Colin Parker

@matt @samhenrigold Yes, by ‘97 Pentium Pro and PowerPC machines were common, with 16 MB RAM or more. Somehow those machines let you multitask, e.g. Winamp, AIM, a browser, and MS word, fitting together, while today, the size of a single tool can exceed the typical HD capacity of that era, let alone RAM (e.g. Slack has a 350 MB install size, Office is 4 GB, and it’s not uncommon to see browsers sucking down 1 GB+ of RAM). And yet what do they do that you couldn’t back then?

@christianp Love it, and have one feature request: case insensitive command entry (my phone automatically capitalizes the first letter)

@aperiodical Is it commonly used in schools at the beginning of fall semester? There’s always higher traffic then.

@christianp Why? Isn’t dropping the zero prefix worse, because it creates variable width?

@syphist@zoner.work @vogelchr@chaos.social @faheus@chaos.social I think it makes the most sense if you imagine they started with a non-IP based communication. Imagine you had UART or something simple coupled onto the power line. Then this whole exploit goes away. Your security focuses on possible malicious traffic over the power line, which isn’t a problem as far as we can tell. root/root is fine in that case because the only thing that can send packets to sshd is hardware you control. Leave it open so a technician can log in easily with an Ethernet jack. But when you switch to a power line format that tunnels through IP, and all of a sudden Linux will treat incoming packets on the plug interface the same as incoming packets on any other interface, and route them to sshd, which likely never was intended or foreseen.