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Editing the OP to show how the header post is maintained.

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Doing random test edits! [tup][tup]

Testing pinned post function.

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Edited by Tabs on Jan 25th 2023 at 3:33:31 AM

Hylarn (Don’t ask)
#5926: Feb 16th 2016 at 11:48:14 PM

edited 17th Feb '16 2:56:47 PM by Hylarn

Sixthhokage1 Since: Feb, 2013
#5927: Feb 17th 2016 at 6:50:30 PM

%test%

edited 17th Feb '16 6:50:38 PM by Sixthhokage1

Yomegami Since: Jan, 2011
#5928: Feb 17th 2016 at 9:29:54 PM

   M      o      r      e       E      V      I      L       T      e      s      t      i      n      g   

   And yet more.   

   AND EVEN MORE.   

   AND EVEN MORE STILL.   

   AND YET EVEN MORE STILL. This is kind of getting silly.   

   T H I S W I L L H A V E T O D O
  

   More testing....   

edited 7th Mar '16 1:25:22 AM by Yomegami

Icon by Civvi the Civilian!
Brahian1 Maid of Time from Where Nothing Gathers Since: Jul, 2013 Relationship Status: He makes me feel like I have a heart
Maid of Time
#5929: Feb 17th 2016 at 9:32:45 PM

but why would you want to do that

i think i mostly want to see what happens when this whole place breaks apart
DeisTheAlcano Since: Jan, 2015 Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#5930: Feb 17th 2016 at 9:37:33 PM

Pink works?

It does.

edited 17th Feb '16 9:37:41 PM by DeisTheAlcano

Hylarn (Don’t ask)
#5931: Feb 17th 2016 at 10:18:19 PM

edited 17th Feb '16 10:18:30 PM by Hylarn

valozzy Since: Feb, 2013 Relationship Status: Desperate
#5932: Feb 18th 2016 at 8:01:49 AM

*test
  • test
    •    test   


EDIT: test no longer looks like a word.

edited 18th Feb '16 8:05:53 AM by valozzy

dunn-ions Galactic President Superstar Mc Awesomeville from The Danger Zone Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: Naked on a bearskin rug, playing the saxophone
Galactic President Superstar Mc Awesomeville
#5933: Feb 18th 2016 at 11:06:37 AM

All Asians Wear Conical Straw Hats "asdfasdf sdaf" All Asians Wear Conical Straw Hatss

Edit

edited 18th Feb '16 12:38:35 PM by dunn-ions

"Im too drunk to taste this chicken" -Colonel Sanders
Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#5934: Feb 18th 2016 at 2:56:14 PM

Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.

RMS' Bio | The GNU Project

On Hacking

In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker". I went to lunch with some GNU fans, and was sitting down to eat some tteokbokki (*), when a waitress set down six chopsticks right in front of me. It occurred to me that perhaps these were meant for three people, but it was more amusing to imagine that I was supposed to use all six. I did not know any way to do that, so I realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea.

First I used my left hand to put three chopsticks into my right hand. That was not so hard, though I had to figure out where to put them so that I could control them individually. Then I used my right hand to put the other three chopsticks into my left hand. That was hard, since I had to keep the three chopsticks already in my right hand from falling out. After a couple of tries I got it done.

Then I had to figure out how to use the six chopsticks. That was harder. I did not manage well with the left hand, but I succeeded in manipulating all three in the right hand. After a couple of minutes of practice and adjustment, I managed to pick up a piece of food using three sticks converging on it from three different directions, and put it in my mouth.

It didn't become easy—for practical purposes, using two chopsticks is completely superior. But precisely because using three in one hand is hard and ordinarily never thought of, it has "hack value", as my lunch companions immediately recognized. Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.

I later told the Korea story to a friend in Boston, who proceded to put four chopsticks in one hand and use them as two pairs—picking up two different pieces of food at once, one with each pair. He had topped my hack. Was his action, too, a hack? I think so. Is he therefore a hacker? That depends on how much he likes to hack.

The hacking community developed at MIT and some other universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Hacking included a wide range of activities, from writing software, to practical jokes, to exploring the roofs and tunnels of the MIT campus. Other activities, performed far from MIT and far from computers, also fit hackers' idea of what hacking means: for instance, I think the controversial 1950s "musical piece" by John Cage, 4'33" (****), is more of a hack than a musical composition. The palindromic three-part piece written by Guillaume de Machaut in the 1300s, "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement", was also a good hack, even better because it also sounds good as music. Puck appreciated hack value.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.

Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful). However, only some hackers did this—many were occupied with other kinds of cleverness, such as placing some amusing object on top of MIT's great dome (**), finding a way to do a certain computation with only 5 instructions when the shortest known program required 6, writing a program to print numbers in roman numerals, or writing a program to understand questions in English. (Hacking does not have to be without practical use.)

Meanwhile, another group of hackers at MIT found a different solution to the problem of computer security: they designed the Incompatible Timesharing System without security "features". In the hacker's paradise, the glory days of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, there was no security breaking, because there was no security to break. It was there, in that environment, that I learned to be a hacker, though I had shown the inclination previously. We had plenty of other domains in which to be playfully clever, without building artificial security obstacles which then had to be overcome.

Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers" (***). Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.

Happy hacking.

  • Pronounced like stuckbokekey minus the s (with an unaspirated t), if I recall right.

    • Going on the great dome is "forbidden", so in a sense it constitutes "breaking security". Nonetheless, the MIT Museum proudly presents photos of some of the best dome hacks, as well as some of the objects that hackers placed on the dome in their hacks. The MIT administration thus implicitly recognizes that "breaking security" is not inherently evil and need not be invariably condemned. Whether security breaking is wrong depends on what the security breaker proceeds to do with the "forbidden" access thus obtained. Hurting people is bad, amusing the community is good.

      • I coined the term "cracker" in the early 80s when I saw journalists were equating "hacker" with "security breaker".

The campaign to reclaim the word "hacker" from association with security breaking is doing pretty well, as witness the widespread usage of terms such as "hacklab" and "hackathon".

  • The piece 4'33" is trivial in the mathematical sense. For each "movement", the pianist opens the keyboard cover, waits the appropriate amount of time, then closes it; that's all. It is a musical counterpart of the empty set.

Here are some examples of fun hacks. If they make you smile, you're a hacker at heart.

First, some of mine.

I learned to use two pairs of chopsticks in one hand, imitating my friend. Here I demonstrate this. Speaking of chopsticks, some kinds of Italian grissini work fine as chopsticks — then, after the meal, you can eat them. I brought a bag of them to Taiwan once just to show them that Italy has chopsticks too. Customer Training College changed to Customer Draining College. Sassy, not computer-related. In 1981, Newsweek interviewed me for an article on hackers. When their photographer arrived, I decided the article should contain a real hack, so I put on the folk dance performing group's Bulgarian dance costume and held hands with a tentacle-like disused robot arm to give the impression I was dancing in a line with a robot. Sadly, they cropped the photo so that little of the robot arm is visible, and it may not be obvious what we are doing together. Photos of some other hacks I've done are here. An anonymous friend joined me to place the "Barbidall Square" sign on a lamppost at Wellesley College, near the stop for the bus to Kendall Square near MIT. With one single sign we made fun of Wellesley students and of MIT students, in different ways! The sign was removed after a few days, presumably by vandalls.

In India there is a chain of fine Bengali restaurants called "Oh! Calcutta". The staff, and the clients, have no idea why that expression is notorious. During my 2014 visit to India I decided to educate them by bringing to the restaurant printouts of the painting itself and a publicity photo from the play. I left a copy of each with the staff. Many years ago I had a root canal operation in a molar in the back of my mouth. It was difficult for me to keep my mouth open far enough, and the dentist said this was because I had a rather small mouth. When it was done, I had him sign a testimonial affirming this fact. I gave it to my mother to show she was wrong about me, all those years when she said I had a big mouth.

My puns and verse and song parodies are also playful cleverness, but the word "hack" does not include verbal wit. April fools such as Yellow Hat GNU/Linux and Pre-Zen studies are on the border between hacking and wit, because they involve an element of action (fooling someone), not just presenting amusing words. Other people's hacks.

Everyone's first hack: walking in the wrong direction on an escalator. That's not the way it's designed to be used, but can you make it work? Saving Jews from Nazi death camps by diagnosing them with highly contagious "Syndrome K". Protecting people from genocide is as serious as a project can be, but there's room for playful cleverness in bending the rules to achieve it.

I think this award-winning art project was actually a hack. A robot that climbs windows to deploy a sun shade. Pure, sweet, and computer-based. Getting potholes repaired by painting penises around them. Making potholes in the streets of Panama City send tweets asking to be repaired. Hoisting Nigerian scammers on their own petard. Cunning, mischievous, and not using computers except for email and phone calls. Lady Gaga's approach to clothing seems like hacking to me. The band Van Halen put a requirement in its gig contracts to supply M&Ms with the brown ones removed. This was a clever way of determining at a glance whether the people running the venue had really tried to carry out the other requirements, which were necessary to avoid expensive damage to facilities. You could call it a "laziness canary".

A charming hack in the London Underground. The hacker who made this poster was arrested for it. Chindogu, "unuseless inventions", are subtly absurd hacks. Dilbert: Japanese workers hack credulous US managers. Dilbert Catroon

Tic Bot is a conversation hack. The ultimate series of hacks with ordinary everyday objects appears in the 1987 film, Der Lauf der Dinge, by Fischli and Weiss. (This should not be confused with the unrelated 2006 film by the same name.) Although hacking and cracking are conceptually unrelated, occasionally they are found together. This is hacking that involves some cracking. This hack pointed out the injustice of the laws against "child" pornography, which is good, but doing that by causing other people to be jailed seems wrong to me. (Hacks can raise ethical issues just as other activities do; cleverness and playfulness do not guarantee that one can do no wrong.) It is also foolhardy to taunt a dangerous monster.

A fun hack implemented via cracking: making a TV emergency alert system give warnings about dead bodies emerging from graves. The security holes that made this possible might be used humorlessly to do real harm, but this hack didn't harm anyone.

You can make Nike's running-map server display whatever drawing you like by running on properly chosen streets. "Rooftoppers" scale tall buildings just for the hack of it. I don't share, and can't understand, their desire for risk, but that doesn't alter the fact that this is hacking.

Acción Ortográfica Quito corrects punctuation and grammar in graffiti. A German student filed a freedom of information request to get the questions for an exam he will have to take.

Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi is on trial for distributing 3d-printed models of her genitals.

She also built a kayak using that shape. Paddling such a kayak would enable certain fetishists to feel they are really inside her.

Airline "hobbyists" hack the rules of frequent flier miles to get lots of air travel without ever needing to pay.

I appreciate the cleverness of these hacks, but repeating the hack every day seems pointless as well as extremely wasteful — like an addiction. Once should be enough.

Russian pranksters fooled Elton John by phoning him and pretending to be President Putin.

Shoppers at Zara stores found clothes with labels saying, "I Made This... But Didn't Get Paid". Lenny the robo-answerer can waste the time of robo-callers. As on January 2018 you can phone Lenny at +1 347-514-7296. A kea (New Zealand parrot) learned to trigger traps meant to catch stoats. Apparently it did this just as play, because it did not take the bait from the traps. Return to Richard Stallman's home page. Please send comments on these web pages to rms [AT] gnu [DOT] org .

Copyright (C) 2002-2017 Richard Stallman

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Edited by Lymantria on Jul 25th 2018 at 9:39:46 AM

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#5935: Feb 18th 2016 at 2:56:37 PM

Administrivia.Ghost Wicks

So it looks like Administrivia.Ghost Wicks is...a ghost wick. While that would make it a Self-Demonstrating Article, it's a lot less useful for people who actually want to know about ghost wicks. (Even Main.Circular Redirect is better than that - it redirects to itself, which goes the circular redirect error message page, which explains what circular redirects are).

Edit: Actually, at least in Safari on iPad, it returns a "too many redirects" error.

edited 18th Feb '16 3:00:10 PM by Lymantria

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
valozzy Since: Feb, 2013 Relationship Status: Desperate
#5937: Feb 19th 2016 at 8:09:02 AM

testing

edited 19th Feb '16 8:09:10 AM by valozzy

Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
KillerClowns Since: Jan, 2001
#5939: Feb 19th 2016 at 5:25:43 PM

AlTeRnAtInG cApS aNd LoWeR-cApS. mOrE oR lEsS tRiCkY tO rEaD tHaN tHe UsUaL?

...okay, so definitely not doing that again.

How about this?

edited 19th Feb '16 6:33:08 PM by KillerClowns

rmctagg09 The Wanderer from Brooklyn, NY (USA) (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: I won't say I'm in love
The Wanderer
#5940: Feb 19th 2016 at 7:50:51 PM

Test

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
polar Since: Feb, 2016
#5941: Feb 19th 2016 at 9:53:59 PM

Comic for Saturday, February 20, 2016: link title

edited 27th Feb '16 2:06:05 PM by polar

This is an automated program that checks the Sneaky Gate every 5 minutes. source code
polar Since: Feb, 2016
#5942: Feb 19th 2016 at 9:55:44 PM

[Sorry, new accounts cannot post external links.]

This is an automated program that checks the Sneaky Gate every 5 minutes. source code
polar Since: Feb, 2016
#5943: Feb 19th 2016 at 9:56:21 PM

Comic for Saturday, February 20, 2016 is up.

This is an automated program that checks the Sneaky Gate every 5 minutes. source code
polar Since: Feb, 2016
#5944: Feb 19th 2016 at 10:01:52 PM

Comic for Saturday, February 20, 2016 is up.

Comic for Sunday, February 21, 2016 is up.

edited 19th Feb '16 10:03:22 PM by polar

This is an automated program that checks the Sneaky Gate every 5 minutes. source code
Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
DeisTheAlcano Since: Jan, 2015 Relationship Status: Drift compatible
BlackMageAnolis At the heart of the world... from about three miles away from you. Since: Jul, 2013 Relationship Status: Dancing with myself
At the heart of the world...
#5947: Feb 20th 2016 at 7:56:12 PM

Hello.
It's me

I was wondering when the frick you'd get that soda for me.

edited 20th Feb '16 7:57:23 PM by BlackMageAnolis

Nouct insert commentary here from an east coast Since: Sep, 2014 Relationship Status: Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies
insert commentary here
#5948: Feb 21st 2016 at 1:12:07 AM

edited 21st Feb '16 1:12:16 AM by Nouct

vandro Shop Owner from The little shop that wasn't Since: Jul, 2009
Shop Owner
#5949: Feb 21st 2016 at 1:21:19 AM

Just a tribal girl
Living in war-torn world

MicoolTNT Shadow of Legends from 'straya, m8 Since: Apr, 2012 Relationship Status: Too sexy for my shirt
Shadow of Legends
#5950: Feb 21st 2016 at 8:40:26 AM

   [[black: Just checking to see how this turns out.   ]]

Fuck you TVT, that's not a thing?

edited 21st Feb '16 8:40:45 AM by MicoolTNT

"We can handle what is true, for we are already living it."

Sandbox: Test
18th Aug '23 7:33:08 PM

Crown Description:

Testing 123

Total posts: 8,046
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