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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Kali Linux seems to have become popular as an "elite" d00d's distro of choice, for whatever reason. In fact, it is specifically intended as a penetration-testing tool only and not for general-purpose use, because it forgoes some security mitigations that you generally want to keep enabled on your actual systems.

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At least Kali seems to be taking it well... The top reply when I just looked at the tweet is from them:

--- Have to admit it’s sort of nice they give kids a roadmap on where to get started. We all know the easiest way to get a kid to do something is to tell them they can’t or should not, then they list specific item not to do. To bad they did not link to https://kali.training ---

As a parent I totally agree!

That was my reaction too — if I were a kid seeing this, I’d immediately google the shit out of this list...

Maybe it’s some sort of clever reverse-psychology trick to train the next generation of GCHQ minions; or maybe it’s a social honeypot. More likely, somebody somewhere had to throw some money at friends and cronies and came up with this “campaign”.

One big reason is the Mr Robot TV series. The main character uses Kali Linux for "hacking", and it was quite a popular show amongst casual computer users. As a result, many people who had limited knowledge about security started installing Kali Linux on their laptops so they could be "hackers" too.

He always wore hoodies and nobody is talking about the dangers hoodies represent ;-)

Spoken as someone who's never been subjected the Daily Mail!

not yet, atleast

Maybe I’m just not remembering, but I don’t think the show ever goes into exactly what distro Elliots running. I’m pretty sure you only get glimpses of his de which is usually GNOME, but I’m pretty sure I saw cinnamon at one point.

No, you see the Kali dragon on the desktop often.

I've not seen the show, but I seem to remember seeing a picture with Ubuntu MATE.

So that’s how it works!

Some people on the Unix & Linux Stack Exchange site have created a definitive answer for beginner questions about Kali, with the general theme that Kali is incompatible with beginners.

https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4640/what-shou...

https://unix.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5360/why-is-ka...

That's because it comes with stuff pre-installed and an easy interface. Apparently, this is enough for people to ignore that it uses root as the default user, is not at all stable, etc. It shows up on all the crummy "Top 10 Hacker Systems!" listicles as the top entry, so people use it. I guess no one wants to install ubuntu and add katoolin repos, because that's not leet enough.

Linux for children

At my age we used Backtrack Linux

Funny you should mention that, since Backtrack is where Kali came from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackTrack

> BackTrack was a Linux distribution that focused on security, based on the Knoppix Linux distribution aimed at digital forensics and penetration testing use.[4] In March 2013, the Offensive Security team rebuilt BackTrack around the Debian distribution and released it under the name Kali Linux.[5]

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