This is a hack that the big companies like Microsoft and the Government do not want you to know about!
Get rid of ads with this easy code that you run in terminal!
[Removed by dclamp] [insert funny dd command to format entire hard drive]
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This is a hack that the big companies like Microsoft and the Government do not want you to know about!
Get rid of ads with this easy code that you run in terminal!
[Removed by dclamp] [insert funny dd command to format entire hard drive]
zomg magic
Yeah. I wouldn't run the command if I were you. Perhaps I should remove it or alter it so that no one actually uses it to remove ads...
It replaces your entire drive with zeros. As in binary zeros.
Probably a good idea...Quote:
Originally Posted by dclamp
Years ago in the day of the floppy I passed around a cartoon about getting more hard drive space... It involved the FORMAT command.... Sure seemed funny at the time...
I learned about the dd command in my digital forensics class. It is apparently a "forensically safe" method of formatting a hard drive since it writes to the hard drive on the binary level.Quote:
Why would you do that?!
Yeah I can picture it now... Some n00b finding a way to remove ads from their computer... and blaming me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve R Jones
Wait until the lawsuits begin to stack up. :D
Back before viruses became big business, I wrote a pseudo-virus. It didn't do anything harmful (though it may have effectively erased unused sectors on the HDs of the day). This was back in the days of DOS, so everybody knew the DOS prompt. When the program ran, it said something like "Hit some key or your hard drive will be reformatted." No matter what they pressed, it would start writing a file to the HD over and over. The file was deleted each time, and it didn't have anything in it, but the result was that the HD light would be on constantly (they were all bright red LEDs at the time), and the HD would grind away for many seconds, certainly long enough for panic to ensue. At the end of that time, the computer would go to an A: prompt. It wasn't really an A: prompt, it was just the string A: on the screen. Various commands were intercepted and resulted in messages suggesting that the HD had no operating system, but it was just a loop that would respond to a few commands, then the program would exit and you'd be back where you started with no harm done.
The modern version of that kind of nuisance program is the one where you screen-capture the dektop, set it as the wallpaper, and hide all the icons.
Reminds me of this Dilbert from a "few" years back - it's one of my favorites.
-tg
I thought you had /dev/zero for both input and output (and it isn't April 1 yet) in which case it should just run endlessly, but not harm the disk. Only if you specified a device representing a disk for the output would it fill the disk with zeros. But I might not be remembering it correctly. I thought it was a nuisance command as given, not a harmful one.Quote:
Originally Posted by dclamp
I had /dev/disk0 as the second command lol. From what I read, /dev/zero is just an endless stream. Not sure what would happen if you used it as a destination...
Yes, it provides an endless stream of zeros, but I'm pretty sure it is also used as a sink, like /dev/null.
There is a reason to choose it over /dev/null in some cases, but I don't remember off the top of my head why and have to start working so can't look it up.
And we all thought linux was clever.
Depends on the definition of clever. Perhaps clever enough that it is harder to program a virus for it, but not so clever in that it is easier to "program" the novice user to destroy the OS himself in many, seemingly obscure ways.
?any one else confused
If you go to a command prompt and type 'removed by dclamp', it replaces all ads with boxes which say 'removed by dclamp'. It may say 'command not found' or something like that. You have to try it several times for it to take, for some reason there's a delay in the parser activation on opening the command line. You'll have to check the process/task manager and see if sachets.exe is running with the correct command prompt. This is a delayed start process.Quote:
Originally Posted by ident