October 10, 2019

Ars Technica: Forum cracks the vintage passwords of Ken Thompson and other Unix pioneers

Ars Technica: Forum cracks the vintage passwords of Ken Thompson and other Unix pioneers. “As one of the original versions of Unix, BSD is an ancient operating system. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it used what are, by today’s standards, strange, even ridiculous security. For one, the hashing function protecting passwords, though state of the art 40 years ago, is now trivial to crack. Stranger still, the password hashes of some BSD creators were included in publicly available source code. And then, there are the passwords people chose.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
August 29, 2019

Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure (Ars Technia)

Ars Technica: Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure. “Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable annex at the sprawling Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
May 13, 2018

Bite-Sized Linux: a zine collecting awesome *nix tutorial webtoons (Boing Boing)

Boing Boing: Bite-Sized Linux: a zine collecting awesome *nix tutorial webtoons. “Julia Evans’s Twitter feed is a treasure trove of her Bite-Size Linux comics that explain core concepts in Unix system use and administration in friendly, accessible graphic form. She’s collected these in a great little print-at-home zine that you can download for $10 (she asks that commercial users making copies for their companies pay $100 to further support her work).” Some of the comments are complaining that they’re not really “comics,” – and they’re not, more like visual representation – but if you like your *nix learning less dry, you’ll like these.

Useful Stuff 0
June 20, 2017

Ars Technica: Serious privilege escalation bug in Unix OSes imperils servers everywhere

Ars Technica: Serious privilege escalation bug in Unix OSes imperils servers everywhere. “A raft of Unix-based operating systems—including Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD—contain flaws that let attackers elevate low-level access on a vulnerable computer to unfettered root. Security experts are advising administrators to install patches or take other protective actions as soon as possible.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
August 20, 2016

Loige: Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other shell commands

From Loige: Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other shell commands. “In this article I am going to show you how I was able to extract and process some information from Wikipedia only using a combination of common bash utilities like curl and grep.” What I really like about this article is that its author, Luciano Mammino, extends it in response to comments and external articles, and the comments themselves are well-worth reading. So well done Mr. Mammino.

Useful Stuff 0

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