The other kind of “flash” that we used to worry about | Hacker News Reader

The other kind of “flash” that we used to worry about

rachelbythebay.com

47 pointstbodt15 comments

I was reading an article the other day and it took me a moment to realize that it was talking about flash as in software and not about flash as in flash storage. Based on the headline I thought Rachel would write about the same, so I was quite surprised and amused to read that she was talking about an even older meaning of flash.

> I should mention that there have been many variants on this theme. You could jam those same fun escape sequences into a mail

This happened to me once as an undergraduate. I was in a lab full of dying Suns (they were replaced the following semester). It was late at night, late in the term and the hushed lab was packed with students wrapping up their projects. I used Pine to open an e-mail from one of my friends at another university, which turned out to be an animated Christmas tree, complete with blinking lights and beeping out "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" on the internal speaker. I killed the terminal window as fast as I could, which wasn't very fast because the poor Sun was so busy rendering it. Everybody gave me dirty looks.

A long long time ago, at a gig I desperately despised, I accidentally ran `cat MyResume.pdf`, causing a mix of garbage and readable ascii to print to my xterm. Unfortunately somewhere in that binary garbage were the escape sequences to turn on printerControlMode in the xterm.

Not long after, my boss shows up at my desk with a sheet of garbage with snippets of my resume mixed in. Learned an important lesson about accidentally spewing binary data into an xterm that day...

Ouch!

This is still possible at CMU. Guaranteed to annoy your friends doing their homework.

mesg y is the default and write works. However when you try to run wall you get "-bash: /usr/bin/wall: Permission denied."

I knew about talkd and other shenanigans but I have never heard it called “getting flashed” before

This is probably the proof that I spent way too much time on IRC over the years.

I suspect the most common interpretation of "getting flashed" is that someone exposed themselves nude in front of you.

That's likely why "their response was just confusion"...

Sometimes I think this happens to me when I accidentally `cat` binary files! It's particularly interesting that people used to add such strange features as "automatic file transfer" to their terminals.

and the solution to this problem is still

> to suspend the program and hope they could blind-type out a "reset".

I find myself doing it a few times in a month, sometimes because of accidentally catting binary garbage, other time it was became a ncurses program crashed without resetting the terminal back to the normal mode.

Next time I'll remember to call it "getting flashed".

Unfortuately, ESR hasn't curated the Jargon File since 2002, and this word was not included. AFAIK, Bob Mottram maintains his own fork of Jargon File, https://code.freedombone.net/bashrc/TheJargonFile. I should request him to add the definition into the file.

Update: added https://code.freedombone.net/bashrc/TheJargonFile/src/652aff...

The assumption behind things like automatic file transfer is that the terminal is slave device to whatever computer it is attached to and the computer is fully trusted. This view breaks down when random other users can spew arbitrary binary garbage ont the connection.

You can often find escape sequences embedded in requests in web server log files, waiting for some unsuspecting user with a vulnerable terminal to read them.

Simpler times... I remember when running talkd, fingerd, etc. was the norm. Not to mention unshadowed password files.

"Flash" is also a term of art in manufacturing, where it's the excess material squeezed out along the mold lines where the molds join.

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