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    A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues of mine and I went to a bar after work.  It was a typical bar atmosphere, perhaps slightly amplified by it being a Friday, with loud music and louder patrons.  Despite some difficulty hearing each other, we got chatting over beers. At some point Adam, someone I’d worked with closely in the preceding weeks, was describing a process by which coding assignments - programs written by students to solve an assigned problem - were automatically checked at NYU.  The process automatically ran the submitted programs, systematically trying malformed inputs and edge cases; things like replacing an expected number with a string, or a divisor with zero. This piqued my interest, and I responded enthusiastically, “Oh, they’re fuzzing ‘em!” He looked at me quizzically, and kindly replied “No… It’s actually the opposite of fuzzing.”  While ‘opposite’ perhaps too strongly implies dichotomy, he was absolutely correct. And I knew that. So what happened?

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.

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