What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

I wrote Ansible, but no longer work on it.

There are numerous problems with the hoax.

(A) the user skipped --no-preserve-root to the command, if he really wanted to delete /, he would need to try harder on a modern distro, because the rm command would stop the attempt (B) ansible by default fails on undefined variables, meaning it would never execute the command (C) Jinja template variables are actually {{foo}} not {foo}, so {foo} in bash prints a literal foo

So this triply couldn't happen. Finally, most people should probably be using the file module to delete files, though if people want to call out to the shell they can with any config tool.

I hate this was even posted because it reflects poorly on me and was in exceptionally bad taste to imply ansible would let it happen.

But can you shoot yourself in the foot with any config tool? If you want to, yes. Can you be bitten by a bug? Yes. Do tool authors make mistakes? Yes.

But it was a mean thing to do, and it's not something the tool would even allow, and it hurts when tech journalists (arguably some of the worst reporters in existance) blindly parrot the article without fake checking (just like they'll also do fake comparisons that just recycle blog posts).

How come that such user-generated-content communities always end like that?!

Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. By definition, this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible, that's pure speculation and there are infinite other scenarios we could imagine, but we don't need to ask them as StackOverflow questions.

On a practical note, it's worth banning just to prevent a thousand viral marketers and recruiters falling over themselves to compose the most attention-grabbing fake questions in the next month.