To be fair it does do a pretty good job of removing the majority of the vulnerabilities, making your system much harder to hack. Or use.
In fact “Don’t use computers” is always my first suggestion whenever friends or family ask me about staying secure or avoiding ransomware.
It’s the same joke as shift+f4 (closes program) or any number of annoying commands that people might be tricked into doing.
There no big mystery to unix- every operating system has a command line syntax. Like learning a foreign language you gotta have a reason to know it and practice to keep your fluency up. I still giggle saying “fup dup” in TAL.
If you actually do attempt deleting all your files then you probably shouldn’t be using a computer in the first place.
Ahhh… I have pulled that joke on people, or at least the windows version of it. People that knew better tho, and I kinda figured that they did. Another “classic” joke is to say on, say, IRC, that you can do this-or-that by hitting ALT-F4.
God I hope so.
Humans can’t handle the internet.
O_o
Nope. You’re among friends here.
I dunno, the idea of a security guard’s computer not having autorun disabled is unfortunately plausible (the parking lot thumb drive sploit,) but a datacenter’s HVAC being controllable from a janitor’s closet in the bathroom? Most ordinary cube farms have their thermostats locked behind a cover just to prevent Janice from Accounting from fucking with the temperature instead of putting on a goddamned sweater. Climate control in a datacenter is a main priority up there with power supply and fire suppression. There’s no way it’s not carefully secured, controlled, and monitored.
It might be doing great things for hacker portrayals, but I didn’t find the show all that watchable.
In my defense, three things.
(1) It’s not quite as easy to bork everything as it theoretically ought to be using this. Macs will give you a stern lecture first and force you to type your password, for example. Networked computers run by a sysadmin will be safe because the whole purpose of a sysadmin is to restrict all the cool, useful, ultra-dangerous commands to themselves. Truth be told, while lots of people don’t recognize this, very very few of them could even get a terminal window open.
(2) This kind of “deletion” is the mildest possible kind. Your computer would (mostly) stop working, meaning you couldn’t overwrite any of your data, which would still be there for the Geek Squad to recover. I’m not saying that would make it cool, but neither would anyone’s novel or family photos be permanently lost here.
(3) Sometimes, in order to get internet website points, we have to do things we’re not proud of.
On a more serious note, while such a command is extremely dangerous, it’s also utterly necessary, because deleting scads of files from zillions of nested directories without getting someone to click “yes” each time is a basic part of how computers work. The people who truly get bitten by this tend to be experts running automatic scripts that, for whatever seemingly innocuous reason, are one day accidentally applied to a “/” (root directory) of a much more important box than what they had been running on.
My understanding is that was just where the ethernet tap was…
Under normal circumstances you wouldn’t. A longer version of the command where there is a directory path after the slash is a useful way to delete a directory. sudo rm -rf /totally/realistic/directory/path But in this form it’s a long running joke among a lot of Unix/Linux users. It’s a mean lesson to new users not to trust random commands from strangers and a way to express a desire for someone to go away among more experienced users.
Hey, that’s a real thing! If I used SQL, I would almost certainly corrupt my database.
My friend bob always has that problem. Maybe you know him bob tables.
I’ve heard of him!
del /s \*.*
(“/s” is equivalent to the Unix “-r” to include sub-folders)
Don’t forget /f (force-delete) and /q (quiet mode).
Although it’s still not equivalent unless you’re actually at a Safe Mode command prompt (with the Windows GUI not running) and not a normal command prompt; Windows locks its files while they’re in use; Unix doesn’t. You can’t delete c:\Windows\explorer.exe while your taskbar is on the screen.
Because of this prank (and mistakes like @semiotix mentioned), the rm -rf / command doesn’t work without a --no-preserve-root argument on most Unix-based systems nowadays.
Oh yeah? Ima prove it!
[tappety-tappety]
ack-thbbpt NO CARRIER
Well that’s good because I’m pretty darned gullible.
