I've found a bug in your code. Since it's Free, it should run on about any Posix system (at least you didn't give any specification saying otherwise). Your program, however, fails to run on systems which don't have/bin/bash.
Suggested fix: Change the first line of the script to #!/bin/sh
Looking again, I see a possible second bug: AFAIK there can be limitations on the length of the argument line, and expanding ls/usr/ may get larger than this length.
Suggested fix: Use xargs with nested shell invocation (sh -c) instead.
Ok, so depending on if I'm right on the second one, you have either one or two bugs for your 21 lines, or 47.619 bugs/KLOC resp. 95.238 bugs/KLOC. I really hope the jet engine control code is better!:-)
I guess all compilers will quickly stop with "syntax error", "parse error" or similar if you throw random input at them. It's highly unlikely that this way you'll trigger a bug in the compiler even if the compiler is very buggy.
Of course, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation (used to encode audio), and CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency. So PCMCIA obviously refers to phone tapping.:-)
Indeed. I might consider to buy a radio with DRM (Digital Radio Mondial), but I'd not like it if they introduce DRM (Digital Rights Management) into radios.
why dry spaghetti breaks into more than one piece when it is bent: -1, Lame
You seem to miss the significance of that research. Note that the article mentioned the physics Nobel price for big bang research. This spaghetti research is of course very related to the question of how the universe was created. After all, we know it was created by the FSM, and surely bending and breaking spaghetti was an integral part of the act of creation.
Well, given that we just lost one planet by redefinition, probably they feared the others might sooner or later lose their planet status as well, e.g. Jupiter and Saturn could be considered too big for a planet, Mercury does not even have an independend rotation and thus might just be considered a moon of the sun, also maybe one day having a moon will be mandatory to be considered a planet...
If you make 1000's of people vote for a person by putting a gun against their head, you have succesfully manipulated the election.
That's why voting is secret. If you can't verify what people voted (and those people know for sure that you can't verify it), holding a gun against their head doesn't help much: They can claim to have voted the way you told them, and still vote different. You have no chance to proof individually that they didn't vote your way.
If you re-program those machines to show child porn on election day, you'll surely get a scandal, even if the actual votes don't get manipulated... but then, a little background picture showing a naked breast will do as well. Just be careful that the nipple isn't obscured by the names of the candidates.:-)
if consciousness is something more than physical, then physically reconstructing the body would not be sufficient for teleportation anyway.
Correction:
if consciousness is something more than physical, then physically reconstructing the body might not be sufficient for teleportation anyway.
After all, if you don't know what the non-physical part is, you cannot tell how it would behave in a physical teleportation. After all, it might just attach to the reconstructed body, either immediatly or after some time.
If it were not the case, the problem probably would be long fixed, and thus he would not have had the opportunity to get this story on slashdot, earning him some good Karma. Thus it's fortunate for him.
I've never had any issues with/bin/true. In my experience, it's quite reliable. So obviously it is possible to write reliable software. OTOH, I've never managed to run/bin/false successfully. Indeed, it's even documented in the man page that it will not be successfull in its task. Since the task is just to do nothing, obviously it must have been a very bad programmer who wrote it: How can you just fail to do nothing?:-)
Not only that. Books about software also generally have a number of other problems:
They go too much into detail. That really kills a story.
There's seldom a real climax. For the best books about software, after reading it you know all about that software, but that's about it. A story needs a climax to be interesting.
Books about software seldom have main characters (unless you count the software itself as such, but then, unless it's some sort of AI, a software usually doesn't really make a good main character).
The story line usually sucks as well. Usually the story is just oriented on the features of the software, e.g. one chapter per feature. That's not a way to make a great story line!
Indeed, as soon as you are root, making the system do whatever you want doesn't take more than changing the lilo or grub configuration to boot your own kernel, and then causing the system to reboot. After the reboot, no security features from the old kernel will have any effect.
Indeed, if you are already in the user account, it should be quite easy to get the password: Just change the user's path so that your own sudo replacement comes first. Then if the user types sudo, he will silently be redirected to your sudo (which then can as silently execute the real sudo using the entered password, so he won't even notice the difference).
Note that the same is true for any other command prompting for a password (so using su isn't any safer).
I guess the idea is that when you come to the machine, but didn't boot it up yourself, you cannot know if the login screen you see is really the one which showed up directly after booting, or if the person booting the computer also logged in and provided his own version afterwards (but before you came).
Of course it's just an irony that the file named "passwd" doesn't actually contain the passwords... Another solution could have been to just make/etc/passwd unreadable by non-root, and provide the non-password information in it another way. An advanced trick would be a file system driver which allows the file access to be filtered for non-root users, so if you are not root, all the password hashes could simply be filtered out when reading/etc/password:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I've found a bug in your code. Since it's Free, it should run on about any Posix system (at least you didn't give any specification saying otherwise). Your program, however, fails to run on systems which don't have /bin/bash.
/usr/ may get larger than this length.
:-)
Suggested fix: Change the first line of the script to #!/bin/sh
Looking again, I see a possible second bug: AFAIK there can be limitations on the length of the argument line, and expanding ls
Suggested fix: Use xargs with nested shell invocation (sh -c) instead.
Ok, so depending on if I'm right on the second one, you have either one or two bugs for your 21 lines, or 47.619 bugs/KLOC resp. 95.238 bugs/KLOC. I really hope the jet engine control code is better!
Given that the sun will never turn into a supernova (it's just not heavy enough for that), what does this tell us about Microsoft?
I guess all compilers will quickly stop with "syntax error", "parse error" or similar if you throw random input at them. It's highly unlikely that this way you'll trigger a bug in the compiler even if the compiler is very buggy.
That's what a version number beginning with a 0 generally tells you. Wine is currently at 0.9.22, so expecting a finished product isn't reasonable.
Maybe because for proprietary code you generally also don't consider some obscure one-man shareware project almost nobody has never heared of?
I think that's now called a Dobiar.
Duke Nukem Forever?
Of course, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation (used to encode audio), and CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency. So PCMCIA obviously refers to phone tapping. :-)
Indeed. I might consider to buy a radio with DRM (Digital Radio Mondial), but I'd not like it if they introduce DRM (Digital Rights Management) into radios.
You seem to miss the significance of that research. Note that the article mentioned the physics Nobel price for big bang research. This spaghetti research is of course very related to the question of how the universe was created. After all, we know it was created by the FSM, and surely bending and breaking spaghetti was an integral part of the act of creation.
Well, given that we just lost one planet by redefinition, probably they feared the others might sooner or later lose their planet status as well, e.g. Jupiter and Saturn could be considered too big for a planet, Mercury does not even have an independend rotation and thus might just be considered a moon of the sun, also maybe one day having a moon will be mandatory to be considered a planet ...
That's why voting is secret. If you can't verify what people voted (and those people know for sure that you can't verify it), holding a gun against their head doesn't help much: They can claim to have voted the way you told them, and still vote different. You have no chance to proof individually that they didn't vote your way.
If you re-program those machines to show child porn on election day, you'll surely get a scandal, even if the actual votes don't get manipulated ... but then, a little background picture showing a naked breast will do as well. Just be careful that the nipple isn't obscured by the names of the candidates. :-)
African-American?
It's a Dutch blackbox, so it's obviously an African-European box!
However I have a problem on how to call black people in Africa. African-Africans?
Correction:
if consciousness is something more than physical, then physically reconstructing the body might not be sufficient for teleportation anyway.
After all, if you don't know what the non-physical part is, you cannot tell how it would behave in a physical teleportation. After all, it might just attach to the reconstructed body, either immediatly or after some time.
If it were not the case, the problem probably would be long fixed, and thus he would not have had the opportunity to get this story on slashdot, earning him some good Karma. Thus it's fortunate for him.
If people don't recognice a sarcasm detector when they see it, then how can it be useful?
I've never had any issues with /bin/true. In my experience, it's quite reliable. So obviously it is possible to write reliable software. /bin/false successfully. Indeed, it's even documented in the man page that it will not be successfull in its task. Since the task is just to do nothing, obviously it must have been a very bad programmer who wrote it: How can you just fail to do nothing? :-)
OTOH, I've never managed to run
Not only that. Books about software also generally have a number of other problems:
They go too much into detail. That really kills a story.
There's seldom a real climax. For the best books about software, after reading it you know all about that software, but that's about it. A story needs a climax to be interesting.
Books about software seldom have main characters (unless you count the software itself as such, but then, unless it's some sort of AI, a software usually doesn't really make a good main character).
The story line usually sucks as well. Usually the story is just oriented on the features of the software, e.g. one chapter per feature. That's not a way to make a great story line!
Well, I considered that password, too, but then I decided to save me some typing and used ">8chars" instead.
Well, if it's only the silicone which smoulders, it's not that bad. Only when the silicon starts smouldering, your server is in real trouble. :-)
Indeed, as soon as you are root, making the system do whatever you want doesn't take more than changing the lilo or grub configuration to boot your own kernel, and then causing the system to reboot. After the reboot, no security features from the old kernel will have any effect.
Indeed, if you are already in the user account, it should be quite easy to get the password: Just change the user's path so that your own sudo replacement comes first. Then if the user types sudo, he will silently be redirected to your sudo (which then can as silently execute the real sudo using the entered password, so he won't even notice the difference).
Note that the same is true for any other command prompting for a password (so using su isn't any safer).
I guess the idea is that when you come to the machine, but didn't boot it up yourself, you cannot know if the login screen you see is really the one which showed up directly after booting, or if the person booting the computer also logged in and provided his own version afterwards (but before you came).
Of course it's just an irony that the file named "passwd" doesn't actually contain the passwords ... /etc/passwd unreadable by non-root, and provide the non-password information in it another way. /etc/password :-)
Another solution could have been to just make
An advanced trick would be a file system driver which allows the file access to be filtered for non-root users, so if you are not root, all the password hashes could simply be filtered out when reading