SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Lifehacker has an Interview with Brian Fox, the author of the Bash shell.
Brian Fox is a titan of open source software. As the first employee of Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, he wrote several core GNU components, including the GNU Bash shell. Now he’s a board member of the National Association of Voting Officials and co-founder of Orchid Labs, which delivers uncensored and private internet access to users like those behind China’s firewall. We talked to him about his career and how he works.
[...] I first recall being interested in technology at the age of 6. My father, a physicist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, had a teletype machine in the basement of the house we were living in. It connected to BBN via a modem. The baud rate was probably around 110bps—quite low. I used to hold down the CTRL key while pressing “G”, which would cause the bell to ring.
[...] I joined with my other 4 co-founders in 2017 to create the Orchid Protocol for a truly decentralized, surveillance-free internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:02PM (10 children)
At least any details, the LOOK AT ME page is plain html, commitment to free and open internet just oozes from it
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:05PM (1 child)
https://archive.fo/1skDb [archive.fo]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @06:04AM
In my default configuration (block everything but readable text), I see the questions but not the answers.
File; View; Use Style; No Style shows the answers for me.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:12PM (7 children)
A shitty puff piece on lifehacker, unfortunately the orchid site also appears to require javascript.
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:35PM (4 children)
Lifehacker has a lot of puff pieces, but the "How I Work" series is interesting to me because it gives me the tiniest bit of insight into how actually productive people (i.e. unlike myself) work.
I am reading it in dillo 3 with no javascript. Granted, it looks like something in HTML 2.0 viewed in Netscape 20 years ago when viewed that way, but I can read it fine.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:55PM (3 children)
You might as well waste your life watching reruns of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
How successful people work is irrelevant. What matters is how they were lucky enough to be born into positions of opportunity. See right here:
See. You don't launch a successful technology career by reading outdated computer manuals at a ghetto library while dreaming about how great it will be when you can afford the computers you can only read about. You don't get a tech job by earning a cheap computer science degree at a ghetto college and going out into the real world expecting rich tech bros not to spit on you for being uppity.
You don't become successful by working your way out of poverty. The insight is you don't start out poor in the first place.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:04PM (2 children)
And yet literally millions of people have done just that. Immigrants whose homeland is so shitty that they packed up and left have come over, started with nothing, and built considerable wealth here. Not just immigrants either. People can and do bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Sure it is harder than being born with a silver spoon in their mouth but they manage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Saturday December 16 2017, @10:19PM (1 child)
Luck plays a very large factor in this; luck, the relationship between the mood / inclinations of the masses and your undertakings, any interactions with the legal system, who you know and who might step in to give you a technical or monetary boost... all these things are real leverage that stand entirely outside the idea that "working your way out" is a means in and of itself.
It's attractive to pretend that just working hard on a good idea or several will serve. But it's actually not that simple.
Some of them manage. Some of them fail despite their efforts, despite the value of their ideas, despite even some advantages. This is the hard truth. Life is not a bowl of cherries, there for anyone to pick up who is willing to bend over.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 17 2017, @09:50PM
Who have been riding the success failure rollercoaster for years. Many of them still haven't come out ahead and in many cases not entirely of their own fault.
One lives in the midwest and her only family/friends that can provide support are in podunk towns.
Another worked for years as a waitress then cook, then started her own business. It was going fine in a reasonably high end mall in a vintage building, until said building changed ownership. This resulted in the new owner jacking up rent on everybody whose leases were ending, leading to move of the businesses abandoning the mall. She still had 12-18 months on her lease, but lost about half of her business from the mall crowd. The rest of her business was from a few large nearby businesses, but while steady business they didn't provide breakeven on their own without the mall-based customers. Long story short, business dried up, what business remained began to peter out as the mall seemed abandoned and more than a little creepy, and she finally called it quits with time remaining on her lease because it wasn't covering her operating costs. She was still trying to recover the last time I had seen her 3 years later doing weekend catering plus a day job.
I've got a dozen other stories just like that. The two that have most recently been successes got a string of lucky breaks job-wise that set them up for the next job they hopped to. Of the ones owning their own business, the only successful one, who was also a 1st gen immigrant was shady as fuck and flaunting at least half of the labor and employment laws in the city/county/state, which allowed him to make money hand over fist. Even then it took them 5-10 years to get enough together to buy the business they wanted and wind down their original, and last time we were in touch they were still avoiding every law they could to make a profit. Some of those laws being very important, like health and safety, or epa regs around dumping. I kept hoping to see them get written up over it, but sadly the regulators never seemed to catch on, and not being a narc I didn't report them myself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:29PM (1 child)
Ditto (almost) what requerdanos says. I read the page just fine with scripting disabled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:04PM
Try the FAQ links.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:04PM (20 children)
Holy crap, that Lifehacker page is a bloatload of inscrutable scripts and CSS with a microscopic bit of content buried among tons of garbage. In other words, part of the growing tide of shameless dark-gray-hats who stop at nothing to exploit every eyeball and click.
I'm surprised that "a titan of open source software [and] the first employee of Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation" would allow his words to appear on such a scummy, malicious site.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:12PM (6 children)
I don't mind OT comments like this because it is true that a smaller and smaller percentage of websites contain a reasonable content/junk ratio. This is a big problem that needs to be dealt with somehow (perhaps the web needs to be forked or something, can we just put all crap like that directly on Facebook?).
However, I will say that I've removed soylent from my favorites due to too much political content and will probably slowly forget about it. Even many non-political topics get turned toxic by political commentators now.
The final straw for me was my post (the FP) here: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/12/10/2256224 [soylentnews.org]
There was a response that "FTF[me]" using a quote that had nothing to do with what I was saying. Then a pointless political debate ensued. It is like these political posts are made by bots...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:29PM (5 children)
This is very, very annoying; I'd love to see a "-10 Pointlessly Political" mod similar to but perhaps not quite as penalizing as the "spam" mod.
I really view the "Yeah, well [current story] is all because [a politician i do not like] is such an [insult deliberately and childishly misspelled], and you are an [insult to intelligence] if you say you don't see it!!!eleventy-one!" posts as a more pernicious form of spam, because they falsely claim to be on-topic, and a certain percentage of commenters actually fall for the premise that they are on-topic instead of just trolling garbage, and reply to them, derailing discussions into pointless political sewage as you note.
That said, I believe that GP is on-topic because Stallman actually does object to his words and images being presented in such an environment; he says things like "if you're recording a video of me, please don't encode it in em pee anything, and please don't post it to youtube." With Fox being the author of Bash, one of GNU's flagship applications, I do think it's interesting that their views seem to differ on things like that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:33PM (4 children)
Would you settle for "Offtopic"?
More to the (offtopic) point, perhaps we could have a "Political" mod understood to have the same applicability as "Offtopic" but with an option so you could filter such posts in or out of your "Soylent experience (TM)".
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:39PM (3 children)
No; I see "offtopic" as a mild frown, compared to what I would rather see, "heavy munitions."
This wouldn't do what I am thinking about here, because taking it out of the stream just for those who choose to ignore it would not prevent it from pretending to be ontopic just enough to derail discussion. Your post and my reply here are offtopic, sure, but are not likely to degenerate into a pointless flame war about which unrelated political group "sucks" or "rocks" more, and that's the difference that concerns me.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:43PM (2 children)
Controlling your own behavior is much easier than controlling everyone else. What's the difference to you if you don't see it vs. nobody can see it?
Maybe you would like it better if your personal setting that filters out comments with the "Political" mod would also trickle down (not trying to get political here!) to all child posts.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:55PM (1 child)
That's actually not too bad an idea, but it still fails to discourage the pointless-political-posturing-posts from siphoning energy and comments away from the community and into pointless-political-posturing-pisspots.
Discouraging that sort of derailing of the conversation is effective even if I personally never see it, and failing to discourage it is ineffective even if I am somehow able to personally read everything but the problem 24/7.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @04:46PM
You are seeking a technological solution to a problem based on the nature of humans.
All I can say is nobody has yet succeeded with that. People talk about what they want to talk about. Add really heavy moderation and that becomes a problem in itself with power tripping a-hole types.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:22PM (6 children)
Well, I'm sure Stallman himself would object to such. But you'll notice that Fox says that he uses an iPhone (prohibits GPL in their app store) and a Macintosh (proprietary OS + bash + emacs) in his daily workflow, and he's an "open source" booster, not a free software activist, so I can't see, given that, why he'd so much as notice, much less complain.
Besides, the page may not be quite the content-free hell you're describing. I downloaded it with wget and read it in dillo 3 with cookies disabled without issue, which is a good sign.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:29PM
Thank you for mentioning dillo! I've just installed it and it might be the browser I've been looking for. Or even threatening to write myself, as soon as I have that elusive free time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:46PM (2 children)
Fairly restrictive uMatrix (nothing but cookies, css and images regardless of domain) + uBlock works fine.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by Crash on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:16PM (1 child)
The only thing I needed uBlock for was the prior (new) Yahoo Mail - which replaced Classic (non-ajaxified), except they renamed the new Yahoo as Classic...
Other than that, uMatrix's default settings works for most sites, with some whitelisting for YouTube and what not.
I turn off all uMatrix's subscription block lists, as they are overkill that just slows your browser down and eats ram like candy.
Even NYT's and the Washington Post's paywall can be obviated by turning off first party scripting heh.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 17 2017, @06:46PM
"restrictive uMatrix...regardless of domain" meant I've disabled first party scripting by default:
https-strict: behind-the-scene false
matrix-off: about-scheme true
matrix-off: behind-the-scene true
matrix-off: chrome-extension-scheme true
matrix-off: chrome-scheme true
matrix-off: localhost true
matrix-off: moz-extension-scheme true
matrix-off: opera-scheme true
referrer-spoof: behind-the-scene false
* * * block
* * cookie allow
* * css allow
* * frame block
* * image allow
* * xhr block
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:46PM (1 child)
That is a ridiculous way to read a web page though just because it's possible to circumvent stupidity doesn't mean it should be accepted as standard.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:31PM
It isn't standard for anyone except perhaps rms himself, and shouldn't be, because it would be a serious pain and defeats the purpose of the www.
I didn't download the file and look at it in dillo until I wanted to see how well it worked without scripting and responsive whatnot. The article looked fine. No comments at the end though, I now notice.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:41PM (2 children)
That's not how I experienced it, however I took a look and count 9 different domains it's trying to load code from, so it appears you are not entirely wrong. I still would not agree with microscopic, the text is taking up 6 pages for me, properly formatted it would still be 3 or 4 pages, for a casual interview it's reasonable.
He's also using a Mac and an iPhone these days. Sad.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:25PM (1 child)
By my quick approximations, the interview text is 1/158 of the page content, not counting included scripts and CSS from other files which I suppose would make the ratio much worse.
So, maybe not microscopic, but still a horrible signal-to-noise ratio.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:13PM
Which prompted me to look at it more closely. That really is a mess. The actual text begins and ends on line 106 of a 117 line file. That's 26,260 columns and 117 lines.
One of the more monstrous piles I've seen passed off as a webpage, but then again I've really quit looking at them, it's just depressing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:32PM (2 children)
"The food here is horrible, and such small portions"
the growing tide of shameless dark-gray-hats
Well, if they at least used dark gray text, I might might even be able to read the damn thing.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:05PM (1 child)
Allow me to explain something to you. When the food is of low quality then you need to eat more to have adequate nutrition. Haven't you ever wondered why those poor people you glimpse from the top of your ivory tower are always eating desperately trying to stay alive while you sit back and watch leisurely as your big piles of money grow bigger.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:23PM
Where's the "Say whaaa?" mod?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:11PM (2 children)
Orchid Protocol may deprecate the integrated ISP/ContentProvider business model. Killing NN may have been a first blow in an attempt to kill market adoption of Orchid. This proto looks like it might be "the one", that actually moves forward in a big way.
From the FAQ it is an overlay protocol. They don't describe at what OSI layer it overlays at though, so we shall see. Anyway, it could be "the one". It may not be. But it could be. Can't wait to get my hands on the source code.
WhooHoo!
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
Ajit Pai and crew killed net neutrality (which has only existed in codified form for a couple of years and was opposed by Pai + ISPs from the start) in order to kill a Tor clone nobody has ever heard of that was started in 2017. Riiiight.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:14PM
If you don't think these guys know that TCP/IPV6 is a dead man walking (and has been for years now) your out to lunch. They do competitor research just like everybody else. When TCP/IPv6 dies, it is going to be something like Orchid or TOR or Freenet, that kills it.
There are a lot of people aware of that, judging by the amount of investment going around. It isn't "blockchain" that people are investing in. It is the next gen Internet model, which is an entropic inevitability.
We are at a pivotal moment. Sometime soon, all of that stockholder value the monopolies have aggregated via buyouts and mergers of ridiculously unsuited companies, is going to go up in smoke. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows what is going to do it, including them. (but apparently not you) Which is why they'd rather commit treason against the Constitution of the United States, than let the market float.
This might be it. It might not. But something is coming. You can bet your ass on it. And the hoodlum trinity of telecom aren't going to like it one bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:36PM (6 children)
From the site:
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:50PM (2 children)
Sort of like the rich man's TOR, where the oppressed pay the less oppressed to be less oppressed themselves in one way, and more in another. Quoting https://orchidprotocol.com/ [orchidprotocol.com]:
If you don't have an awesome powerful system to mine cryptocurrency, but you do have a good net connection, you will apparently be able to just run this instead and watch the coins/tokens add up. Hey, I'm in, my net connection is great and goes probably 75% unused.
I do wonder the value of an "Orchid Token" expressed in any other unit.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Justin Case on Saturday December 16 2017, @04:56PM
Ten Orchids can be exchanged for one tulip [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:52PM
I have not read the protocol but from what I have read of ETH, it allows you to create virtual currencies pegged to bitcoin, so presumably it's value is sky high!
No really Etheirium isn't a big dirivitive engine, TRUST ME!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:16PM (2 children)
I was going to ask about that before the discussion got derailed.
Maybe they should make one orchid = 1/1,000,000 BTC.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:21PM (1 child)
My orchids are worth alot more than that (to me, anyway)
http://urologyspecialist.com.au/an-overview-of-orchiectomy-orchidectomy/ [urologyspecialist.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Funny) by a262 on Tuesday December 19 2017, @02:53AM
Where's the "+1, Oh Dear God(s) Why?!" mod when you need it?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:16PM (8 children)
Brian Fox, a black man, wrote Bash, a shell which is installed everywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:23PM (6 children)
Without bash you wouldn't even have a command line. Brian Fox has more power than Obama ever did.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:28PM (5 children)
Ksh > bash
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:36PM (1 child)
Either way somebody could make lots of jokes about backdooring you, given all the holes in bash since... 2.0 came out?
That big exploit a few years back I had actually been warned about back in the 90s by a friend as a reason to use some other shell.
Of course since all the shell scripts on linux REQUIRED bash features, sometimes even while referencing /bin/sh, instead of /bin/bash, I never migrated off it, because rewriting every shell script when I barely knew any shell scripting would have been impossible for me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday December 16 2017, @07:49PM
I don't know about all the linuces* in the world, but in Debian and derivatives, /bin/sh isn't bash. (it isn't sh either; it's dash.)
Dash is a smaller shell that loads faster/depends on fewer libraries/has fewer features than bash; the Debian folks say that switching to dash results in a faster system boot time given that (faster loading time) * (many scripts loaded during boot) = less time to boot.
---
* operating systems based on linux kernel + gnu userland
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:08PM
Kirk shell > Gorn shell
(Score: 1) by turgid on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:11PM (1 child)
I remember when the ksh license was changed to make it free-as-in-beer. All the Real Unix(TM) people loved ksh, and they were very excited. They thought it might take over the world. The problem is the FOSS shells had been steadily improving over the years to the point that they were "good enough." I seem to remember some discerning types using zsh. It was a lot better than bash at one point.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday December 16 2017, @09:24PM
BASH wasn't really all that great at first frankly.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 17 2017, @03:24AM
...and from the looks of the muthafucka he bash yo head in if you wimpy Whiteys keep talkin' shit 'bout his shell.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 16 2017, @05:40PM (3 children)
"We are not directly concerned with the legality of utilizing this protocol in China."
Nice thought, but you still appear to be at the mercy of your ISP. Until we can ubiquitously connect without one, we're pretty much screwed.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @06:47PM (2 children)
This is not correct. Constraint of speech and trade is contingent on the ability to differentiate the nature of the content. If you can't tell what it is where it came from, or where it is going, you can't filter it.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:20PM
you can't filter it.
That's the goal. Make censorship impractical, if not impossible. I can run the filter at my end. You can run your filter at your end. Never the twain shall meet.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday December 16 2017, @09:17PM
The first step is you tag the special content to give it a boost. Then later on, once that's come to be expected and the most popular sites have all voluntarily complied, you can just start default denying anything you *don't* recognize.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by crafoo on Saturday December 16 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)
I like bash. Pretty good shell. It reminds me of the fact it was written to replace the Bourne shell. Ever look at the source code? A study in C preprocessor macro abuse (the Bourne shell, not bash).
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/mac.h [tuhs.org]
Here are some of my favorite macros from the Bourne source code:
the TRUE define is maybe my favorite, for it's simplicity.
I also was reading some code C++ recently that had:
#define private public
Yeah, I guess. Sometimes it's just easier to just hammer in those screws.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @09:17PM
Uh-huh. So the TRUE define is good for bitwise comparisons since all bits are 1.