No Mod Required

FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife … please.”

Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.

Still, he plays along, explaining that “sudo” is a command in the Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: “The humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like ‘Simon says.’ ”

Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.

Read more:

Link by Link - This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix

While I’m here, why not click through for my favorite XKCD ever.

If you click on link today, make it this one. The ASCII view of reality is sooooo cool. The other filters look interesting, but the idea of an ASCII filter on reality is just too funny to keep to myself. I must spread the geeky coolness of it…

English Russia » The Matrix Goggles

via William Gibson

I’m especially interested in the taunting. Because if there’s one thing (other than typing in the magical patterns that make computers go*) I would imagine a Defcon organizer being good at, it would be taunting. Hackers can be really fucking funny**

Edited… Now with youtube video!

Kicking and running, Michelle Madigan*** has left the building

August 03, 2007 (IDG News Service) — It’s a story of betrayal worthy of an episode of Dateline NBC — and they’re already a step ahead on their at-the-scene-reportage.

Dateline NBC Producer Michelle Madigan was publicly outed at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas Friday after show organizers were tipped off that she was trying to film show attendees with a hidden camera.

Madigan ran from the show after organizers publicly threatened to escort her from the event at the beginning of a 4 p.m. conference session by noted hacker HD Moore. “She literally kicked the door open,” said “Priest,” a show official who declined to be identified. “She made the mistake of running. Had she taken it like an adult, she would have been treated with kid gloves, treated with respect.

Update: Undercover TV producer booted from DefCon

Make sure to check out the photo gallery here:

amishrabbit : photos : Michelle Madigan of Dateline NBC Being Chased Out of Defcon - powered by SmugMug

More from Wired:

Dateline Mole Allegedly at DefCon with Hidden Camera — Updated: Mole Caught on Tape

The DefCon site:

Welcome to DEF CON, the Largest Underground Hacking Convention in the World

*which is what I tell little kids I do for a living

**some day, when I’m not up to my eyes in shit, I’ll dig up some examples from back in the day that will make your eyes water with laughter

***I know the shelf life on the meme is not infinite, but I’m sorely tempted to create a lolmole, if just to make myself laugh- “i’m in ur defcon filmin ur dudes”

[edited to add- i did it. it was too tempting. I did chuckle a couple of times making it. I bet it will still make me chuckle tomorrow when I'm not drunk]

Hopefully the next announcement will be for an 18 hour miniseries of the Baroque Cycle.

“Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.”

“The communications director for Montana’s lone congressman solicited the services of two men he falsely believed to be criminally minded hackers-for-hire — with the expressed goal of jacking up his college GPA — during an exchange that spanned 22 e-mails over two weeks this past summer.”

Congressional aide admits trying to hire hackers — to boost his college GPA

I was almost sucked in there for a second. I used to visit Attrition regularly back in the day and I was sorely tempted to just browse and read the fuck out of it for the rest of the day.

Anyway, the following (linked from mefi) is one of the many classic email exchanges archived at Attrition. In this installment, a user writes in to ask if the attrition guys can hack into his school’s server to change his GPA. Hilarity ensues.

Going Postal

Mitnick on Security
Dude knows what he’s talking about. He had books and movies made about his life as the super-hacker and his greatest skill wasn’t coding, it was social engineering- talking his way into access…

malevole - Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t pay attention to this stuff. Oh well.

I’m a newly minted member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sort of lame that it’s taken me this long, but what can you do?

When you break into the N.Y. Times’ network and drop quotes like, ” ‘A total outsider figuring out how to run a network remotely is pretty much a self-administered IT orientation course on meth,’” you’re bound to get a little bit of coverage.