41–50 of 58 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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!
Even a post by someone making something as part of their programming portfolio would have been more useful to the world.
The 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 w…
I 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.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/te...
The VLNEXT macro is mentioned as reserved for implementations though.
They all had their uid set to 0?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Apparently it's off-color to dare suggest password cracking without permission is an invasion of privacy(!) I don't recall anyone suggesting private passwords have no expectation of privacy myself but clearly people here think it to be so. So that's weird and just a bit creepy.
It is also part of the hacker culture to test other people's security in a white-hat manner. This is a good thing.
If my password were weak enough to be cracked in this way, I'd certainly prefer someone do it and tell me to change my password rather than use it for their own gain.
As for off-color, name-calling is generally frowned upon even if you have a point. If you disagree, it's best to keep your tone neutral
The password file on UNIX systems from 1969 right up till the 1990s were readable by everyone on the system. However, the passwords were one-way encrypted or "hashed". For the password a user typed such as "p/q2-q4!", the password file contained a hash such as "ZghOT0eRm4U9s". It used to be a rite of passage of every aspiring UNIX systems programmer to write a cracking program to discover some of the passwords on their system -- typically by encrypting a dictionary of words to see if any matched up with the hashed values in password file. If everyone picked good passwords, this was futile. But on any large UNIX system, many users selected dictionary words so this attack was often successful.
Recently someone unearthed the password file from one of the original systems on which UNIX and C were developed. Naturally it's great fun to discover the original passwords of all the UNIX luminaries such as Ken Thompson (his strong password being a chess move "p/q2-q4!"), Dennis Ritchie (password "dmac" -- anyone know what that might mean?), Brian Kernighan (an easy to type keyboard pattern "/.,/.,"), Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne shell, didn't seem to care and chose obvious password "bourne", and more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21209594.
One lone password from the original list, Bill Joy's password, was still uncracked. Bill Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, author of vi, and a key developer of BSD UNIX. He apparently picked the best password. This latest news says that Bill Joy's password has now been cracked, that it uses a control character in place of a letter, it is otherwise all lowercase letters, and is a chess related term (as Ken Thompson's was also chess related). An an example, his password could be chess-related word "c^Astlng", where the ^A is control-A (but it isn't -- I checked). But the actual password has not been revealed "because of the outpouring of negativity about these disclosures, [the discoverer is] reluctant to post the actual password without [Bill Joy's] consent".
Plato 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 yellow mari…
Every terminal and personal computer had a custom keyboard back then.
If you read on in the thread there's this fun story[1]: > John P. Linderman jpl.jpl at gmail.com > Sat Oct 19 23:11:10 AEST 2019 > Related story. A user came to us with a problem while we were in our computer room. We asked him to log in at the VAX console, so we could look into the problem. Moments later, dozens of users flooded in, asking what had happened. Seems the first user had a CTRL-P in his password, which,…