Around the year 2000 I was working operations in the NOC for WebTV (then owned by Microsoft). For those who don't know, WebTV was a little set-top box with a modem which would dial up on demand and provide a very basic web/chat/email experience on the TV. The box would call a 1800 number to figure out its own phone number, then re-dial on a local toll-free number with a local sub-contracted ISP.
One of the services we had would periodically send a UDP datagram out to online clients to let them know they had new email. The settop box would then light up a little indicator light.
Of course, sometimes the client would hang up. The IP might get allocated to a PC dialup user. And sometimes, that PC dialup user might be running a firewall that was popular back then, called BLACK ICE DEFENDER.
BLACK ICE DEFENDER had all these (not so) cool features, the kind that semi-technical people love. For example, it would log ATTACKS. What are ATTACKS? Unrecognized traffic, of course.
Sometimes the little UDP datagram for our "you have mail" service would be delivered to a PC user running BLACK ICE DEFENDER, which would register it as an ATTACK. It would then ever so helpfully look up the ARIN contact information to see who sent the errant datagram -- which had the NOC phone number. It would then tell the user "THIS ENTITY IS HACKING YOU" and imply that contacting them would be productive. Yes, you could pick up a phone and call the Microsoft NOC. Back then, the internet was a smaller place.
My job was to check the NOC voicemail, which was reliably filled with very angry people. Often they would threaten that they've reported us to the FBI or somesuch, or that it confirmed some conspiracy theory or another. We played the good ones on speakerphone for entertainment.
Good times. Doesn't happen anymore.
The same year I was working on various online music stores using Microsoft's Windows Media DRM. This would cause a licensing window to pop up in Media Player all the time when the license was missing or expired for someone's music. We would get various complaints emailed to us, and being head developer sometimes the thornier ones would end up in my inbox, and my friendly ass would be kind enough to reply and try to figure them out.
One time one of the senior execs was walking past my screen and peered over my shoulder to read a new email which said "EVERY MORNING YOU ARE ON MY COMPUTER GET OFF MY COMPUTER!!!". The exec leaned over, typed "GO FUCK YOURSELF" and hit reply.
The benefits of being the boss...
Notice that on iOS (for example) if an app crashes it just disappears > poof! < and it’s gone.
On Windows when an app crashes (or you kill a non responsive app), you then see a dialog with Microsoft Windows branding saying that it is logging that the app crashed. As nerds we understand why… but the result is that the user doesn’t curse the app, they curse Microsoft. Whereas when an iOS app disappears they curse the app, not Apple.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/ is proof that there are people out there whose mental illness will result in threats on your life (at least this specific person apologized later: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/08/09/nocais-apology/).
It's difficult to blame people for their mental illness, but a valid excuse doesn't make dealing with this crap any better. At least paranoid Github issues don't usually come with death threats...
I remember I would take the IP addresses of the “attackers” and plug them into a McAfee graphical tracert tool, and it felt like nothing short of something out of GoldenEye.
Thanks for the memories!
It doesn't help that if you Google any filenames, or even any semi-obscure file extensions, there would always be plenty of blogspam articles saying they're "possible virus". And oftentimes, there is no legit article to say what they really are even if you try, if they're from some relatively less popular software.
https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/18cf47156abe94255ae14...
Too bad there aren't enough Mac users to prompt a similar backlash against Macs littering every computer they visit on the network with .DS_Store and other turds.
/*
** Temporary files are named starting with this prefix followed by 16 random
** alphanumeric characters, and no file extension. They are stored in the
** OS's standard temporary file directory, and are deleted prior to exit.
** If sqlite is being embedded in another program, you may wish to change the
** prefix to reflect your program's name, so that if your program exits
** prematurely, old temporary files can be easily identified. This can be done
** using -DSQLITE_TEMP_FILE_PREFIX=myprefix_ on the compiler command line.
**
** 2006-10-31: The default prefix used to be "sqlite_". But then
** Mcafee started using SQLite in their anti-virus product and it
** started putting files with the "sqlite" name in the c:/temp folder.
** This annoyed many windows users. Those users would then do a
** Google search for "sqlite", find the telephone numbers of the
** developers and call to wake them up at night and complain.
** For this reason, the default name prefix is changed to be "sqlite"
** spelled backwards. So the temp files are still identified, but
** anybody smart enough to figure out the code is also likely smart
** enough to know that calling the developer will not help get rid
** of the file.
*/Building illuminati lairs now, are we!
It's because McAfee started using SQLite, angry users would stumble upon the files, do a minimum of searching or thinking, and be furious at SQLite developers.
For the embedded use case I think it’s a slam dunk, but there are many interesting use cases for server side but they all seem to be toyish.
The locking behavior of SQLite is somewhat problematic unless you use WAL and even then not perfect
Human readability was not a goal, in fact quite the opposite.
There were certainly times when they were necessary: when Windows had nothing built-in to defend itself, and for a time after then when those built-in features were crap.
Those times are pretty much over now IMO. I'd go as far as to suggest that the market is now an attempt at a protection racket and hardware hawkers are complicit: things come pre-installed on new laptops and make very misleading claims about what might happen if you uninstall them instead of subscribing after the free trial period (ref: Dad got a new laptop recently, I went through and removed all the junk included with it, I can see why people with little technical experience might just pay up).
Around the time of Windows 7 I stopped using anti-virus software and nothing happened. And for a long time before that, paid antivirus software (ESET NOD-32) wasn't finding anything. I think the simple rules of having a router with a firewall, not clicking random files, not using Internet Explorer, and keeping Windows up to date covered 99% of possible exploits, and the other 1% was luck.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/06/google_zero_hacker_re... [2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=69...
The data point was "what is the biggest thing your group does that the other does not?"
The professionals came in as "multi-factor auth" The non-professionals came in as "anti-virus"
In modern capitalist democracies with social benefits there’s a lot of debate/opinion about what the state should do versus leave to the market.
Imagine you establish a successful little utopia on an island somewhere. At first you outsource policing to a few strong and forthright friends, then as the place grows you let the market decide. But as the place really matures you end up having to bring policing “in house”, controlled by the state. There is still plenty (plenty!) of ways it can be corrupt… but when anti-virus / policing etc is fully outsourced - over time its corruption levels completely saturate.
Similarly - a military power that relies on mercenaries/soldiers of fortune/contracted parties. It cannot work beyond a very short term. (Machiavelli goes into this in a lot of detail in ‘The Prince’ … he was super evil but he was no fool.)
Seems strange to say that Bill Gates should’ve read more Machiavelli and he would’ve avoided creating the leeching anti-virus industry for so long.
The problem is that virus scanners sometimes misclassify those temp files as belonging to malware apps, or sometimes they might be written by real malware apps, but even in the latter case, that only happens because the malware uses sqlite as a library. The malware isn't written by the SQLite authors, so complaining to them is pointless.
Firstly, it not that anti-virus software was misclassifying it -- it's that a particular one, Mcafee, was USING sqlite. And more importantly, it didn't put the file(s) in the proper %temp% folder. Instead, it created it as `C:\temp\{name}.sqlite_`. This is why users found them suspicious and complained to devs.
Also keep in mind putting random files or folders under root of C:\ was, while never recommended, a common practice in 2000s (some still do so even today). So what Mcafee was doing is hardly unheard of. But people still freak out when they see these in their C:\ (TBH, understandable).
> %userprofile%
Apple, in its arrogance and backwardness, doesn't store those choices on the BROWSING user's computer; it stores them in the directories on the computer being browsed... where, by the way, they'll be trounced by the next Finder user who comes along.
.DS_Store files come from Apple's file systems containing a separate data and resource fork. APFS can natively store the contents, but for foreign file systems/network shares, a .DS_Store file is created to store those attributes.
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores -bool trueMy other favorite Apple filesystem cock-up is the inclusion of a "Contents" directory in every bundle, which never has any siblings. I mean... what kind of ass thinks that a directory needs a subdirectory to hold the contents of itself?
The one thing Apple fixed in Finder that annoyed the living #$%! out of me for all previous years was that you couldn't sort files WITH FOLDERS AT THE TOP. Of course the fix was incomplete, broken in some places at first, including your Desktop directory. But that did get fixed surprisingly quickly.
desktop.inihttps://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/11/tales-from-my-inbox-p...
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warnin...
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/02/16/why-is-your-email-in-...
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
Edit: more information here: https://www2.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=McafeeProblem Apparently, McAfee kept those files locked when it was using them, so the files couldn't be deleted and people got angry that they couldn't clean them up. Sounds like a loud minority to me.
I used to have a popular freely available 3rd party DLL that was included in lots of software packages. Because I was silly, it had my email address in the metadata that'd show up if you clicked "Properties" in Explorer. I'd get plenty of emails from random people asking for and sometimes _demanding_ help with software I've never heard of. I'm sure if I had an easy to find website with my name and a forum on it, it'd be full of such angry comments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
(yes, it's the funny one)
I think that lsof can still see these temporary files; I'm not sure how I first noticed it.
Windows implements a POSIX kernel layer, so perhaps this functionality could be coaxed out of it.
Imagine for a moment the cross section of Windows users that 1) have McAfee running 2) poke around the Windows temp folders and/or run some sort of "cleaner" to "optimize" their system and 3) don't recognize the name "sqlite". I can imagine the exact type of user, peak Dunning-Kruger and utterly insufferable. Even just seeing their e-mails before deleting them would be maddening. I think most people on HN can vividly imagine the sort or remember back when they were that insufferable twat.
> The locking behavior of SQLite is somewhat problematic unless you use WAL and even then not perfect
SQLite with WAL and synchronous configured appropriately will insert a row in ~50uS on NVMe hardware. This is completely serialized throughput (i.e. the highest isolation level available in SQL Server, et. al.). At scale, this can be reasonably described as "inserting a billion rows per day".
I have yet to witness a database engine with latency that can touch SQLite. For some applications, this is a go/no-go difference. Why eschew the majesty of SQL because you can't wait for a network hop? Bring that engine in process to help solve your tricky data problems. I'd much rather write SQL than LINQ if I have to join more than 2 tables.
We've been exclusively using SQLite in production for a long time. Big, multi-user databases. Looking at migrating to SQL Server Hyperscale, but not because SQLite is slow or causing any technical troubles. We want to consolidate our installs into one physical place so we can keep a better eye on them as we grow.
Fun fact: SQL Server "Hyperscale" is capped at 100MB/s on its transaction log. I have written to SQLite databases at rates far exceeding this.
Admittedly, not high traffic like you asked, but one of my favorite uses of SQLite hands down.
If you need high write volume, then yes, the locking behavior means SQLite is not a good fit.
I think performance can be good, as long as a competent schema design is in place. Allowing ad-hoc queries from less trusted users will surely tank performance.
That being said; even if it weren't usable in a web service space, does that make it any less reasonable of a database? That whole mentality sounds like a web developer centric one. Berkeley DB was used for decades for application and system databases, a field that SQLite largely replaced it in. And one that MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, etc are generally completely unsuited for. It's the same reason Microsoft offered MS Access for so long alongside MSSQL, until MSSQL had it's own decent embeddable option to deprecate it.
The other use case I'm eager to explore is as persistence of status data in a long-running process. Occasionally the task blows up halfway and although we can recover the functional changes, we lose the reporting data for the original run. If we save it in a SQLite database instead of just in-script data structures, we don't have to try to reverse engineer it anymore.
In both cases, I like the idea of "everything's one file and we nuke it when we're done" rather than "deal with the hostile operations team to spin up MySQL infrastructure."
Because SQLite is run in many different environments and scenarios, and what's terrible in one scenario is perfect for another. There are no defaults that will work for everyone. This also applies to MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. but the range of scenarios for those is more limited (no embedded for example) so the defaults are a bit more tuned to what's suitable for your scenario.
An old product I worked on (which is still around) used (still uses?) SQLite for storing filesystem blocks that came from the paired backup software. A single database only contained the blocks backed up from a single disk (based on its disk UUID.) So, this is a perfect scenario since there's only one writer at a time because there's only one device and one backup on that device at a time. We could write blocks to SQLite fast enough to saturate the IOPS of the underlying device and filesystem containing the database. This was over 10 years ago. Very practical and durable and way better than anything we could do in house.
Today, you can definitely do GB/s on NVMe class hardware with the right pragma settings and the right workload. So for certain classes of multi-tenant solutions I think it's not so bad, you can just naturally have a single writer to a single data store (or can otherwise linearize writes) and the raw performance will be excellent and more than enough.
I got romantically and sexually involved with a person who had schizophrenia, they would occasionally make very wild and inaccurate accusations toward me, and when I broke it off they began stalking my friends, family, and me. At some point, the episode they were having ended and they stopped, and later, she said they forgave me for what I did (which was nothing).
While I sympathize that some of the emotions they were feeling were out of their control, the act of buying airplane tickets, renting cars, and harassing friends, family of mine, and me IRL was over the top and frankly, imo, unforgivable even with a diagnosis of mental illness.
RIP Terry. A. Davis
That appears to me to be quite like a Chesterton fence. Everyone encounters these eventually.
”Please see attached screen dump for a screen shot of your contact info included in Spotify (or what more likely seems to be a hacked Spotify developed illegally by a third party).”
No, that would be ._<filename> files (containing resource forks, when the corresponding file is stored on a volume with a FS not supporting them natively), which are much rarer these days given that resource forks are not really used anymore.
.DS_Store contains Finder metadata, as far as I know (non-default icon sorting or positioning, categories, tags etc.), and they occur on all volumes, including Mac native filesystems. Finder just hides them by default.
`.gitignore` is for stuff that all developers need to ignore, like compiler output, and should be kept to the bare minimum.
The other was keeping file handles open to deleted files, as you describe. I don’t recall how this worked, but I suspect it involved uncompressing data into a file descriptor, then reading it back. I guess as long as his terminal window was open it was more stable than tmp (he may have also been using screen).
Unlinking files reduces their reference count. Once the reference count reaches zero the file is considered deleted and the space can be reclaimed. Every open file descriptor and hard link increases a file's reference count. So if you've got a file descriptor open on a file in a background task (daemon, nohup, screen, etc) and unlink it with rm or something the file's reference count will decrement but not go to zero. Only when that program closes the file descriptor will the reference count go to zero and the file actually be deleted.
Someone on my company thought it good to launch background process from within a cron, and start it with `&ˋ at the end, so that it detached from the cron and goes as child to init .
Right, but the program opens std out and dumps its output in it. Guess what, the fd handling the std out ends up in a temp file which is deleted by cron, but still held by the program.
I ended up with a full / in all production servers, with no culprit when running ˋdu`. Only running ˋlsof |grep deleted` did I find these huge temporary files.
Killing the process and switching to a saner systemd service was the savior.
And the definition of “deserved it” is “having more money than everyone else”.
Who cares if that money was made by exploiting people or selling shonky goods or breaking promises or tricking people or otherwise being an asshole?
Go on, take that flight. Buy that shiny thing. You worked hard for that money. You’re better than they are. You deserve it.
/S
No, no. Getting on the internet wasn't based on having money for it. It was based on figuring out how to wire a 300 bps modem to a phone receiver. And to do that you needed a bit of a brain. And you likely weren't going to use it to share photos of your boo and shop for your next sugar-whatever, or share your dumb recipes. If you were capable of doing it, you might have valid opinions about what was going on in the world that would be worth debating or comparing with others... and anyway, there wasn't enough bandwidth for you to be both a blank, ignorant serf and to have your brain hijacked by masses of political operatives. No, the economy of scale just hadn't developed yet to deem the opinions of each individual member of the uneducated mass to be worth the effort of advertising to [each one] separately at the time.
[edit] Also, I'm assuming you can afford now to be on the internet and to take flights, so why can't you simply show the same amount of class that people showed when it was more difficult for them and they had to act a bit better to do so? Would that be too much to ask? Or is being a slob and intellectual degenerate some sort of proof that you're morally superior by way of being poor and not needing material things? You do realize that no matter what era we live in, the rich have nicer, shinier toys, right? What I meant by "class" was, as I said, the way you choose to comport yourself; it has nothing whatsoever to do with money.
A lack of class and comportment online is not new, and the shiny accoutrements and signifiers of “class” can as easily hide malign intent as demonstrate worth. (also: people shared all kinds of crap online, even then).
If you limit the internet to people who can wire up a 300 baud modem, then you’ll just end up with trolls who can solder.
I’m happy that everyone can fly, and can get online. How else are they going to learn about the world? I don’t have to hang out where they hang out if I don’t want to. That’s why I’m on HN and not FB. But they have every right to take advantage of these things, and I still have faith in humanity.
Anyway, without travel and information, how else are they going to learn that the world is filled with artificial barriers intended to keep them in their place?
Every decent OS in 2023 should provide a method for this.
[0] And I would be very careful about the security angle, because this is effectively a very dangerous back door into the whole system. Useful, but something to be careful about.
[1] Dump live activity stats, performance info, ability to run arbitrary queries against any database(s), ability to run arbitrary code in the app itself if available in a reasonable way (ex. if the app is in a dynamic language, just an eval(), possibly embed tcl/lua if not).
Often times experience can affect these IQ tests. One can easily warm up to IQ tests; I know you're not supposed to be able to, but it's totally doable. Do two ones in a row, and after learning the answers to the first one, you'll do loads better on the second one (after a break, so your concentration isn't depleted if you struggle with that).
Yes, that's rather the problem—there isn't just one way to do that, which makes it a portability issue.
I am utterly at a loss about what you think the intellectual barrier to buying a plane ticket is.
> The world was better when there was a higher barrier to do things like, e.g., buying a plane ticket or getting on the internet.
But that is the case, all developers need to ignore the ".DS_Store" files. So by your own rule it is appropriate in there then?
Global .gitignore exists, but I just had to look it up again to refresh my memory – chances are, junior devs or hobby developers will never even consider it as an option.
That said, arguably ignoring .DS_Storage should be the default on macOS builds of git.
I can do the principled thing as you describe it. And then I can be angry every time a new dev arrives who doesn't have their computer correctly set up yet, or someone reinstalls their machine, or anything like that.
Or I can do the pragmatic thing, add one extra line to the .gitignore file and forget about it forever.
In my opinion this is not a hill worth dying on.
And, for what it's worth, all developers need to ignore .DS_Store files regardless if Finder creates it or it gets placed in when you unzip something created on a Mac, for instance.
In the best case, you spend extra time needlessly denying PRs and bothering people who already likely don't know git well enough to cleanly fix their commit. In the case of a repo large enough that you're not the only person approving PRs, I'd say it's almost inevitable that they eventually slip through.
Just my 2¢ from experience working in the industry.