[HN Gopher] Remove "This incident will be reported." from user w...
___________________________________________________________________
Remove "This incident will be reported." from user warnings
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 690 points
Date : 2023-04-29 12:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| barnbuilder wrote:
| Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no
| trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This
| commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a
| bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously
| somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).
| calebegg wrote:
| > Social media communities really ought to observe a [...] rule
|
| Oh honey....
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Feasibility and wisdom are unrelated.
|
| I just saw an IG post from a collab between a prominently
| irreverent burger popup in my town, and one of the most
| progressive wine bars in the city. It had a security guard
| kicking out a rowdy woman from a bar.
|
| The comments BLEW UP with people who had never had the
| burgers or been to the bar calling out the "cop culture" and
| the celebration of authoritarianism in the photo.
|
| It's a joke at this point, how angry people get at things
| that have the barest tinge of something to be mad about.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| /r/SubredditDrama has had this rule in place from the beginning
| and it's never been effective. It may be a community norm among
| the regulars, but the lurkers won't care.
| xpe wrote:
| You might enjoy reading ann Atlantic article titled something
| like "I don't wanna see you smoking pot". It is an opinion
| piece about the importance of community norms.
| xpe wrote:
| The current title is "I Don't Want to Smell You Get High":
|
| > I'm glad that draconian anti-marijuana laws have
| disappeared. But we need a taboo against public consumption.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/weed-
| smell... by Thomas Chatterton Williams
|
| Some snippets:
|
| > I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in
| addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on
| the idea that any social response to public weed smell would
| inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown
| bodies. In fact, I don't want the police to put public weed-
| smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a
| better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which
| smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law
| employs restraint.
|
| > Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the
| intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can
| be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-
| upon standards and a common investment in informal norms...
|
| > The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against
| communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive
| politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred
| to as an ethos of "left-libertarianism." In ways large and
| small, it has degraded urban spaces....
|
| > When is the last time you've seen someone pounding shots of
| vodka on the subway? You haven't, and for good reason. Drug
| possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that
| we've optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn't
| the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.
| radhad wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| They could at least have the option to report it to Santa
| juliangmp wrote:
| This makes me weirdly sad
| rbanffy wrote:
| Same. I like the surreally enigmatic message.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Why can't I report all those idiots posting the letter "F" in
| github comments? ;)
| chewbaxxa wrote:
| They are just paying their respects.
| Symbiote wrote:
| What does F mean?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| It's a call of duty meme, at some point your character is
| at a funeral and F is the action button and there is a
| prompt on the casket "press F to pay respects"
| cobbal wrote:
| It's a low-effort addition to the dialogue, but it is a
| legitimate communication of a viewpoint. Who gets to draw the
| line of which comments should be nuked? (My view, the repo
| owner should (and maybe already has that power))
| hiepph wrote:
| If you keep tolerating BS then the BS will keep coming.
| That's why quality subs need moderators in the first place.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Why would somebody care about low effort dialog more than a
| year after the commit?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And my question to the github management is why can't any
| registered user report any low effort useless or offensive
| comment to the moderators, whoever they may be, like almost
| every other online discussion group outside of 4chan?
| klyrs wrote:
| Request a "F" emoji reaction instead.
| [deleted]
| pimlottc wrote:
| For those who may not be aware:
|
| https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/press-f-to-pay-respects
| jon-wood wrote:
| Strong agree on that. One person doing so was possibly amusing,
| everyone else jumping on the wagon is just irritating noise,
| and I'm not even responsible for trying to sift through that
| for legitimate feedback.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The point of the joke is that it's a bandwagon joke.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I disagree that it's a joke, because they're absolutely
| nothing funny or clever or original about it, but you're
| right that the point is to jump on a bandwagon, and it's
| intentionally ironically disrespectful of everyone's time
| and attention, which is also the point. It's really just a
| spammy childish 4chan troll.
|
| All Due Respect: Press F for Farce. Recently, Call of Duty:
| Advanced Warfare became roundly mocked when images showed a
| funeral event where the player is asked to "Press [F] to
| Pay Respects."
|
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/all-due-respect-
| press-f...
|
| >On the other hand, Call of Duty forces the player to Pay
| Respects for the game to proceed. It's a mission objective
| just like any other, complete with an interactive reticle
| floating above the coffin. Furthermore, it's embarrassing
| to ask the player to take this action explicitly. This is a
| military funeral! What else would you do, blow a raspberry?
| It's no wonder players feel insulted.
|
| Ludonarrative Dissonance:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance
|
| >Ludonarrative dissonance is the conflict between a video
| game's narrative told through the story and the narrative
| told through the gameplay. Ludonarrative, a compound of
| ludology and narrative, refers to the intersection in a
| video game of ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative
| elements. The term was coined by game designer Clint
| Hocking in 2007 in a blog post.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It makes strangers type seven paragraphs when someone
| uses it.
|
| That one letter to seven paragraphs ratio is pretty funny
| when it happens.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| LGTM. The incident might not be reported, so that message may not
| be accurate.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Thank goodness. That was a terrible message. I remember my very
| first experience with unix was setting up Red Hat 3.0.3[1] at
| work for a small internet company in like 1997 and getting that
| message and just not knowing what on earth to do. There was noone
| in my company who could help me and all I had was a unix book
| from my local library which didn't even cover linux (but I sort
| of thought it would be helpful).
|
| [1] With the legendary 1.2.13 kernel
| johnisgood wrote:
| "This incident will be logged" may have been better.
| aflag wrote:
| "Your system admin will remember this."
| rbanffy wrote:
| "Your transgression has been noted and punishment may be
| dispensed accordingly".
| lamontcg wrote:
| "A disapproving God has noted your infraction, and Santa
| Claus has added an entry on the naughty list for you"
| rbanffy wrote:
| "There will be consequences"
| martopix wrote:
| "The boss wants to see you immediately."
| exabrial wrote:
| that's pretty soft. wow.
| abnry wrote:
| Funny story. When I was in grad school, the math department
| office I was in had Linux computers administrated by the
| department. One day I was goofing in my shared office with a
| fellow grad student by playing with what resources were
| available.
|
| We were trying sudo and failed with enough silly passwords that
| we got the "this incident will be reported" message. I
| confidently told my officemate that these messages were never
| saved and recorded.
|
| A few moments later, from our open office door (which I assume
| meant all our conversation was able to be overheard), our IT lady
| from down the hall came in and said to me "Download the internet,
| really?"
|
| Because yes, I did type, while not saying I was doing so, "sudo
| DOWNLOAD THE INTERNET" into the terminal while goofing.
|
| Funny story but I did feel a bit embarrassed at the time.
| nailer wrote:
| To be fair in 2023, a lot of people are building LLMs and
| starting with downloading the internet.
| deusum wrote:
| Save a lot of time and space by doing an rm -rf first
| adolph wrote:
| sudo !!
| eimrine wrote:
| sudo rm -rf /*
|
| # unless previous, this command is working, handle with
| care.
| stilley2 wrote:
| I once entered 'sudo echo hi" or something similar on a large
| HPCC and received an email back from a sysadmin that just said
| "hello".
| 1lint wrote:
| That's an amusing anecdote, though I find it bothersome the
| sysadmin failed to correctly implement the echo command
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Someone turned up the temperature hyperparameter.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I find it bothersome that the "yes" command outputs "y" by
| default instead of "yes". False advertising! Since Unix
| loves short concise command names, why not just name it
| "y"?
| purpleidea wrote:
| It does so you can pipe to commands that want a string of
| "press y/N" sort of things.
|
| If you want yes write `yes yes`. And one character
| commands are almost generally avoided. So don't name it
| "y".
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think it was just a joke from parent, not a legitimate
| question.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| $ y not not not not not
| not not not not ...
| [deleted]
| ww520 wrote:
| There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to
| find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.
| mingus88 wrote:
| That was such a mind blowing experience coming from a DOS
| background. It would split your terminal horizontally and
| you could see each other type in real time.
|
| Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant
| messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen
| `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I
| was working. We've been married for 20 years now.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Long before Unix talk, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing
| System at the MIT AI Lab) had a program called UNTALK,
| written by a user named UNCOLA, that supported split
| screen text chat, back around 1992 or earlier.
|
| Incompatible Timesharing System:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Sy
| ste...
|
| Getting Started Computing at the Al Lab by Christopher C.
| Stacy. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL
| INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY WORKING PAPER 235 7 September
| 1982:
|
| https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41180/AI_W
| P_2...
|
| >6.10.3. TALK
|
| >If you want to link to someone who is on another ITS
| machine, you can use the TALK program. The program is run
| by typing:
|
| >*:talk uname@host
|
| >To exit TALK terminating the conversation, the user who
| initiated TALK must type ^C.
|
| >This method of comlinking is less versatile than the
| backnext commands, and only works across ITS machines
| (not locally).
|
| >Another useful comlink program is UNTALK. UNTALK is
| similar to TALK but does not work across machines.
| However, on a display terminal, UNTALK splits the screen
| horizontally and allows the two people to type at the
| same time on their part of the screen.
|
| The "backnext commands" he referred to would actually let
| you not only perform a text chat link (albeit not split
| screen), but also take over another user's TTY, to type
| into and see the output of their DDT shell and programs.
| There was no security other than obscurity on ITS, and
| that feature of linking to and sharing another user's TTY
| was meant for collaboration, helping, and teaching
| people, and also initializing and configuring output-only
| serial devices like line printers.
|
| History of the Net is Important, by Keith F. Lynch:
|
| http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACN8-1.pdf
|
| >[...] ITS stood for the Incompatible Time-sharing
| System, an obvious take-off on CTSS, the Compatible Time-
| Sharing System. (Just as Unix is a take-off on the
| earlier TENEX, TWENEX, and MULTICS.)
|
| >All four ITS machines also had UNTALK, a split-screen
| conferencing program similar to the later "talk" on Unix
| and PHONE on VMS. I was told it was written by a user
| whose ITS username was UNCOLA and who had committed
| suicide. I don't know if it was the first program of that
| type, but it was the first I had seen.
|
| Even before that, ARPANET TIPs supported a low level way
| of text chatting (not split screen) called a "TIP to TIP
| Link" (documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the
| Terminal IMP") where each participant bounced their
| packets off of a port on some host, without actually
| logging in or going through the host.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518273
|
| Users Guide to the Terminal IMP (1975):
|
| https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminal
| IMP...
| amichal wrote:
| I did a summer program at MIT around then and remember a
| program that let you send popup messages in xwindows to
| other users or to a channel. You could subscribe to any
| channel and use wild cards. I remember being hacked by
| someone to subscribe "*" and being unable to use my
| terminal for a while until i figured out how to
| unsubscribe without being able to see what i was typing
| under the wall of messages. I thought it was called
| zyphermail but the interent seems to have no memory of
| this.
| craig_s_bell wrote:
| You might be thinking of Zephyr, which was part of
| Project Athena. My school was using Athena, and I
| occasionally received zephyrgrams from people at MIT.
|
| http://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/izephyr/html/izephyr.
| htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)
| amichal wrote:
| That was it! Thank you for the references
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917
|
| Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to
| be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-
| me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list
| to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or
| sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
|
| So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove
| them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-
| me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds
| of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they
| could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing
| lists with people with similar interests, without
| bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't
| about being removed from mailing lists.
|
| It worked so well that it was a victim of its own
| success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list
| was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut
| down...
|
| ...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall
| incident" in 1987:
|
| http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759965
| ww520 wrote:
| The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek
| - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical
| space fighting game. I've wasted so much time late into
| the nights playing the game in the lab instead of doing
| coursework.
|
| The admin came to the lab from time to time and said
| we're hogging the workstations with the game and banned
| the game during daytime.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I remember ca. 2000 my best friend busting into my
| office, pushing me aside, logging in savagely to
| something and having a sight of relief.
|
| He managed to send back a fleet or something - it was a
| real time game where you needed to do stuff at the right
| time (after sometimes a few hours). I do not remember the
| name of the game but it was fashionable for some time
| (not sure if it was text based or not)
| sdwr wrote:
| Those games are still kicking around. Played Neptune's
| Pride a while back, would not recommend, seems designed
| to devour your waking (and what should be sleeping) life.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > The one program truly blew my mind at the time was
| Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime
| graphical space fighting game.
|
| Anything like mtrek? It's still around [0], and even over
| telnet [1].
|
| 0: https://mtrek.com 1: telnet://mtrek.com:1701
| ww520 wrote:
| It's a fast paced multi-player space battle game with a
| top down graphic 2D view. It's like Command and Conquer,
| with each unit controlled by a different player.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQkDhwo7qNQ
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| "talk" was often bugged (and IIRC, used UDP) so it was
| soon updated by xtalk and then ytalk. ytalk was like the
| kitchen sink of talk, with a huge feature set and
| compatibility with everything that went before. Everyone
| had to get ytalk for sure.
| skykooler wrote:
| I use ytalk on a VPS that me and a friend have ssh logins
| for. It's still a neat way of communicating that I don't
| think any modern chat apps do.
| knorker wrote:
| I once talked to a somewhat famous hacker by logging in
| to an account he set up via SSH that spawned 'talk' as
| the shell.
|
| He didn't trust IRC and other chat systems.
|
| Is the end he got caught anyway due to sloppy opsec. Like
| many other hackers.
| taneq wrote:
| Oh man, that brings it back! ytalk on the university
| student server was just about the first instant messaging
| system I used. My typing speed went way up after a few
| weeks.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I remember that one of the financial banking software we
| were using had an internal chat that was basically using
| "write"(?) underneath to send messages to another users
| terminal (it was running on Sun Solaris I think).
| alarge wrote:
| When I started college, all of our classes would assign a
| temporary (semester-long) account on one of the various
| Vax 11/780s supplied by the computing center.
|
| Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1
| BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other
| (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the
| lab). To block someone from writing to you (often
| desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever
| you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg"
| command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I
| figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave
| open write permission to your tty.
|
| With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke
| where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty
| command to their tty, e.g.: % stty erase
| e > /dev/tty03
|
| which would make 'e' the backspace key for the duration
| of their terminal session. Much hilarity ensued.
| skissane wrote:
| It always annoyed me that the Unix terminal subsystem is
| too dumb to handle multiple writers to the same terminal
| at once without them potentially corrupting each other's
| output. There are some techniques to reduce the incidence
| of this but none of them are foolproof, whereas a better
| design could be.
|
| Maybe that was too hard when people used to use hardcopy
| terminals (actual ttys), although even there it possibly
| could have done better than it actually does.
|
| But certainly by the time people had softcopy terminals
| with cursor positioning (like the DEC VT series and its
| emulators), a better experience could have been possible.
| For example, what if the functionality of curses was
| actually in the tty driver, so if another process wrote
| to the terminal it would appear as a new window, which
| could then be dismissed without altering the output of
| the underlying program? Or, to avoid putting too much in
| kernel space, the tty subsystem could live in a user-
| space daemon (possibly one process per terminal), and
| then applications would talk to it over IPC
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >Or, to avoid putting too much in kernel space, the tty
| subsystem could live in a user-space daemon
|
| On Unix, that's what "pseudo ttys" are for (i.e.
| /dev/pty*)!
|
| For example, that's how Emacs lets you run multiple shell
| sessions in sub-processes, such that they have full job
| control (i.e. ^Z and ^C works to interrupt or stop sub-
| processes in the shell, since they're handled by the
| TTY). That's also how xterm and the Mac Terminal emulator
| work, providing the shell sub-process with its own pseudo
| tty with job control, even though there's not a
| corresponding /dev/tty* serial port driver. It's like a
| virtual serial port using a device driver with "TTY Line
| Discipline" but without an actual TTY.
|
| https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/tty/tty_ldisc.html
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_discipline
|
| ChatGPT correctly explains it better than I can or
| anything I can find with google:
|
| Unix pseudo ttys, or pseudo-terminal devices, such as
| /dev/pty*, are a key mechanism in Unix and Unix-like
| operating systems for enabling communication between
| different processes. Pseudo-terminals are designed to
| provide the same interface and functionality as physical
| terminals or terminal emulators. They consist of a pair
| of devices, the master side (e.g., /dev/ptmx) and the
| slave side (e.g., /dev/pts/N), which are used to
| establish a bidirectional communication channel.
|
| Pseudo-terminals are useful for running programs that
| expect to interact with a terminal, even when there is no
| actual terminal involved. This is particularly important
| for terminal-based applications like Emacs, which can run
| sub-shells within their own window or buffer.
|
| Emacs, an extensible and highly customizable text editor,
| can leverage pseudo-terminals to run sub-shells, like
| bash or zsh, within its own environment. [Omitted
| detailed instruction on how Emacs sets up a pty for a
| sub-shell.]
|
| By utilizing pseudo-terminals, Emacs can provide an
| integrated environment where users can work with both
| text files and interactive shell sessions seamlessly.
| This enhances productivity and enables users to harness
| the full power of Emacs' editing and navigation features
| while working with the shell.
| skissane wrote:
| > >Or, to avoid putting too much in kernel space, the tty
| subsystem could live in a user-space daemon
|
| > On Unix, that's what "pseudo ttys" are for (i.e.
| /dev/pty*)!
|
| No, that's not what I was talking about. On just about
| every Unix, even with ptys, the line discipline code (or
| STREAMS modules for SysV-derived systems) still runs in
| kernel mode.
|
| On Linux, you could implement something like what I was
| talking about with CUSE - have a character device which
| implemented the termios ioctls in a user-space daemon
| instead of in the kernel tty driver. That's very
| different from how most Unix systems implement ptys
|
| But what I was actually thinking about was a daemon which
| exposed over IPC an API a lot richer than termios.
| Something closer to curses.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Back when I was at university the x servers on our
| terminals were not secured, and other people could open
| output on your terminal. A favourite was a program that
| sent cockroaches scurrying around the screen whenever you
| moved a window.
| vidarh wrote:
| My university got a bunch of SGI Indy's for cheap as a
| marketing ploy by the importer, and everyone could log in
| to all the machines. It became a lot of peoples first
| experience of the privacy implications of webcams (they
| had them built in) and taught a lot of people the value
| of paying attention to the privacy covers.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Ha, ha! Same here... The classical joke here was to send
| an xkill command: next mouse click will terminate
| whatever window was under the cursor.
| tryauuum wrote:
| also wall(1)
| andrewSC wrote:
| Also w(1)
| darkwater wrote:
| And write(1)
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Nothing beats walling the undergrad project server.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident"
| of March 31, 1987.
|
| It was waaaay more than just reported to the local
| sysadmin, and almost got UCB kicked off the ARPANET.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard#rwall_incide
| nt
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138
|
| Jordan Hubbard wrote: "One of the people who received my
| message was Dennis Perry, the Inspector General of the
| ARPAnet (in the Pentagon), and he wasn't exactly pleased.
| (I hear his Interleaf windows got scribbled on)"
|
| >Here's the explanation he sent to hackers_guild, and
| some replies from old net boys like Milo Medin (who said
| the program manager of the Arpanet in the Information
| Science and Technology Office of DARPA Dennis G. Perry
| said they would kick UCB off the Arpanet if it ever
| happened again), Mark Crispin (who presciently proposed
| cash rewards for discovering and disclosing security
| bugs), and Dennis G. Perry himself:
|
| (See https://www.ndia.org/events/2021/8/18/1341---
| swif-2021/speak... if you don't know who Milo Medin is!)
|
| Milo S. Medin replied:
|
| >Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a
| pencil pusher in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of
| DARPA that deals with all CS issues (including funding
| for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...). Calling him part
| of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't win
| you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the
| Pentagon last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with
| Mike Corrigan (the man at DoD/OSD responsible for all of
| DDN), and a couple other such types discussing Internet
| management issues, when your little incident came up.
| Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying
| something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this
| happened again. There were also reports about the DCA
| management types really putting on the heat about turning
| on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates
| are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company
| can hold them off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan
| mentioned that this was the sort of thing that gets
| networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong people
| with this move!
|
| >Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this
| hole be patched in the next release. People generally pay
| attention to such people.
|
| Jordan's infamous rwall incident is the kind of thing
| that might have triggered the rumored "explosive bolts"
| the Defense Communication Agency was once talking about
| installing, that would violently separate the MILNET and
| ARPANET in case of national emergency.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171294
|
| >DCA must have the ability to partition the ARPANET and
| MILNET in case of an "emergency", and having non-DCA
| controlled paths between the nets prevents that. There
| was talk some time ago about putting explosive bolts in
| the mailbridges that would be triggered by destruct
| packets... That idea didn't get far though...
| psychphysic wrote:
| So many acronyms
| itronitron wrote:
| remarkably few, considering the organizations involved :(
| ww520 wrote:
| Speaking of interaction with the admin. Back in the days when I
| was in school, the computer lab ran a Honeywell mainframe with
| terminals. I wrote a program emulating the logon screen to
| intercept the username and password of the unsuspecting
| students logging on and to email them to me. I was going to
| post the list of all the usernames and passwords at the end of
| the semester on the wall. I dubbed it the Fishing project with
| my friends (yes, that's before all the phishing activities went
| rampant).
|
| I collected dozens of usernames and passwords before the
| professor of my CS class stopped me one day after class and
| said, you better stop whatever you're doing. Apparently the
| system saved the typing of all sessions and the admin actually
| went through all of them.
|
| The next semester all the terminals had a physical switch
| installed that had to be pressed to reset the terminal before
| logon. That killed any running program. I was glad to play a
| small part in improving the security of my school lab.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| This is more or less how I started to administer the unix
| cluster at my uni in 1993 as a student.
|
| I wrote a fake su program that woul d impersonate the real
| one, asked the admin to help with something, got the root
| password and went to them to tell them the password a few
| days later.
|
| And offered my help in exchange of a seat at their shared
| office and my own workstation. They were glad to get someone
| because unix was new to them (they were using Novell). It was
| new to me too but I learned a huge amount of things that were
| actually bootstrap my IT career after my PhD.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| That's quite similar to my story. While at high school, I
| wrote an innocent program to open the terminals at the nearby
| college for chat sessions - nothing nefarious. The sysadm saw
| what I did and realised I could use it to phish passwords.
| Next time I went to use the computer lab, the terminals were
| locked down.
|
| Showing my age but this would have been 1984 or so... a
| remarkably early contribution to security?
| ww520 wrote:
| So we all are ;)
| elashri wrote:
| I remember the first time to have this message was at my first
| time using CERN lxplus during my undergrad. I was worried that
| people will think I am stupid to try "sudo apt-get" there. It was
| a mistake as I had several terminal sessions and forgot which one
| was the local.
|
| Anyway fast forward today. I know the answer to the question to
| whom usually this notification gets sent. They forward it via
| SMTP server to the person on computing shift (at least for some
| of the experiments) based on the experiment this person (who
| tried sudo) account belongs too. probably also some IT email.
|
| Anyway it is stressful for new and young people. but honestly I
| never read them. I have email rule to put them inside specific
| folder I don't usually open.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The first time I saw this message I was on my own danged system
| and I was still momentarily alarmed, hahaha. Common sense
| asserted itself pretty quickly of course.
| justinator wrote:
| So no one checks these reports?
|
| No wonder we've had so many high profile breaches.
|
| Maybe this is what all those layoffs are about.
| steeleyespan wrote:
| A+ joke.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Only low-key, though. A sysadmin not monitoring authlog /
| admin-mail is a huge security smell.
|
| The fact that our infrastructure STINKS of this is one of the
| major indications we do not take security seriously.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Fortunately we solved this; we don't have any system admin
| to not watch these logs.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Not true - the reports are checked. See https://xkcd.com/838
|
| (Sorry for posting this twice. It was just too relevant here)
| moogly wrote:
| My favorite message I got in Ubuntu in 2008 (I still have a
| screenshot of it):
|
| > Could not grab your mouse.
|
| > A malicious client may be eavesdropping on your session or you
| may have just clicked a menu or some application just decided to
| get focus.
|
| > Try again.
|
| > [Close]
| IshKebab wrote:
| I suspect a lot of readers here will not understand what's
| hilarious about this.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I remember getting something similar-sounding on modern Ubuntu
| a few weeks ago.
| bvinc wrote:
| This sounds like an xwindows thing. The way popup menu windows
| work in x, is the program grabs all keyboard and mouse events.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah I think nobody checked any reports since a good 25 years
| now.
| ec109685 wrote:
| One of the most privileged processes on the system and no unit or
| functional tests need to be updated with this change. Sigh.
| enw wrote:
| This always surprises me.
|
| How come there are seemingly zero tests for what's essentially
| critical infrastructure?
|
| How do you make sure things keep working? How do you prevent
| regressions as team members change and tribal knowledge and
| intuition is lost? How do you ensure all future humans working
| on the project can make meaningful changes with confidence?
| oblio wrote:
| Short answer: you don't, you brute force testing with your
| user base and you get lucky until you don't, plus you don't
| care because you're too entrenched.
|
| That's how 99% of these old timey tools work (coreutils, SSH,
| SSL, etc). They're getting better but you can definitely feel
| that they're managed by old hackers that predate CI/CD.
| nixcraft wrote:
| Boy, I made so many memes around sudo. I can't believe they
| removed it. I mean, sudo does log messages in /var/log/secure or
| /var/log/auth.log on Linux when something fails or is executed
| successfully, depending on security policies. The default on most
| distro is to log messages.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Can't be done. That program is in the fossil record; change the
| error message and you're going to break a thousand unknown
| workflows that are relying on detecting that string (because
| string detection is the only solution they have to get nuanced
| information on the nature of the error).
|
| ETA: Oh wait it was actually committed? Color me surprised.
| chaxor wrote:
| Yeah I _relied_ on that over heating to occur when pressing
| Ctrl for too long :D
|
| (Hopefully someone understands the reference)
| encodedrose wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1172/ !!
| dawidpotocki wrote:
| Don't worry, I have a fix just for you. Though it defaults to
| spacebar, so you would have to change the keysym yourself.
|
| https://git.dawidpotocki.com/dawid/xkcd1172/about/
|
| GH mirror: https://github.com/dawidpotocki/xkcd1172
| gnarbarian wrote:
| I say they should keep it for old times sake
| remram wrote:
| (February 2022)
| technick wrote:
| Why are we changing things that aren't broken? Did this message
| trigger some snowflake?
| benjaminmikiten wrote:
| Per the commit message:
|
| > Whether or not sudo sends email is now configurable, so the
| warning may not be accurate. It is also confusing to the user
| since they will not know who the incident is being reported to.
| klyrs wrote:
| I've always been amused by this, because I usually get it on
| single user systems (mine own) without mail. It makes me picture
| some shady office in a bunker in central Nevada, where
| undeliverable incident reports end up in dusty filing cabinets,
| indexed by incorrect passwords.
| isomorphic- wrote:
| Guys. This commit was made Feb 3, 2022. Stop spamming the GitHub
| repo with dumb memes. It's not Twitter. The comments are for
| developer collaboration.
| fergie wrote:
| What does the "F" mean in the comments?
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Alright, did I tell my college sysadmin story already? This is
| the perfect place to drop it.
|
| 1990, freshman in college, Pascal class on AT&T Unix SVR3 3B2
| cluster named "earth", "wind", and "fire". We'd just learned our
| way around "vi" and how to "uvapc" our Pascal source into a.out.
|
| I discovered anonymous ftp, and "make", and I quickly rose to
| become the gaming king of Pascal class. I had ularn, nethack,
| megs and megs of games crammed in my no-quota $HOME, and I'd
| opened permissions for everyone else to access and play them. I
| often chit-chatted with a classmate or two over "write" or
| "ytalk".
|
| Not content to merely play games, I became mischievous with the
| system and its inner workings. I created a .profile and a .plan,
| the latter of which used VT100 cursor escape sequences to self-
| modify the screen, such as changing my $HOME to "/" and I also
| made a boastful comment about having root access.
|
| It was all in good fun, and then came the day that I discovered
| /etc/passwd and I attempted to "su" to every single system
| account I found listed. I mean some of their passwords were just
| "*" so they must've been wide open!!1
|
| I soon received ominous, chilling email from the unseen sysadmin
| of the whole cluster. He described to me everything I'd done up
| to this point, and he informed me that saying I have root access
| is like telling airport officials that I have a bomb. That point
| definitely drove it home to me as a young and dumb hacker.
|
| So, for the rest of my short college career, while I did some
| silly "extra-curricular" things with my own compute resources, I
| was careful to not try and break system security, or even say
| that I had, for fear of the wrath of the unseen sysadmin.
| devenvdev wrote:
| My similar story: I wrote a script that tries all the words
| from a spellchecker I found as passwords for each user (a
| really naive dictionary attack). The angry admin did came as
| apparently each wrong attempt generated a beep on some station
| in their room (these were dos times iirc and the admins were
| just high school kids).
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > AT&T Unix SVR3 3B2 cluster named "earth", "wind", and "fire".
|
| Not related to sudo, but this brought back a memory of the
| cluster I had access to during my college internship. 6
| computers, I don't remember what kind or vendor. Named after
| the starter Pokemon for generations 1 & 2. They were in the
| rear of the room behind a cage I did not have a key for.
|
| One day a sysadmin came into the room asking "Uhhh... I'm
| looking for a... totodile?" The way he pronounced totodile made
| it clear he had no idea what a pokemon was.
|
| He had to remove it and replace something, didn't really give
| us any details. A few days later he brought the server back and
| hooked it back up to the cluster. The very first thing we did
| was rename it to Croconaw. (The evolved form of Totodile).
| Aeolun wrote:
| So did you have root access? I can't figure out if you attempt
| to su all the system accounts worked or not.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Nowadays /etc/passwd is world-readable and passwords are in
| /etc/shadow but perhaps /etc/passwd used to store the hashed
| passwords as well.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I, of course, did not have root access or any access that I
| shouldn't have had.
|
| /etc/passwd indeed stored the hashes in SVR3, and there was
| no such thing as /etc/shadow. I was naive enough not to
| understand hashes, and so I figured that those jumbled
| letters in the file had to be the actual passwords, and if
| "*" was in an entry then "*" was, of course, the password!
| Why didn't it work?!!?
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| If you read the source of 'cat' and 'more' you'll see
| that if they are reading /etc/passwd they replace the
| passwords of system users with '*', unless you are uid 0.
|
| When 'less' was created, there was a bug where when you
| scrolled upwards the passwords would be revealed, so it
| was decided that the passwords should be replaced with
| actual asterisks and stored in individual files per-user.
|
| For security, these files were given access rights only
| for the owning user, and immediately deleted, with an
| encoded copy of their inode number being stored in
| /etc/shadow.
|
| Fun fact: forced password changes were initially
| introduced when disks were getting full and deleted
| inodes of user password files were due to be overwritten.
| "For security reasons" was correct but misinterpreted.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > If you read the source of 'cat' and 'more' you'll see
| that if they are reading /etc/passwd they replace the
| passwords of system users with '*', unless you are uid 0.
|
| That sounds so wrong, anything from a user-written
| program, `ed`, etc to a symlink/hardlink could read the
| password.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Sounds wrong because it is wrong, pure unadulterated
| intentional B.S.; don't know why the commenter decided to
| yank our chains like this.
|
| I believe there is a meme in chat rooms where trolls get
| unsuspecting users to reveal their passwords by
| convincing them that the chat replaces it with "***" and
| so forth. Perhaps the GP is riffing on this.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Back in the day, not only did /etc/passwd contain
| (unsalted) hashed passwords, but many publicly accessible
| hosts were configured to allow anonymous FTP and let you
| browse the entire fileystem. I would never do this myself,
| naturally, but people collected those things and run crack
| on for days to get passwords for accounts.
|
| Man, the internet's no fun anymore.
| ww520 wrote:
| Schools are supposed to be the place where students can break
| things and break rules. It's part of the education.
| notatoad wrote:
| learning that if you get caught you're going to be held
| accountable for your actions is also part of the education.
|
| it's not as if they executed OP. telling a kid to stop
| screwing around is pretty reasonable.
| fy20 wrote:
| During college in the mid 2000s I discovered that the
| network share with all corporate data was accessible (read
| only) to everyone.
|
| The only way it was not immediately obvious was because
| only sub folders were assigned a drive letter, and the
| network share was hidden in the UI. I found a way around
| that in the Windows open dialog and then was able to
| trigger Explorer to the top level directory.
|
| The share also contained private data of applicants (names,
| addresses, date of birth, education history) which was most
| concerning to us.
|
| With some friends we wrote a document showing what we found
| (not explaining how to do it) and posted it to an internal
| message board. We also sent copies via email to our IT
| teacher, sysadmin and the principle. Shortly after the
| sysadmin invited us for a chat and basically told us not to
| do that again.
|
| A couple of hours later we were invited to the principles
| office. The principle was away at the time, but the vice
| principle - who wanted to make a name for himself -
| immediately suspended us all and said he'd discuss it with
| the principle but said most likely we would be expelled,
| and they may need to involve the police.
|
| Our main concern in the post we made was that personal data
| was effectively publically accessible (to anyone who
| connects to ethernet - you didn't even need to log in).
| Even before GDPR, our country had very strong data
| protection laws which this would have breached.
|
| A few days later a parent sent a letter to the principle,
| effectively restating what we said, with added threats of
| reporting them for violating data protection of minors.
| Strangely after that the issue was dropped and we were
| allowed back...
| Fnoord wrote:
| Which goes to show us this computer thing is a learning
| experience for schools as well. We've come a long way
| since, and with things like ML we get the same
| experience.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Completely lost on me "babying kids and not showing them
| that actions can have consequences" is fetishised as soon
| as computers are involved. I guess because we all grew up
| doing this stuff.
|
| As an adult that writes software used by a lot of students
| in a classroom environment, I am glad to see that the
| spirit it still alive whenever I have a Sentry error come
| through indicating quite clearly that someone is trying to
| cheat by dicking around in dev tools. However I'm also
| certainly going to make the troublemakers shit their pants
| with a strongly worded console.log().
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| For those wondering where the reports go, under systemd-based
| linux distributions ideally you can get them with this:
| sudo journalctl /bin/sudo
|
| Historically speaking however the sysadmin with access to the
| 'mail' command would be able to run that and see mail delivered
| to root@localhost for these reports. I think at least OpenBSD
| still does things this way [1], but they moved away from sudo
| YEARS ago now [2]
|
| [1] https://man.openbsd.org/security.8
|
| [2] https://man.openbsd.org/doas
| evilspammer wrote:
| I haven't used journalctl in a while - do you mind explaining
| how it works with a binary path? Does it report all system
| logging that came from that executable, as if it were a service
| file?
| teddyh wrote:
| The systemd journal logs not only raw strings and priorities
| (like legacy syslog), but a large number of metadata fields
| for each message. One of these fields is the name of the
| executable which generated the message. The command
| journalctl /bin/su
|
| can, to avoid ambiguity, also be written as
| journalctl _EXE=/bin/su
|
| See systemd.journal-fields(7) for more information: https://m
| anpages.debian.org/stable/systemd/systemd.journal-f...
| tryauuum wrote:
| wow! finally something neat from journald
| dale_glass wrote:
| Finally? The thing has an amazing amount of useful
| features. Let's see:
|
| * Automatic log cleanup to a desired storage size.
|
| * Automatic compression, transparent decompression.
|
| * Filtering by date, or boot number.
|
| * Log shipping, ability to see interleaved logs from
| multiple machines.
|
| * Microsecond precision for timestamps, multiple
| timestamp types and output formats.
|
| * Output in JSON or multiple other formats, for trivial
| parsing.
|
| * Cursors, for easily continuing parsing where you left
| off.
|
| * Applications can log custom fields. No need to extract
| data from strings then.
|
| * Captures logs that happen inside initramfs before / is
| mounted.
|
| * Docker containers can log to the host's journald
|
| It's pretty darn nice, really.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Or you set up your system so mail for root gets redirected to
| an smtp server with an actual inbox read by actual people
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah, I kind of lament them removing this warning if I'm
| going to be honest. It feels like something such as that
| should be more common best practice.
|
| Of course decent log collection/monitoring should also be
| able to catch authlog stuff and alert accordingly and I'm
| sure most organizations rely on solutions like that instead
| of letting things get lost in email
| stefncb wrote:
| It's only removed if sudo doesn't send mail. It still warns
| if it's relevant.
| can16358p wrote:
| Isn't it leaking detail about internal policy about
| whether incorrect sudoing is getting reported or not
| though?
| freedomben wrote:
| Is there more to the change than the linked commit?
| Because if not, looking at the code change I don't see
| how you could possibly be correct. There is no additional
| logic/branching that could be checking whether sudo sends
| mail or not, just a string change.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It was added back in a later commit but only prints if
| the mail is configured.
| freedomben wrote:
| Nice, thanks that's very useful info
| bo0tzz wrote:
| This is correct, and was added back a few weeks later in
| https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
| electroly wrote:
| This is a pretty short diff and it clearly does NOT do
| that, unless you're saying they went back later in
| another commit to add this. They removed the message in
| all situations. The string "This incident will be
| reported" has been removed from the source code; it could
| not possibly print that message now.
| simse wrote:
| The warning is added back here: https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
| fafqg wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be correct.
| asveikau wrote:
| I feel like that warning comes right out of the era of
| multi-user machines with unprivileged shell accounts. That
| era is largely gone. Today, someone, possibly a less
| knowledgeable user, runs sudo on their single user laptop
| that they completely own outright, and may get confused who
| they're being "reported" to.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Funny if you live in a free country
|
| Potentially terrifying if you don't
| wkat4242 wrote:
| To themselves of course. That's pretty clear.
|
| But there is a renewed focus on corporate laptops to
| remove admin rights on windows. Not really because the
| user is not being trusted, but because malware has a lot
| more options for bypassing EDR/antimalware and
| persistence when it runs with admin rights.
|
| I'm sure this will come to Linux too at some point.
| ctoth wrote:
| Completely this, I was so confused by OP because naturally
| this is how my playbooks configure my systems.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I think this is mostly relevant to how confused and
| sometimes downright mortified it makes new users of sudo
| when they encounter it
|
| In other words, don't think well-configured ansible
| playbooks are most people's first exposure to linux
| although it does sound like you're doing things right which
| is nice to hear
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I was surprised to start getting emails about my cron tasks
| once I set up my mail server. It's neat.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I've always felt it was a very bad practice not to do it.
|
| In a lot of companies but one they avoided it for fear of
| receiving emails. On that only company that did it, we made
| sure that mailbox was clean by actually having a look when
| cron scripts were crapping out or when users failed sudo
| repeatedly and contacted the users. It was a much better
| housekeeping than log on a box and see there are hundreds
| of unread emails but dismissing it like most do.
| evilspammer wrote:
| I think it's a fear of _sending_ emails. You could
| accidentally trigger a cronjob that sends a bunch of
| emails and gets you put on spam filters. Error reporting
| for cron is, of course, important; but the builtin email
| reporting is best used for the local machine/network. A
| more flexible and robust solution calls out to an API
| that handles transactional emails/push notifications with
| debouncing, escalation policies, etc.
| hiepph wrote:
| Well, it depends! Because what you need to see more often
| is errors. You don't want successful notifications "spam"
| more often than error notifications.
| isomorphic- wrote:
| So, we're posting commits from almost 2 years ago as if they just
| happened today? Half of the comments in here can't tell it's an
| ancient commit; some people say celebrating saying "Glad they're
| finally doing this." What?
|
| Bit ridiculous to see all the pointless spam/graffiti in the
| comments on that commit now.
| Reason077 wrote:
| The message was actually re-added (in modified, clearer form) in
| a subsequent commit:
|
| https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
| vbitz wrote:
| Our IT Admins used to post the reports to a Twitter account (with
| usernames removed).
|
| https://twitter.com/moss_sudo
| trollingagain wrote:
| The infringement has been backtraced and you will be reported to
| the cyberpolice
| smashfizzle2 wrote:
| [dead]
| wolfd wrote:
| When I was in uni, the computer science school actually did
| occasionally check these reports. Specifically, a guy named Chris
| checked them. Some friends of mine apparently used this to send
| him messages.
|
| `sudo hi chris`
| gvurrdon wrote:
| Similarly, at a place I used to work, messages such as "sudo
| echo 'Hey John, please would you chmod -R a+r on
| /storage/data/filename.txt, thanks!'" were used. This usually
| resulted in irate "Stop that! You have to submit a ticket!"
| emails.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| This would make a great (inaccurate) clickbait story about how
| millenials (or insert group) found the message too
| confronting/authoritarian.
| its-summertime wrote:
| Stressful message to see back when I was a clueless child. I'm
| glad its getting removed.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I had a similar reaction to Windows 95's "An illegal operation
| has occurred." I remember wondering whether the police were on
| their way.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Who is General Protection, and why is he at fault for my
| programs crashing?
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| His second-in-command, Colonel Panic, is to be equally
| feared.
| nullc wrote:
| A friend of mine ran a multi-line BBS out of his home when he
| lived with his parents.
|
| One day he came home and his parents sat him down to discuss
| the "illegal activities" he was up to with the computers. He
| was sweating bullets about the secret warez section of the
| BBS until eventually he figured out that it was due to an
| illegal operation crash message!
|
| (In that case it was probably desqview rather than windows)
| sergiomattei wrote:
| My brother pulled this prank on me when I was first learning
| batch file.
|
| I thought I was going to jail.
| glhaynes wrote:
| I got my first computer when I was about 6. It would boot to
| BASIC if there wasn't a floppy disk inserted. I typed
| something random and got back "SYNTAX ERROR". I wasn't old
| enough to know what either sin or taxes were, but my
| impression was they were both real bad.
| [deleted]
| jon-wood wrote:
| Way back when my Dad worked from home, and had what I think
| was a Macintosh Classic II provided by his employer. I'd
| occasionally be allowed to play the games on it, mostly the
| pair matching one, which on one occasion crashed. Back then
| the crash dialog featured an icon of a bomb with the fuse
| lit, which caused me to panic thinking I'd caused the
| computer to blow up. Thankfully I hadn't, and I believe that
| computer is still in his attic somewhere.
| Kye wrote:
| I have genuinely had to reassure panicked relatives over
| this.
| politelemon wrote:
| Actually it's been brought back. https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
| shpx wrote:
| Next step is to remove users/groups/sudo from Linux/UNIX
| entirely. I'm one person using the computer, running software I
| trust. I don't need it.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I suspect if you look in your passwd file you'll find lots of
| users. Does nginx really need to read the files in your home
| directory?
| bmacho wrote:
| Why, yes. Imagine you are in flow, and you want to show a
| file to nginx, but you can't. Better give root (and user)
| rights to nginx when you set up your system.
| scraptor wrote:
| Very few computers running nginx have human user accounts
| with more than dotfiles in the home directory. Meanwhile
| desktops run everything on the same account because defining
| usable security policies between users is basically
| impossible.
| sph wrote:
| Just login as root. Not that I'd recommend it.
| radiator wrote:
| So ...puppy Linux?
| lxe wrote:
| The "this incident will be reported" message always struck me as
| having the same vibe as the "provided by the management for your
| protection" labels they have on toilet seat covers.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Can someone share even _one_ story where sudo reporting these
| "incidents" was helpful?
|
| This feature seems to come from a world where elite hackers
| simply repeat the same sudo command over and over hoping it will
| eventually work.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> Can someone share even one story where sudo reporting these
| "incidents" was helpful?_
|
| No, not a single one.
| gtirloni wrote:
| HN puzzles me with these downvotes. I have not a single story
| to share about sudo reporting the incidents and that being
| useful and I've managed *NIX systems for 2 decades now.
| Anyway, looks like there's some people out there there feel
| very strong about this.
| rbanffy wrote:
| "And, if we did, we'd have to kill you."
| salawat wrote:
| Fool, I have signal handlers defined for all signals! You
| won't be rid of me that easily!
| hoodmane wrote:
| Yes. More or less the first time I used Linux was on a fedora
| workstation at my desk at MIT. The very nice sysadmin down the
| hall sent me an email just a bit later saying "We see you were
| trying to install x program. We installed it for you." I
| understand that this is a very rare experience but the first
| time I saw that message, a helpful person _was_ actually
| looking at these reports.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Does this kind of sysadmin still exists? (or do they even
| still have the freedom to be so kind?)
|
| I cannot really imagine that happening today, at least not in
| "professional" context.
| stcg wrote:
| It still happens, a fellow student and friend of mine got
| this response ('installed it for you') about two years ago
| at Radboud University Nijmegen after entering `sudo apt
| install nasm`
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Glad to hear that. I really like that style and attitude.
| It shows competence, humor and willingness to help.
|
| My admins were sadly mostly of the grumpy type, who did
| not like change, or initiative to solve peoples problem.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Yes....?
|
| If I see info in logs and it could help a user (my userbase
| is internal), I reach out to them. I've coached a number of
| them through improving something on their end, even if it's
| not a critical change.
|
| And I'm by no means some sysadmin wizard.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "And I'm by no means some sysadmin wizard. "
|
| It is more about the general attitude, so thank you, for
| being a helpful IT admin.
| antognini wrote:
| It sounds like you were able to successfully run sudo, just
| with a somewhat longer latency.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| I have a small server that some of my friends have accounts on.
| When they accidentally (or not!) try to use sudo (often this
| happens with a "curl | sh" thing) I like to be informed.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| There's no need to update the copyright year, but I do like it as
| a canary to tell somebody the file has been updated lately.
| [deleted]
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Aw - can't we just make it configurable?
| smashfizzle2 wrote:
| [dead]
| pram wrote:
| I was always disappointed it never summoned some grumpy graybeard
| unix admin from a dark server room basement to give me a chiding
| lecture.
| tomatodevice wrote:
| I receive mails from sudo incidents generated by my users, I
| check the boxes except the gray beard.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I shave, I try to keep my demeanor as gray as possible.
| bonzini wrote:
| What about the red dress and flying reindeer?
| duxup wrote:
| I would have taken the opportunity to ask them a few questions.
|
| But that's probably why they don't come out to lecture.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Can't believe nobody has reposted this yet:
|
| https://xkcd.com/838
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I just assumed they went to Ken Thompson directly.
| slim wrote:
| it's in the github issue itself :)
| john_shafthair wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180426220342if_/http://assets....
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I got a chiding lecture like that from some skinny UUG-type
| security admins, by manually shutting down my HP-UX workstation
| in a university CS lab. I had reached behind it and flipped the
| power switch.
|
| I tried to flip it back on just afterward, to resume my
| business (lol) but found that my login was blocked with a
| message...come up to security in room 300-something and talk to
| us to get your account un-suspended.
|
| The issue leading to the frantic shutdown goes as follows:
|
| I had been browsing some of JWZ's online journals in
| Netscape...the old about:jwz trick.
|
| Within those pages, there's a linked audio clip of the fake
| *rgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally".
|
| I clicked on the link not realizing what would happen, and of
| course this passionate audio clip played at more or less full
| volume to a computer lab full of university students from
| China.
|
| (They were extremely "I didn't notice that" about the whole
| thing, but I was beet red and frantically scanning the room for
| anyone who I could possibly nervously laugh with...)
|
| Back then Netscape didn't show any audio controls that I could
| find anywhere when clips like that played, which was also a
| really frustrating part of this. I guess it just handed off the
| audio to some process which I could have found via `top` if I
| had the time.
|
| There was also an internal speaker, nothing with a manual
| volume control. Great!
|
| Anyway, I went upstairs, got my lecture about other people who
| could have had sessions terminated while working on the same
| workstation, got the login back, and fortunately none of the
| Chinese students seemed to have let my er..._BYU_ CS security
| admins...know about the situation in the lab. lol.
|
| (No longer a practicing Mormon; still think CDE is cool)
|
| Edit: Just for the memories...at the same time, I had a PT job
| doing university IT support on a Novell network, and we
| supported, among other places (the MTC, the laundry, Creamery--
| PHEW those amazing chocolate malt shakes--but not so phew the
| time the creamery's huge 1K+ gal. milk vats leaked and there
| was a foot of standing milk in our PCs there, etc.), the
| married student housing computer labs.
|
| Colloquially labeled by my boss and others as the "rabbit
| hutches"...
|
| This was still pretty early days for the web, and I remember
| periodically getting frantic voicemails from newly-married
| folks.
|
| A common version of the voice message would be something like,
| "Hi, uh...I was in the married student housing lab...trying to
| book airline tickets for my husband to fly home and see his
| mom...anyway (tearful quivering voice starts)...russian porn
| came up I guess? I mean I am just guessing...uh, so
| anyway...(crying harder, phew)...the lab assistant gave me your
| number, and here's my number, if we need to talk about this or
| anything, call me I guess?"
|
| I can't imagine what those students must have felt when the lab
| assistant just shrugged their shoulders regarding "what to do
| about this" and gave them somebody's office number to call. Up
| the chain with you!
|
| Gestapo-level perceptions would always tend to kick in at that
| point...and you had to maintain an ecclesiastical endorsement
| to continue studies there, so this was a pretty big deal.
| Anything involving porn was always at the potentially-
| terminate-your-entire-university-experience level.
|
| (Often the calls to those labs were pretty funny though. Like a
| toddler put a dorito inside of a CD-ROM drive, bring your
| hemostat, things like that. Afterward we'd get a Jamba Juice,
| or get a free cafeteria meal from a really nice food-services
| manager, chat about Everquest, etc.)
| HieToKolob wrote:
| Also former BYU EE major (and former Mormon), very early
| 2000's. I recall fondly those HP-UX boxen running CDE. I
| really liked that UX. For some reason it really appealed to
| me as an engineering student. I was very active in the UUG.
| At one point I lived in a married student housing unit. Some
| of the kids fucking incessantly in those units could have
| stood to make sure their windows were closed. But I digress.
| Story time!
|
| This was in the early days of Napster. Out of curiosity I
| downloaded and unzipped it in my home directory. I think I
| started downloading some random file but terminated it before
| it finished. Several weeks later when trying to log into my
| account, it didn't work. When I asked the skinny kid in the
| admin room about it, he lectured me about having the Napster
| software unzipped in my home directory before telling me to
| delete it as he re-enabled my account.
|
| I was generally low-trust when it came to anything
| administration-related at my school, so I kept my own backups
| of all my shit. That ended up saving my ass. The HP-UX boxen
| were configured to dump huge core files by default on
| segfaults. The predictable thing happened as random widely-
| ignored core files proliferated throughout student home
| directories. I think about 2 weeks before the end of the
| semester, some low-level admin kid tried writing a script
| that recursively walks all the students' home directories and
| deletes core files to free up disk space. Not wanting the
| script to interfere with regular workloads during the day, he
| had it run as a cron job in the middle of the night. The kid
| fucked up the script, and it instead deleted all the contents
| of everyone's directory for the whole goddamned department.
| Well, effectively. I think when the admins got into work the
| next morning they realized that shit was completely fucked
| and killed the script. But massive damage had already been
| done. Two weeks before the end of the semester when final
| class projects were all coming due. Also, the backups hadn't
| been working, and nobody had been giving a fuck. Until then.
|
| I had a friend in another lab in the CS department who ran a
| Tor exit node from his workstation. Fast forward a few weeks,
| and his advisor sat him down and, with a really serious tone,
| asked if there's anything he wanted to talk about with
| respect to his usage of the lab computers. Apparently some of
| the shit the Tor exit nodes were accessing made some waves in
| the department. (Bearing in mind that BYU is a _very_
| religiously conservative institution.) He somehow survived
| that incident, but he went out into the Real World (there 's
| a pun here -- you should look up the whole Julie Stoffer
| debacle sometime) not long after of his own accord.
|
| Then there were the students who abused the lab laser
| printers to print wedding invitations. All the fucking time.
| IIRC, it was only 10 cents a page, so it was a steal to print
| really nice-looking stuff at the time. Even better were the
| students who fed not-safe-for-laser-printer shit into the
| them that would melt and gunk up the insides.
|
| Some assholes would often lock the screen rather than log out
| in order to "reserve" an HP-UX workstation for themselves.
| That got annoying when things were busy. I'd do a hard reboot
| whenever I ran across an unoccupied locked workstation.
| Apparently there were some grad students whose work that they
| were distributing across several nodes as background jobs
| would get fucked when the workstations were hard-rebooted.
| Personally I think that should have been a hard lesson in a
| "cattle, not pets" approach to distributed systems.
| Especially when there is effectively no physical security for
| the compute nodes.
|
| There are also UUG stories. One of my favorite is when the
| UUG was handing out "Software for Starving Students" CDs full
| of OSS software in the student quad. They ended up getting
| reported to the "authorities" for distributing software for
| free.
| astrange wrote:
| > the married student housing computer labs.
|
| This is a good garden-path sentence.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Learned something new today!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
| amelius wrote:
| Your parser needs more lookahead.
| themadturk wrote:
| They have a pretty amazing creamery at Washington State
| University as well... have a milkshake after lunch, you won't
| need dinner. Go Cougs!
| lakomen wrote:
| I miss those times, thanks for reminding
| zubairshaik wrote:
| What does UUG stand for? That's the only acronym that ChatGPT
| didn't give me a guess for from your comment.
|
| The other guesses were: CDE - Common Desktop Environment, MTC
| - Missionary Training Center.
|
| GPT is much better than web search for this, I'll say that.
| It's ability to use context is invaluable.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| This is an interesting example of the Clever Hans
| Phenomenon. You think you're comparing GPT and Google
| equally but you're actually giving GPT much more manual
| help. A search as simple as "UUG acronym" gives me the
| answer in a box at the top: "Unix Users Group" (tested in
| incognito).
|
| GPT is useful, but there's an annoying tendency of it's
| proponents to promote it with examples they haven't
| validated.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Interesting. The same search term returns "UUG is an
| acronym for: Uniface Users Group. Universal Underwriters
| Group." in the top box for me. Also in incognito.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I get those too, all from the wiki disambig page.
|
| > UUG is an acronym for: Uniface Users Group. Universal
| Underwriters Group. Unix User Group.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| https://www.facebook.com/groups/byu.uug/
|
| This user group was already in place by the time Linux came
| along, so you had the UUG doing Red Hat boxed set giveaways
| and such. There was a ton of excitement about Linux and not
| as much about Unix at that point. Then a bit more proper-
| Unix excitement when OS X came out.
|
| The other ones are correct.
| HieToKolob wrote:
| OMFG. The currently-active BYU LUG hosts their site on
| motherfucking Facebook. How the mighty have fallen.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| I got my uni CS club going on IRC. I've recently
| discovered that they're now on Discord. I get it, like,
| IRC is increasingly undesirable these days, especially
| without a bouncer. It still hurt though.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Just because we've never seen him doesn't mean he hasn't at
| some point quietly summoned a curse on us
| KyeRussell wrote:
| I am 100% sure I had some petty manually-initiated
| retaliatory action taken against me by a sysadmin at my
| university. I never heard a peep through any channel,
| official or otherwise.
| DANmode wrote:
| You can't simply allow this many people to hang on a cliff
| that high!
| sph wrote:
| Or silently reduced your quota by 20%
| midasuni wrote:
| Move to Texas
| jaggederest wrote:
| let me just run the tape eraser over the backups for that
| user...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Was his name Simon?
| esafak wrote:
| For the uninitiated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > CLICKETY <
| LegitShady wrote:
| "man the internet has been really slow lately"
|
| graybeard chuckles in the server room
| blueflow wrote:
| At @dayjob, we have a mailing list for root@ mails. We actively
| use it for recording the output of cronjobs and like that.
| Several times a year i get sudo fail mails from random people on
| the terminal servers. A few years ago i actually compiled a list
| of the most prolific repeat offenders and they got a bag of
| marshmallows that have the form of coal nuggets right before
| Christmas vacation.
| sph wrote:
| Sounds like a fun workplace!
| ibic wrote:
| As it happens - "The warning was restored in a slightly altered
| form in 9757d29" ( https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872... ) - Millert.
| dan_linder wrote:
| This is great! Now when I break into a system I can quickly
| verify if they've got this aspect of sudo logging setup or not!
|
| Only 1/2 /s
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Checking if the alarm is set by seeing if it activates seems
| like it's not particularly useful.
| couchand wrote:
| Not to comment on this particular case, but this is a more
| useful tactic than it seems at first. Seeing the reaction
| that an alarm brings can provide lots of useful information
| for evading future ones.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| For some alarms yes. But for one where you won't even
| know if it activated unless you see the response, and
| there's little reason for anyone to care about it most of
| the time... it seems pretty niche.
| usr1106 wrote:
| That makes senses. I already wanted to comment that showing an
| false warning is not good. But silently sending a mail of what
| you tried to do is worse.
| brundolf wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd (one of my favorites): https://xkcd.com/838/
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often
| happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program
| has performed an illegal operation" dialogs.
|
| As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was
| "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law
| somehow.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is why I don't put easter eggs or obscure programmer-lingo
| into programs anymore. Every error is potentially user-facing.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| ...but every other developer making the same decision has
| made computers boring.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| At the very least if it's something where I need to include a
| technical error message or stack trace, I like to include
| something like
|
| "An unexpected error occurred! If this happens multiple
| times, here is some information you can email our support
| team:\n{technical output}"
|
| Of course often the support team is just me.
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The first computer at my home was a machine my father bought
| for bookkeeping for his business. I had a loose understanding
| of what that meant (around 8-9 y/o). I knew paying taxes was
| something he did.
|
| I remember looking thru the BASIC manual and seeing
| "ILLEGAL..." error messages. I assumed it meant that doing
| whatever this was somehow violated tax laws. Made sense to me
| since the computer was used for bookkeeping.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I remember seeing
|
| > FATAL ERROR
|
| and being like...uh...do I call the police?
| netheril96 wrote:
| You should call for an ambulance instead.
| contradictioned wrote:
| I used to mix up terminal windows, and on some occasions tried to
| call a sudo command on university clusters. But I always followed
| it up with a sudo echo ,,sorry wrong terminal".
| kazinator wrote:
| The behavior shouldn't be configurable; it shouldn't exist.
|
| No administrator wants to be bothered by reports of a legitimate
| user who failed to type a password correctly a couple of times.
| salawat wrote:
| ...only true of course if you forget that user != user agent.
|
| Just because jschmoe seems to get his password wrong 95% of the
| time doesn't mean that I don't find the 9500 times he flubbed a
| sudo command valuable signal that something may be up.
| Especially if he can only recall ever using sudo himself once
| in a blue moon.
|
| There is the user in the context of the system, then there is
| the ultimate person interfacing with and feeding the system
| input and output.
|
| Hell, sudo itself is the perfect illustration of _why_ an
| operator would want such a log.
| kazinator wrote:
| Sorry, I miswrote. The actual issue is not that the user
| hasn't typed a password right, but that the user is not in
| the sudoers file and trying to run a sudo command.
|
| Doing that just once is reported with an e-mail to root.
| (Would you believe it?) People have been complaining about
| this for years. It's a pretty poor feature.
|
| If the intent is to remind root that some users are missing
| sudo access who ought ot have sudo access, the phrasing is
| all wrong: "this incident will be reported" is disciplinary
| language, like the user has done something wrong.
|
| Likely they are just copying and pasting something from a web
| search (or got from an AI chat, nowadays).
|
| The entirely separate su program generates no e-mails from
| people guessing the password wrong. You can grep your
| auth.log for that, if you care.
|
| I just tried su with one bad password attempt on a Debian
| box. The program quit immediately and logged this:
| Apr 30 2023 15:37:21 localhost su[22401]: FAILED su for root
| by kaz Apr 30 2023 15:37:21 localhost su[22401]: -
| /dev/pts/6 kaz:root
|
| that is the real message to root: the log. Don't bug people
| with e-mails.
|
| The correct requirement of a failed sudo would be to emit a
| message conveying this meaning: "Sudo didn't execute your
| command because your account is not listed in the sudoers
| file. If you think you should be, contact your
| administrator." It should not be contacting the administrator
| for you.
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| This change was partly reverted in https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
|
| TL;DR: Only display the warning if sudo is configured to send
| emails.
| Ruq wrote:
| Just change it to "This incident has been logged to /PATH." and
| that should be fine, right? Or, if you're really concerned about
| not exposing system log paths just mention it's been logged.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| sohkamyung is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be
| reported.
| f1shy wrote:
| Sogtulakk?
| fafqg wrote:
| [flagged]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| So... how will santa know who's been a bad boy/girl now?
| seekingthelight wrote:
| [dead]
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| So according to the comments it isn't actually gone, just the
| wording updated and now dependent on if you have actually set up
| the mailer to report it somewhere https://github.com/sudo-
| project/sudo/commit/9757d29a24ac1872...
| john_shafthair wrote:
| That seems pretty stupid.
|
| While they're at it, why not update the SSH warning banner with
| a list of what we do and don't log on this system. As a
| courtesy to their adversary.
|
| This sudo message has been the same since the dawn of time.
| There is literally no reason to correct it. This is the one
| place you don't want to be pedantic, leaking security
| configuration via stderr.
| kragen wrote:
| something like 99% of computers with sudo installed are
| single-user machines where the only effect of the warning is
| to scare people
|
| and it's only been the same since people started to switch to
| sudo in the late 90s; su never printed such a warning
| alexb_ wrote:
| >the only effect of the warning is to scare people
|
| Good. If you're not familiar with what sudo does, then you
| shouldn't be using it in the first place.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| If it's your own computer you should be able to break it
| until you learn how not to.
| twelve40 wrote:
| i'd argue in a different direction: if sudo barks a scary
| unknown message at me, i'd avoid using it altogether and
| just use su, which is the opposite of what people should
| be nudged to do.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Are you familiar with every part of the stack you are
| working on, down to the hardware?
| salawat wrote:
| Yes. Largely through torturing my system and reducing it
| to non-bootable state and having to read up on what
| symbols I mangled this time and how. Why do you ask?
| pxeger1 wrote:
| It's an abstraction. You shouldn't need to be familiar
| with every aspect of what it does.
| kibwen wrote:
| If you shouldn't be using sudo, then you shouldn't be
| listed as a sudoer on that system. If you're listed as a
| sudoer, then you should become familiar with what sudo
| does.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Reminds me of when I was younger and my mom and my brother
| were using a windows computer. They got the message "an
| illegal error has occurred" and my mom called me to ask if
| they had broken the law.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I almost shit myself the first time I saw X Screensaver..
|
| It has to take the prize for worst UX ever.
| kragen wrote:
| do you mean the bsod screensaver
|
| sometimes people also complain about xscreensaver's lock
| screen because it doesn't use a widget library, but the
| alternative lock screens can often be crashed through
| bugs in the widget libraries they use
| Gigachad wrote:
| The one with the flaming screen and countdown timer. I
| had just installed the distro and though I had some
| malware installed.
| kragen wrote:
| oh, that's just the lock screen
|
| the flaming screen is just the xscreensaver logo (it's
| supposed to save your screen from burnin, originally)
|
| i hadn't ever heard of anyone thinking it was malware,
| that's pretty funny
|
| jwz is a more brilliant troll than i gave him credit for
| mr_mitm wrote:
| When I was young I had messed with the computer and it
| showed an english message with the word "atom" in it. My
| mom not being a native speaker freaked out as if a
| nuclear explosion was about to take place.
| john_shafthair wrote:
| [flagged]
| Arch485 wrote:
| I don't really think this is a security issue. If an
| attacker is able to try executing sudo on your system,
| you have much bigger problems (for example, data exfil
| can be done by non-sudo users in many cases, or if your
| system is sufficiently old there's known priviledge
| escalation exploits). I don't think an attacker gains
| much knowledge from knowing whether or not they're on the
| naughty list.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If the attacker can execute sudo they can probably just
| alias it to a sudo that sends them the password and wait.
| The number of users on multiuser systems who _don 't_
| have sudo access is just vanishingly small. Universities
| perhaps. But in most companies, if they trust you with
| access to the machine in the first place they'll trust
| you with sudo access.
| aflag wrote:
| That message is poor UI. If you know what it means, you
| probably don't care about the possibility of sudo sending an
| email when you first typed it. If you don't know, you will be
| worried probably without a good reason to be so.
|
| Nowadays it's even worse than it once was, because now the
| natural instinct of people is to think that the incident was
| reported to canonical or ibm. The opposite of how they are
| supposed to feel about when using free software.
|
| I'd change it to "This attempted was logged" or something
| like that when that is true. Just so the user is aware that
| the data they are typing there may be seen by someone else.
| But by default, in their own systems, that message should
| never appear, unless they specifically configured it that
| way.
| [deleted]
| microtherion wrote:
| Maybe update pnews.sh as well to recalibrate the estimate of
| "hundreds, if not thousands of dollars" per usenet message.
| discreditable wrote:
| Warning banners are not uncommon. https://www.stigviewer.com/
| stig/red_hat_enterprise_linux_8/2...
| matsemann wrote:
| But I use the output from sudo in my program, changing this
| message breaks my scripts. /s
| lucb1e wrote:
| Here, you dropped this: https://xkcd.com/1172/
| litlikeamatch wrote:
| [dead]
| cratermoon wrote:
| As for your concerns.... they have been noted, and logged.
| gopalv wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/838/
|
| Well, if you have an incident list and nobody's checking it twice
| ...
| oconnor663 wrote:
| That XKCD is actually mentioned directly in the commit message
| :)
| lavenderwitch wrote:
| [dead]
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| Anyone knows why it's even considered an "incident" at all? you
| might have misstyped a username or something, why would it
| require a report?
| [deleted]
| charles_f wrote:
| I love that a product decision for such a critical piece of
| software infrastructure includes a link to an xkcd comic for
| justification
| estebarb wrote:
| I teach an entry level CS course at the University and my
| students got scared a lot when they saw that message. It was
| funny until I noted that they were really worried :( .
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Yes, it's important that things be clear. Hopefully we do
| something about man pages next, they are way too obfuscated.
| rbanffy wrote:
| [flagged]
| babuloseo wrote:
| No lets keep this :)
| myinstaspace wrote:
| [dead]
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