@cks @mhoye

There's no polite general way to ask a process to terminate

Is that not what SIGTERM is? (I suppose it could be argued that a signal that defaults to immediate termination isn't entirely "polite", but hopefully a program that would actually be sensitive to such impoliteness would install a handler for it to do appropriate things before exiting.)

you can only easily find out about a child ending if you're its parent.

In terms of portable mechanisms yes, though on a reasonably recent Linux you can use poll(2) or the like on a a pidfd for a non-child process.

(Offhand I don't know of any existing tools that expose pidfds in a shell-convenient way, but if someone were sufficiently desperate I expect a bash extension loaded via enable -f could probably do it in a reasonably ergonomic fashion.)

@rk ...the dog fixes the plumbing?

@rk I'm inclined to agree with Biscuit's instincts there; that dog doesn't look right.

A vet we used to go to had a little wire frame statue of a dog out front, just bent rebar or something. One time as we were going in, despite it being literally about 80% see-through, my dog walked up to it and promptly sniffed its butt.

@chalpin Is the 10-minute talk duration listed there correct? That seems like an impressive array of topics for so little time...

@rk Except some of us thought he did!

@rk In the vein of complex (and perhaps amusing) human-deity relationships, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Joseph Heller's "God Knows". I liked it a lot when I read it, but now it's been 20+ years and I'm thinking I should do so again.

@th hash tag threat model? (re: right-side server BMC)

@david_chisnall @grahamperrin

line-diff tools (which, for better or worse, are the tools we have)

git diff --color-words is a tool that we have, and an extremely useful one for making prose diffs more readable, FWIW. (Even if sentence-per-line formatted, but especially so if not.)

@georgetakei Rapidly approaching https://theonion.com/centers-for-disease-contraction-urges-americans-to-suck-1819575826/

@w8emv Or if you really want to ensure they're never found again, a document in google drive.

@rk I dimly recall reaching for pax once probably 15 years or so ago because it had some arcane capability I wanted that GNU tar didn't. Haven't touched it since though, I'm pretty sure.

cpio still gets used for Linux initrds though, so if you're the type to end up in situations where you're sifting around in those (who, me?) it might not be all that rare an encounter.

@petersanchez Maybe try email? His MX still appears to be online...

@cks An ASRock system by any chance? (I think they pretty universally use the 0x2f8 port instead of the more common 0x3f8, but perhaps others do so as well.)

@david_chisnall @arafel @cstross @bjn @lauren Tangential, but perhaps worth noting: blanks can indeed kill at sufficiently close range.

Though yeah, it'd certainly be nice if the antivaxers could experiment on themselves in isolation without inflicting the effects on the rest of society.

@rk My dog has gotten accustomed to having his paws wiped and handles it pretty cooperatively. He'll calmly let me lift and wipe off each one in sequence as he stands there, but for some reason always seems to think we're done after three; the fourth is somehow a surprise to him each time.

@cks Seems a bit of an odd exercise -- using FDE in the first place would seem to imply a threat model that includes a local attacker with physical access to your hardware; given that, wouldn't it be fairly simple for such an adversary to extract the (unencrypted) SSH host key from the initramfs and use it to steal the LUKS passphrase via MitM?

Subsequent research indicates that this is known as "surface hoar": https://avalanche.org/avalanche-encyclopedia/snowpack/weak-layer/persistent-weak-layers/surface-hoar-2/

Assuming a causal relationship (naturally), the obvious question is its direction -- nominative determinism or merely descriptivism?

@rk @Grittens I think @arnd might be such an individual?