Inform HN: Bash.org Is No Extra

Phil Tadros · January 11, 2024

2024-01-11 05:17:08

I just had an argument over IRC with a stranger on the internet last week. We’re still out there.

I thought the humor on this site hadn’t aged well, but this one got me:

    < pronto> :(
    < GiftdKook> Turn that frown upside down!
    < korozion> ):

“Turn that frown upside down” is a way of saying – don’t be sad, be happy. Instead of having the corners of your mouth point down (frown), have them point up (smile). The joke is that if you move the eyes to the other side of the mouth, it remains a frown.

Expectation

🙁 becomes 🙂

Subversion

🙁 becomes ):

People say “turn that frown upside down” as a phrase to mean “don’t frown, smile!”

But the poster flipped the emoji so it was a frowning face pointing right, then a frowning face pointing left

What does age have to do with it?

“Turn that frown upside down” isn’t a phrase that would make much sense to people who didn’t hear it before. More so if English isn’t their first language or they are neurodivergent.

I don’t believe I have ever heard this phrase used IRL. It’s not a very nice thing to say in most contexts (saying this to another adult is outright bad – which is what makes the IRC joke funny in the first place).

It was down for a couple of months already. However, the IP and server seems to be there. Maybe the person who keeps that up will restart the daemons when they remember they operate one of the nostalgia cornerstones of better part of the internet.

Maybe the server’s password is hunter2. Let’s see whether can I access it.

Edit: Nope. Seems firewalled.

That’s because of the HN security. It prints all passwords as stars.

You can try putting your HN password in a comment, it would be visible only by you, and the others will not see it.

I guess you’re right. My HN password is *****.

When I edit, I can see it, but when I save the comment, it becomes starred. It even randomizes the length every time I save.

Brilliant!

But this also means that they know your plaintext password, meaning that they’re saving passwords in plaintext. Given that this is mostly a technical community, it’s much more the risk of keeping a database of plaintext passwords than the benefit of being able to obfuscate passwords in comments.

EDIT: thanks to another commenter, I understood that what’s happening in the above comments is just a meme and HN isn’t storing plaintext passwords. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

What actually happens is more complex: when you type a *******, HN tries to log in once for every string in your *******, and then when it succeeds it goes back and replaces that string with a randomized length of asterisks.

This has to be a joke.

The only way it can be realistically implemented involves the storage of clear-text user password to enable string replacement during comment submission. Either that or converting user comment to a prefix/suffix table (or something similar) and then hash each item to search for a match. Both option is ridiculously unnecessary.

Anyway, my HN password is ****. I bet it don’t work.

Fortunately with modern serverless architecture, it’s possible to make this performant! Just split up each comment into words and dispatch each word to a queue where AWS Lambda workers can check the words against the user’s password hash. It might cost $20 to process each comment, but at least it’ll autoscale to handle any comment volume you throw at it!

* At least 1 capital letter is required

* At least 1 number is required

* At least 1 symbol is required

These days it’s probably ‘Hunter2024!’

Host resolves, packets are dropped (ICMP timeouts, but nothing is “unreachable”). My sysadmin gut says that the server is there, behind a firewall, and the webserver is down/stopped, or the firewall is killing everything.

The IP is not shared. It reverse-resolves, too.

So, it’s not dismantled and thrown to side.

Looks like the hosting provider, Idologic, got bought by Stablepoint. Maybe they have somehow blocked the site during the merger?

There was a lab I hung out in back in college. The nature of the room and the devices that we had in there, there was 10bT, 10b2, and 10b5. Twisted pair, coax, and thick.

The someone had what was termed “the connector of evil”. Apparently coax and thick had the same signal… just thick was more rigid about where you connected into it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap ). The connector of evil appeared like a 10b5 terminator on one aspect and 10b2 on the opposite… and handed the sign between them.

When including one other pc onto the 10b2 phase, we’d invariably disrupt the wave within the wire and a few gadgets would drop off.

The trick was to have every machine ping -f one of many methods on 10bT and redirect its output to /dev/audio. If the machine was making noise, it was good. And so then we might fiddle with completely different lengths of coax between the T connectors till every little thing was buzzing away.

Ah, I probably missed it because we had the following dialogue at the office.

    <senior-sysadm> Hey bayindirh, is the log server up?
    <bayindirh> *SSHs to server* Yes, it's up and running nicely.
    <senior-sysadm> Where's that thing in the system room?
    <bayindirh> *Scratches head* Umm, I don't know?
    <senior-sysadm> Go find it, we'll upgrade it to newer HW.
    <bayindirh> Uh, OK. *leaves desk to dig the system room*.

P.S.: I’m the one who installed that server physically and configured it in the first place. 😀

Happened to me recently when moving. Couldn’t find one of my zigbee temperature sensors, but it was still reporting information diligently, so it had to be somewhere in the house. Took about 6 months before I found it.

Anticlimactic, partly unpacked moving box. I was mostly surprised it was able to re-join the mesh while being in a completely different spot, something that a lot zigbee chips struggle with.

Oh man, that is so sad to hear.

bash.org has given me endless laughs. It always cheered me up.

Its too bad the the top 100/200 hadn’t changed in years. I guess that’s because IRC has been mostly dead for a while now (no more new submission) and that the voting algorithm favored a self-feeding feedback loop. Nonetheless, it was fun to come back once every few years and re-read the top quotes.

Hopefully someone revives the site. Hopefully it’s just that the server needs some love or something. Do we have any idea who is behind it?

> Its too bad the the top 100/200 hadn’t changed in years.

I checked it every couple years or so when I remembered some part of some top quote and wanted to get the full thing. I always saw the top quotes never changed, so I just assumed the entire site wasn’t really updated.

I’d be happy to host the site in perpetuity on one of our dedicated hosts (for free). Have hosted the sites for a number of notable open source communities for decades.

What a shame. IRC is one of the few protocols left of the early Internet that hasn’t been aggressively commercialized and colonized by corporate interests, and this is just another nail in the coffin.

Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web, and if all that historical baggage and complexity is really necessary, or even worth it at all.

> Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web

Because for the great majority of users, i.e. those who thought that “the internet” lived inside the blue “e” icon for IE on Win XP, or those who “break their cup holders” [1] they have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes and so everything has coalesced around “web based” as the lowest common denominator in an attempt to accommodate everyone.

[1]https://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/computer-cup-holder-joke/8…

Do you have any data to support your assertion that a “great majority”(whatever that means) of users in the present “have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes”?

Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We’re not in the year 1995 anymore.

I’m pretty sure the great majority of users nowadays have only ever interacted with the internet through apps on a tablet or phone. And even the dinosaurs who “logged on” when desktops and icons were a thing knew how to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes because that’s how Windows worked, and people were using home computers before the web and web browsers even came along.

The decision to appify the web was an economic one made not on behalf of the end user, but corporations. It’s cheaper to write a website or a webapp than a native application, to distribute bits than burn a CD or cartridge. It’s cheaper to publish in bits than ink and paper. It’s cheaper to handle electronic forms than physical, mailed in forms. It’s cheaper to send an email than call someone on the telephone.

I was able to have literally months of logs from a dozen servers streamed to a single app running with 1/256th the memory I have in the laptop I’m writing on, and it was both more responsive and had more features. And you didn’t need to deal with anyone’s custom emoticons or gif spam. That is a serious loss from my perspective.

Hell, just today I was trying to figure out how to use native emoji in Discord. Turns out, you can’t, and they just force you to deal with those god-awful cartoony ones. Ugh. One day someone will come back around and reimplement basic text chat as a “minimal”, “sleek”, or “uncluttered” experience and we’ll come full-circle. Maybe it’ll even use XMPP this time….

You still can, it’s very useful for bots and game integrations because you just need an IRC lib in your language of choice. However, the servers aren’t IRC anymore, they just have a compat shim that speaks IRC for those purposes.

Even many social services provided by governments in the west are not available to you unless you have access to the web.

Sounds like we’re headed in the right direction… if you’re in the business of selling shovels.

Contacted their/Stablepoint’s support bot:

Today

What happened to bash.org?

Hello there!
YR

I will be happy to assist you but it appears that the support PIN you entered might be incorrect. Can you double-check, please?

Yordan R.

I haven’t entered any support PIN

Can you please provide me with it as I need to verify the account?
YR

You should be able to see your verification number by going to the client area —> Support—> And on the left side you will see your support pin.

Yordan R.

I’ve not got an account
YR

I see that the website you mentioned (bash.org) is hosted with us, it’s resolving from our server, but without your support PIN I’m unable to check it further due to security reasons

Yordan R.

OK, can I suggest you reach out to the owner of the site and, in a kind, proactive way, let them know it’s not working and the internet is upset with them?

See discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950721
YR

Received it, thanks

A few years ago, I read all of bash.org from beginning to end. It took about a week of transit rides.

There were a lot of laughs, but a huge proportion of it was slurs directed at Black people and women. It’s probably time for it to fade away.

The quotes I remember the most were (paraphrased)

1. Best ebay review ever — bought item for my brother who had cancer, item never arrived and my brother died

2. Something about writing a warranty about installing a cinder block in a window and then throwing it through a window at the Sony headquarters

3. “There’s no such thing as a sin on the battlefield.” “Opposite over hypotenuse. dipshit”

One of my all time favorite sites on the interenet, I am glad there is an archive version.

IRC and being ASCII only had their benefits. These days, Discord displacing IRC, for most people who even have PCs, there is a much different vibe of re-posting meme pics and gifs, or even youtube videos.

Yet, I don’t know if this is because of the higher production requirements, or not, but there isn’t a database of spontaneous funny moments.

Ironically, many of the “respectable” discord servers (i.e. revolving around hobbies people under the age of 18 aren’t/can’t get into) seem to not allow cross-server emojis (which mostly stops all usage of them and discourages gif-memeing as well).

Combined with “compact” mode in user settings, I find myself having a vaguely IRC-like experience in the servers worth participating in.

Terrible shame how many of us have come full circle just to do the same things on the corpo’s surveillance state owned land instead of our own.

Yeah, I am getting prompted to subscribe and pay to even participte. Perhaps it’s part of the larger theme of capitalism and monetization consuming all parts of human existence, including those that come from a purely artistic or communicative self expression. It’s supposed to be part of the technological progress that builds us up, as a society, but I am strugging to fill the bash.org void.

>IRC and being ASCII only had their benefits.

I still use IRC every day and you can send unicode emoji, Japanese, etc. just fine (via external tools or copy/paste typically). It’s up to the client/terminal emulator/font on the other end to make it look right. Plus posting links to images/videos, either at random public spots or ones you just uploaded to a filesharing site, is pretty common.

I have only been to bash.org a handful of times, but multiple channels I’m in have their own bots that can store quotes and spit them back out later, so it’s a bit more small and local than bash.org. It’s only for single-line messages, though, so not the same as capturing a whole conversation. I do also occasionally grab some lines to dump in a text file for personal enjoyment.

Most recently, I was using bash.org as my go-to non-HTTPS site for captive portal purposes (back when HTTPS Everywhere was a useful extensions). But the built-into-Firefox HTTPS only treatment handles captive portals gracefully already, so I didn’t actually visit in a while.

Goodbye!

Thanks to the folk who put it together and ran it nearly 20 years. I wonder how much the whole thing cost?

Kind of thing that gets put together as a “hey this is cool” project, it runs and people use it, so we’ll just leave it up… months later its more popular, the original authors of the system moved on, but no one can just pull the plug now. this is a public resource, so we’ll just keep feeding it.

Years later, someone may go through and fix the design problems; or not. It might be no one figured out how to resolve the dependency on PHP2 or Python1 the original code may have had.

That reminds me about the time when I used to run a similar website but focused on quotes from the IRC run by Flashback Forum (one of the larger/the largest? discussion forums in the Nordics).

Apparently I put the source for the site on GitHub (https://github.com/victorb/Flashback-Citat [12 year old PHP code!]) however I can’t discover any precise archive of any of the quotes nor the operating web site, sadly :/

Newfangled stuff… german-bash.org was the original.

Has also been dead for 2 years now. I found a 20 year old quote of mine on archive.org. How time flies.

>old internet

Reminds me of Gigablast disappearing, a search engine that was in the spotlight in the early 00’s, a sole developer competing amongst AlltheWeb and Google.

When their site disappeared there was barely a mention.

I guess since the mass of geocities was uprooted it’s become the norm, the churn of the web and generally accepted. archive.org is great, but it does seem strange how transient information has become on the web. HN and archive.org have good memories.

Always surprised when some of these sites shut down. The operating cost seems low and putting on a few ads (ethical, non-intrusive, etc.) can net you passive $100+/mo.

Even if it’s a static HTML, you need to patch your webserver, OS, and migrate the whole stack to newer versions.

This is why I’m scaling down my home infrastructure to SBCs and run everything on Debian with stock package repositories. It reduces tons of burden to something very manageable.

“Even if it’s just static text, you need to patch your OS, update your text editor and migrate the whole document to newer versions.”

Nah. That’s bull. A static site can be put on a web server and the site never needs to be updated again. I have web sites people started hosting on my servers in the ’90s that are still there, still serving, and haven’t been touched in twenty years.

Sure, I update the servers and software, but the actual amount of work needed for the site is, quite literally, zero.

> Sure, I update the servers and software, but the actual amount of work needed for the site is, quite literally, zero.

I think this is what I said? Quoting myself:

> Even if it’s a static HTML, you need to patch your webserver, OS, and migrate the whole stack to newer versions.

I don’t think I said “you need to update/patch the webpage itself”.

Huh. The password masking algorithm changes some words possibly.

Because no software is perfect, which means every lock has weaknesses that sooner or later get found out. Chances are that, say, a Linux 2.x server that was considered “very secure” in 2005 would now be pwned in a few hours.

A historical archive of something should allow for robust, non-interactive ways to persist. Maybe there should be standards for this. In the mean time we can find gratitude to archive.org and similar services

> a few ads (ethical, non-intrusive, etc.) can net you passive $100+/mo.

No way. That’s barely true of Adsense anymore much less whatever non-Adsense network you have in mind. And not for a dead site like bash.org.

Wasn’t it already dead for ages?

I remember back when it got popular it seemed to stop accepting submissions after a short time.

And the hunter2 stuff got stuck on the top list forever, probably because the mechanism is self-reinforcing by making it easiest to vote for the stuff already on the top.

Would make for a nice webservice, like those Pokemon/StarWars/etc apis.

Ironically, those quotes will likely survive a lot of more modern content. Even viral stuff, these days, will disappear incredibly quickly – bat an eyelid and the imgur link is broken, the twitter post is paywalled, the reddit thread is taken down… And any private service like Discord or Slack will happily burn everything after a few months.

“The internet does not forget” is such a massive lie.

“The numbers missing from the sequence correspond to the quotes that are either
still pending review or have been rejected. However, my dataset is by no means
considered to be proven complete.”

My fav quote of all time was:

<erno> hm. I’ve lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can’t figure out where in my apartment it is.

I remember first being pointed to the site for having said: Wanting a man who doesn’t smell is like wanting a woman who doesn’t talk.

Its importance was immediately obvious.

This is what happens when you don’t use a proper capital-S Stack. Probably they weren’t even using Kubernetes and a separate multi-cloud management DB for monitoring their data pipeline ingest.

     i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

We aren’t encouraged to have this kind of fun on public forums anymore. I don’t know why exactly, but I do know we’re not better off for dropping this humor.

Wikipedia isn’t an appropriate place for Bash quotes because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia about broad concepts. Also, Wikipedia as a policy is not a primary source.

Wikiquotes could be appropriate. Submitting a dump of the entire database to Archive.org could be appropriate. (For example, Archive.org hosts user-submitted dumps of things like product manuals, old TV shows, old computer games.)

Considering the quotes have an unknown, and almost certainly not public domain or CC BY-SA license[1], they wouldn’t be appropriate for any Wikimedia project.

[1] And even if submitting required licensing the contribution under some Wikimedia-friendly license, considering each person included in a quote would also have to agree to such a license… and I have a feeling bloodninja wasn’t following up their conversations with “would you mind sending me a signed release of the above six (6) messages under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license version 3.0?”

Source Link

What's Your Reaction?

Leave a Reply