linschn

Thanks for the pointer about the useless use of true.

Using builtins may be a security risk as they can be overloaded (hence the use of full paths everywhere).

I did not know about bash's extension of printf to print a date. I need to use the builtin to use it though. But I've received good advice elsewhere on how to do that securely, so I'll do it and do a write-up because it's not information that's easy to come by.

Your advice is very helpful, thank you.

This is correct, the command is run by the user writing the message. Only the output lies in the channel.

Yeah in the tests I ran while designing it, it became apparent that keeping everything in order was kind of a pain. However, with Guix it actually becomes quite easy. There is not "state" in the system: the system is simply a function of your system declaration (the /etc/config.scm file) that defines the whole OS. No need to remember what to chmod chown, etc.

The host owner (there's no root on Plan 9) can change those permissions and edit the file if need be.

This is something I would like to explore. If I had to guess now, I would think that the management of many open handles on a single file by the kernel is going to be more limiting than ssh.

But I'd also wager we can go quite far with a single cheap VPS. A few thousands user does not seem impossible at all.

I couldn't make talk or wall work on a modern linux system. That's a shame.

Your enthusiasm made me smile :)

What would you change about it ? I'd be happy to learn how to write better code.

I should really mention it in the article. I actually tried to install and use it before writing suc but was unable to.

Exactly !

Too many software project just ignore the underlying abstractions of the OS they run on. I feel weird with all this virtualization stuff, like we're missing something obvious.

Rob Pike said in 2000 that systems research is irrelevant http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ and I'd like to think that if we went back to simple tools like this we could make it somewhat relevant again.

I agree that Slack is much more featureful, but I fail to see what critical piece of IRC functionality is missing ? If anything, you don't need a bouncer for chat history with suc, so it's more featureful than IRC.

With that said, I seldom used IRC so this is a genuine question for people who used it and miss some features.

I'm seriously considering trying something like this just to see if it works. TCP would kill it though (maybe?). But maybe UDP plus some clever ffmpeg invocation...

That was exactly part of the point I was trying to make with the article. The other, that I left unsaid but should probably add explicitly, is that Slack et al. run on a server with a kernel, but choose to ignore the access control capabilities of said kernel and instead chose to reimplement them. I think it is a shame, and more software should strive to be security agnostic instead of reimplementing access control for the umpteenth time.

I use a C wrapper that calls the shell script. Ugly, and I need to harden the script a bit more, but it works :)

https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/suc/-/blob/master/suc_wrappe...

Yeah, mobile is tough. Termux works, but not as a comfortable experience as whatsapp. I'll see what I can cook up.

Indeed, multiplatform is very very costly.

I'll edit the article accordingly, thanks for looking into it.

I want to thank you sincerely for capturing the sentiment of the piece. This is exactly what I had in mind and I'm genuinely happy you were able to get that from the text :)

This is a very astute way to look at it. I'd say then that the value of Slack is to be user friendly, which suc definitely is not for muggles.

But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? - Same question, but taking into account that Slack captures your data and won't give it back to you ? How expensive is it to leave Slack ?

Sure, suc sucks, but we probably could converge on something less bloated and proprietary than Slack ?

Indeed ! The question is whether all that is worth so many engineer-hours. I'm not advocating for all Slack channels to be replaced by suc, that would be silly. I'm just pointing out how costly it all is. There's got to be a middle ground that does not require hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

That's exactly what happened :) thank you.

To HN readers: this has been sorted out, adding user is a semi-manual process and I was asleep :)

He is named in the text, and the reason as to why he is justly criticized (he witnessed the USA's false flag operation that started the Vietnam War, yet kept silent and participated in the hostilities) is also spelled out.

https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign/-/blob/master/fals.... Well the skew is random between 0 and 2 degrees.

Apart from the signature generation, here is another project that does the false-scanning and signature pasting : https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign

Well for starters the first modern European army with commoner officers was France's when it had to take on all of Europe in 1790. So dating it to WWII is being more than a century late.

I am sorry, I completely missed the sarcasm. Textual communication is hard. Your imitation of hn pedantry was so good that I fell for it.

No, it seems that you are the one that don't understand.

A piece of paper is not Turing Complete because the computation happens in the head of whoever is holding the pen.

An excel sheet (or actually a power point presentation!) is, because the user just has to mindlessly, unconditionally, do a simple, non computational action to make the cycles go forward.

There is a difference between the two scenario, and if you can't see it, please do ask questions until I'm able to make that clear to you.

This is useless pedantry: by this metric absolutely nothing in the universe can be Turing Complete, and it's only a theoretical construct.

Turing completeness is a useful tool for the analysis of actual, real life computers and their programs, despite their finitude.

Your comment is comical, given the state of labor laws in most of Europe.

True, those labor laws are under attack, but they still stand, and such layoff would be so costly there that they could hardly happen.

4 months is not generous, it is under the legal minimum in many countries, provided you've been with the employer long enough.

For those of you in Paris Thursday next week (October 20), there is a whole day conference on the history of the chip card held at the Bilbliothèque Nationale de France by an association of crypto experts:

https://www.arcsi.fr/colloques/actes_collq_221020.php