> On Sunday, an anonymous email was sent to many reporters announcing
> the hack: “Hi to all mankind. The greatest leak of cyber space era is
> happening. What’s its name? Oh I forget to tell. Its HBO and Game of
> Thrones……!!!!!! You are lucky to be the first pioneers to witness and
> download the leak. Enjoy it & spread the words. Whoever spreads well,
> we will have an interview with him. HBO is falling.”
http://ew.com/tv/2017/07/31/hbo-hacked-game-of-thrones/
HBO has joined the ranks of Hollywood entertainment companies to suffer
a major cyber attack.
EW has learned that upcoming episodes of a couple series and at least
one alleged script or treatment have been put online by hackers who
breached the company’s systems — with more threatened to be coming soon.
“HBO recently experienced a cyber incident, which resulted in the
compromise of proprietary information,” the network confirmed in a
statement. “We immediately began investigating the incident and are
working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity firms. Data
protection is a top priority at HBO, and we take seriously our
responsibility to protect the data we hold.”
Hackers claimed to have obtained 1.5 terabytes of data from the company.
So far, an upcoming episode of Ballers and Room 104 have apparently been
put online. There is also written material that’s allegedly from next
week’s fourth episode of Game of Thrones. More is promised to be “coming
soon.”
HBO is not commenting on what content might have been stolen, confirming
specific titles or the amount of data accessed. This morning, HBO
chairman and CEO Richard Plepler sent an email to HBO employees alerting
them of the breach.
“As most of you have probably heard by now, there has been a cyber
incident directed at the company which has resulted in some stolen
proprietary information, including some of our programming,” he wrote.
“Any intrusion of this nature is obviously disruptive, unsettling, and
disturbing for all of us. I can assure you that senior leadership and
our extraordinary technology team, along with outside experts, are
working round the clock to protect our collective interests. The efforts
across multiple departments have been nothing short of herculean. It is
a textbook example of quintessential HBO teamwork. The problem before us
is unfortunately all too familiar in the world we now find ourselves a
part of. As has been the case with any challenge we have ever faced, I
have absolutely no doubt that we will navigate our way through this
successfully.”
On Sunday, an anonymous email was sent to many reporters announcing the
hack: “Hi to all mankind. The greatest leak of cyber space era is
happening. What’s its name? Oh I forget to tell. Its HBO and Game of
Thrones……!!!!!! You are lucky to be the first pioneers to witness and
download the leak. Enjoy it & spread the words. Whoever spreads well, we
will have an interview with him. HBO is falling.”
It’s not clear if the hackers actually have what would be the crown
jewel target for an HBO cyber breach — upcoming episodes of the
company’s biggest hit, Game of Thrones. So far, no GoT episodes have leaked.
In April, a hacker penetrated Netflix to release episodes from season 5
of Orange Is the New Black ahead of its summer return. And in May, a
hacker claimed to have stolen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No
Tales, but Disney chief Bob Iger later said the threat was a hoax. The
biggest Hollywood hack victim was Sony in 2014, where approximately 100
terabytes of data was uploaded online (versus the 1.5 TB claimed in the
HBO attack).
For years, HBO has fought a cyber-battle to keep Game of Thrones
storylines secret and the show’s content from being illegally
distributed — particularly before episodes air. In season 5, the first
four episodes leaked online before the show’s season premiere after
review DVDs that were sent to the press and industry insiders. HBO has
since halted the practice of sending any episodes in advance. That same
year, some clips leaked ahead of time from overseas HBO distributors,
and even images of Jon Snow’s death found their way online before the
finale aired. Just a couple weeks ago, a Thrones trailer to be screened
at Comic-Con leaked onto YouTube in advance of its release.
The BASH shell is an inordinate duplicity of features wrapped in a
cacophany of syntax, where it's almost impossible to ascertain the
sane lowest common denominator and almost-identical appearing syntax
can have disastrous results if a single character is missed or added
(thus resulting in a completely alternate syntax reality).
And when one tries to do something truly elegant, to "master bash",
one discovers after weeks of ones irrelevant-to-bash time, that
absolutely nothing is elegant, and the variations ultimately make
nothing of any even mild complexity/robustness, simple.
So then of course one discovers dash, when you want higher
performance, a much smaller footprint, or simply to attain that
hallowed "lowest common denominator" syntax (don't be fooled friends,
don't be fooled!).
To test out new code/syntax efficiently one would presume the command
line is a reasonable place to go, but for starters dash (at least
when launched from a bash shell) has no readline support, and
xorg -> xterm -> bash -> tmux -> bash -> dash
is evidently too much for little dash, since not even the arrow keys
work (nor Home, End, Del and probably others), no readline, no
command history, just backspace and paste with the mouse (same on
Linux console for the curious...).
There goes -that- experiment!
Of course there's a certain irony where for increased performance in
bash there is the useful-sounding "arithmetic context" feature ("(("
and "))"), which by the way is not impelemented in dash - for
performance reasons.
Oh well, so I throwze in me towell, "eff it! effing eff it already!!"
and decides the LCD of "/bin/test" will bring the sanity of
consistency if not the salvation of sane syntaxity.
But, you guessed it, NO! 'Twas not to be!
Dash. Simple. LCD. Yes, that must be it the one true way - I see it
in all system scripts - albeit they look a little verbose here and
there, there's an undeniable consistency about them, and everyone
says "dash runs faster", so it must be true::
performance? check!
apparent relative consistency? check!
What's not to like?
Well, learning the differences for starters. Despite a MUCH more
approachable man page than that ungodly bash man page (which is
admittedly still better than no man page).
And don't get me started on the frustration arising from trying to
test dash from the command line due to the frustration of trying to
use dash instead of bash in my scripts, due to the frustration
arising from the ungodly unconsistencys of bash syntax, and bash
syntax as compared with dash syntax, and bash vs dash inbuilt test
syntax and vs /bin/test and /bin/[ command line "command" syntax
(just try lexico strings comparison with < or > in each environment).
AAARRRGHHGHGHGGE !@#@!!.. ... . . . .. ....... .
Thy consistency must not be obtained yet ye suffer the inability to
compare numbers except for some strange options which evidence the
necessity to prefix every test, for numbers or strings, with a bloody
x.
That's right! The crucifixion of syntax itself with the imposition of
the cross, the wholey cross, and nothing but the cross, every where,
every time, every place, everywhere, every script, and also every
where.
And I mean --everywhere-- you look! (Did I mention EVERYwhere?!!).
And why? Why thank you for asking - because /bin/test won't work in
various system-destroying scenarios otherwise, that's why!!!
See above, heathen, see above!
<soothing voiceover>
Imagine a soft blue light as you experience that quiescence calmly
rising, on your deep in-breath, bathed in pure essential shell
mastery of that single letter, "x", solving all your syntaxtical
perturbxtions, gently smaxhes itxelf on your eye ballx, thux
enxuring your enduring peaxe and happinexx with life and Unix
itxelf.
</soothing voiceover>
Seriously, it's time for a change, time for sane shell syntax, time
for ... the one true language. (No no! Not the oblig xkcd cartxxn,
ANYthing but the oblig!! We need standards, lots of them, and more
standards!)
And since all the existing shell and scripting standards are
completely insufficient, it's time for the obligatory implementation
of a new, all-encompassing shell with universal syntax applicable to
all languages, all tools and all environments, incestuously binding
with all other languages and admitting no deficiency!
That's right - you guessed it :) , it's time for Lisp!
Shell has had its day, and "eval" is waay too clumsy in comparison
with the visual elegance of Lisp where every second letter is an
utterly uniform opening or closing bracket, where the original
theoretical language struts itself in simple glory and where
ultimately every "fancy new design feature" in every "fancy new
language" somehow always existed in elegance from the origin.
Bow, punk!
Bow before Lisp, the alpha and the omega of programming languages!
Every concept ever "discovered" in "fancy new programming language"s
of the day, from functions to modules, objects to tail calls,
run-time self modification, objects, and universal appeal. That's
Lisp.
Well perhaps that teeny little "universal appeal" bit ...
And on that note, a question:
Any suggestions as to which functional language variant might be most
suitable for "shell" glue script repalement language?
Thanks,
Z
(PS: there's a little rather bland and dull, but nonetheless just
mildly humorous, humour, on the fish shell web page:
https://fishshell.com/
I might check that out as a bash replacement...)
