m7c1

Today we'll continue setting up a Linux environment which is reminiscent of OS X, while being very very speedy, and anti-mouse - the way computing should be.  We'll base this on a clean installation of Debian 10 without a GUI (which we covered in part 0x01 of this series), and proceed to setup and the i3 window manager, the Terminator terminal, the application launcher Kupfer, and set zsh to be our default shell.  At the end of the tutorial series, we'll have an speedy interface that looks something like the image below, which is my daily driver.  This flies on an SSD and 10 year old hardware!

Welcome to part 0x01 of our multi-part tutorial on setting up a speedy, usable Linux environment!  A little background first.  Linux is a free and open source operating system originally designed by Linus Torvalds.  Today, it comes in many 'flavors'.  Debian is the flavor that underpins the popular Ubuntu and Mint distributions, and is associated with perhaps the best known package (or software) repository which can be interacted with using the aptitude package manager, or apt.  Other flavors include RedHat, Arch and SUSE.

A buffer overflow is one of the oldest tricks in the book.  The NSA was performing them in the 70s, and they continue to be a problem today.  As we'll explore here, they result from an interaction between inappropriate assumptions and the way modern operating systems function.  In this tutorial, we'll cover a very simple example of how the execution of a poorly coded program can be subverted to give control over the system it's running on.

This is a 'fork bomb':

:(){ :|: & };:

In bash (and probably bash-like shells) this declares a function named :, and defines that function as a call to itself, piped into a call to itself, which is then forked.  The result is endless forking of a non-terminating program that calls itself twice per call.  The last : initiates the bomb.

    Situation: I'm in the EU, living under its Big State ethos and enduring its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Web presences with an EU market have largely complied in some fashion, but many without have simply denied access to requests appearing to originate in the EU. I wanted to read an article on a site in the second category.You'll need tor and a proxy. I use privoxy.