The power cable would like to have a word.
We have squid games at home.
Squid games at home:
while this is not real, something similar in principal very much was! (but not too widespread)
see here or look up “casino dos malware”
uh in short it erases “the disk’s” (unsure which) file allocation table (pretty much the dos/windows version of a superblock). apparently some versions did copy it to memory and give the user a chance though!
Has “let’s play a game” vibes
Reminder that binaries cannot change a shell’s working directory, so the non-mines will do nothing.
(
cdis a shell builtin)I mean, you can just write a whole custom shell for this
it could just reinvoke
$SHELLin the parent dirTechnically they could if run as root by modifying the parent process
Good point. Also it wouldn’t stop you from just opening another terminal window haha.
Reminds me of gameshell, which is a rogue-like game designed to teach you the unix shell. So instead of navigating with NESW, you
cdto locations. At one point you search the “garden”, which is an unmanageable tangle of directories, withfind.Based on the responses in this thread, I feel like you could present this screenshot with a “I bet you couldn’t find your way out of this!” and a zip of the directory, and a significant number of users would voluntarily download it and extract it just to “prove that they could”.
Well yeah? And you do it in a vm. But seems like a decently simple problem anyway.
ls -aland compare the sizes.Obvioulsy whoever set this minefield thought about this
Genuinely my first response. What are VMs for?
I run QubesOS BTW. My entire computer is just a bunch of VMs in a trench coat.
Running Qubes as a daily driver is some serious level of privacy enthusiasm
\cd ~what does this change?
Bypasses aliases and uses the original command
When people don’t know normal things we learned in '92, I get worried.
Combat the minefield with a fork bomb. Ain’t no process surviving this engagement.
I’ll hit them with an rm /etc. We go out, we go out together and on my terms.
cat 1strings 1I can think of a way out:
Just throw the whole PC away. It’s someone else’s problem now!
But that just becomes a Jumanji issue
But it’s on a dedicated server you have already paid for, which also hosts your own Minecraft game server with active players (mission-critical process which can never be allowed to stop).
Maybe something like
find ./ -type f | xargs md5sum, then avoid the one directory where the executable has a different checksum. Heck, evenfind | lsmight suffice.This could be trivially defeated by a program which erases the hard drive unless run using a particular executable name. Then, all twenty entries could simply be hard links to the same executable file on disk, but one of the names would trigger different behavior.
So then you either cat the executable and hope it’s a shell script, you output the binary with a hex viewer and compare, you modify the executable so it’s in a lower permission group and thus wouldn’t have access to erase the drive, there’s like a hundred ways to solve this.
Does it have a perpetual energy source if I unplug it?
There was an old virus that would copy your FAT table to ram, erase it from disk, and preset you with a slot machine UI where you would gamble to get the FAT back, if you won, great, the virus would write the FAT back to the drive, if not, you lost everything.
Rebooting without playing meant loosing everything.
FAT Table
Can I just pay? I can go to the ATM Machine and enter my PIN Number
You forget that FAT stands for “File Allocation Travesty.”
Diabolical!














