rf ~ has hijacked the point he was trying to make in the first place. Now everyone's discussing if there's a better way of making his point rather than downloading random scripts on the internet and running them.

And the dramatic irony is: he tried to warn people that bad things can happen if they run scripts without verifying... by doing _exactly_ what he is warning about -- doing malicious stuff to you. It wasn't well thought out, was it?

Lesson: one can make a point without deleting someone's home directory... (or something equally evil)

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#13

Post by mseebach »

moccajoghurt wrote: post #9

"Your house is not fire-proof, that's why I burned it." Congratulations for proving your point by destroying other people's work. Seriously that's nothing you would expect from a thoughtful person.

"Your house is not fireproof, so to taunt you a bit I'm going to throw some burning matches in your frontyaOH MY GOD WHY DID YOU THROW A BUCKET OF GASOLINE ON THEM?"

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#14

Post by meaty »

Jem wrote: post #3

This reminds me of the prat that decided to teach me a lesson in PHP security by exploiting my first script & deleting my entire website when I was 15. :( Lesson learned, and it got me into PHP security, but I can't help but feel there are nicer ways to go about giving such an important lesson...

Sometimes the hard way to learn the lesson is the best way and sometimes a costly mistake by someone is an education for lots of people. It's an unfortunate side of human nature but it's valuable.

My own experience by proxy: A colleague of mine kept everything he owned on a single CDRW. It got put in a Pioneer slot loader. A few seconds later "boom" and the disk shattered into thousands of small pieces. He cried. I, and the 15 other people in the room, learned about keeping backups in multiple locations.

The same thing happens when a seal eats a penguin. Hundreds of other penguins learn to keep away from seals.

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#15

Post by nailer »

aw3c2 wrote: post #8

What kind of title is this? "Evil Open Source". It has nothing to do with the content. The linked post itself is titled "OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault??!?!"

I accidentally downmodded you. But +1, the title has nothing to do with the app. Both people involved are very, very immature.

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#16

Post by meaty »

afarrell wrote: post #6
thirsteh wrote: post #2

The repo owner was stupid for not checking what they were merging, and the author is stupid for making the pull request in the first place. If they wanted to prove a point, they should have merged something a little less harmful, like "echo This file could have deleted your home folder. Don't run random scripts from the Internet without inspecting them first."

Right. If you are going to troll, do it with something annoying but harmless: download and play an audio file, lock the screen so they have to sign in again, pop open 100 gnome-shells, etc.

Back in the day, the goatse was the preferred method of education.

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#17

Post by lucaspiller »

meaty wrote: post #16
afarrell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. If you are going to troll, do it with something annoying but harmless: download and play an audio file, lock the screen so they have to sign in again, pop open 100 gnome-shells, etc.

Back in the day, the goatse was the preferred method of education.

Rickroll's seem a bit tame comparatively.

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#18

Post by MindTwister »

static_typed wrote: post #7

This is one of my pet peeves of late - so many tools and tutorials advise the user to curl and pipe some script of the net to install and make it work. Why aren't we teaching people to be a little cautious - to download, review and then install? How did developers become so lazy, and so coddled that we desire convenience over security or forethought? Or worse, is it really due to an increasing number of developers wh…

Scenario: I want to install rvm

I could download their install script, read it through and then proceed to run it

or,

Since I'm trusting rvm not to do any harm in the first place, I might as well use their handy one-liner and install it in one go. Anything they can do in their one-liner they can do to me when I install rvm anyways.

Re: OMG rm -rf ~ in a valentine bash script and its partly my fault

#20

Post by anon1385 »

static_typed wrote: post #7

This is one of my pet peeves of late - so many tools and tutorials advise the user to curl and pipe some script of the net to install and make it work. Why aren't we teaching people to be a little cautious - to download, review and then install? How did developers become so lazy, and so coddled that we desire convenience over security or forethought? Or worse, is it really due to an increasing number of developers wh…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest

The Underhanded C Contest was a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake. The contest rules define a task, and a malicious component. Entries must perform the task in a malicious manner as defined by the contest, and hide the malice.

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