Tell HN: Bash.org is no more | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Bash.org is no more

575 pointsKhaine331 comments

Bash.org was a cornerstone of the old internet. It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. And now it is no more.

View on HN

It was down for a couple of months already. However, the IP and server seems to be there. Maybe the person who keeps that up will restart the daemons when they remember they operate one of the nostalgia cornerstones of better part of the internet.

Maybe the server's password is hunter2. Let's see whether can I access it.

Edit: Nope. Seems firewalled.

Almost, the password is ********.

I can't read it. pfft

That's because of the HN security. It prints all passwords as stars.

You can try putting your HN password in a comment, it would be visible only by you, and the others will not see it.

hunter1

Close.

hunter2

Wait, how did you see my password?

we see it as asterisks ... you see it as hunter2 and not **** 'cos it's your password

What? I just see stars

Get to a doctor!

What? I just see stars

Have you seen a doctor?

No, just stars

Ready when you are, Raul.

How about ****** Did it work?

Oh wow, you kiss your mother with that mouth?

I use my fingers to type passwords and ehh...

I guess you're right. My HN password is *****.

When I edit, I can see it, but when I save the comment, it becomes starred. It even randomizes the length every time I save.

Brilliant!

But this also means that they know your plaintext password, meaning that they're saving passwords in plaintext. Given that this is mostly a technical community, it's much more the risk of keeping a database of plaintext passwords than the benefit of being able to obfuscate passwords in comments.

EDIT: thanks to another commenter, I understood that what's happening in the above comments is just a meme and HN isn't storing plaintext passwords. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

In case you're unclear why your being down voted, comment chain is a riff on one of the more famous bash.org quotes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2.

HN does not actually know your password or hide it in comments.

(whistles softly as he changes password from a string of twelve asterisks to ******)

> HN does not actually know your password or hide it in comments.

Does it not know? What if I post it in this comment? My password is *****.

What actually happens is more complex: when you type a *******, HN tries to log in once for every string in your *******, and then when it succeeds it goes back and replaces that string with a randomized length of asterisks.

(sticking with the obliviousness for a moment,) Would they need to store the plaintext password? Hashing every word typed isn't efficient but it's possible to achieve without knowing the plaintext.

It reminds me of Facebook allowing login even when you've mistyped your password: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/214814/why-can-...

Yes, that's true. But since HN is famously hosted on a single not-so-powerful server, that would be unlikely to be the employed solution.

Considering how laggy the comment box is on reddit, it makes me wonder if they're not already doing something similar, but client-side in js. I guess it would expose the salt though.

Exposing the salt isn't an issue, it can (and should) even be a different one for each account.

> Hashing every word typed

Wouldn’t work if your password contains spaces.

But it does! They, instead, hash each letter independently, that's how they can do this.

They just hash every substring that can be a password.

Don't write long comments. Show some love to HN's server carrying its O(n^2) burden.

I love that some 20-30 years after that famous chat somebody still fell for it.

*****? That's amazing! I've got the same password on my luggage!

This has to be a joke.

The only way it can be realistically implemented involves the storage of clear-text user password to enable string replacement during comment submission. Either that or converting user comment to a prefix/suffix table (or something similar) and then hash each item to search for a match. Both option is ridiculously unnecessary.

Anyway, my HN password is ****. I bet it don't work.

Fortunately with modern serverless architecture, it's possible to make this performant! Just split up each comment into words and dispatch each word to a queue where AWS Lambda workers can check the words against the user's password hash. It might cost $20 to process each comment, but at least it'll autoscale to handle any comment volume you throw at it!

Can passwords include spaces?

I love each and every one of you who have posted into this subtree, although it's bittersweet if bash.org really is going away… <3

https://archive.is/0y1yT is the archive of http://www.bash.org/?244321

FIY, your archive link is not working too at the moment.

What do we do?

Sigh

I put on my robe and wizard hat

https://web.archive.org/web/20190228221758/http://www.bash.o...

Works for me. Do note that archive.is blocks CloudFlare DNS.

Works for me now too, probably the server was not handling the load.

This has bitten me before; now my pihole has this line in its dnsmasq configuration

      server=/archive.is/archive.ph/8.8.8.8

so that even if I'm using cloudflare dns for everything else, it will query 8.8.8.8 for those two domains

This hack needs to be pinned to the front of HN :)

Seriously. I’ve been hitting this for months.

Gonna go out on a limb and agree with the archive.is owner -- the reason he blocks it is bc cloudflare intentionally doesn't support edns client subnet. They cite privacy reasons, but it comes at the at the cost of performance -- most cdns use DNS based routing, so using cloudflare DNS means you connect to random server for a lot of websites. CloudFlare on the other hand uses anycast routing for their CDN, so they don't suffer at all.

I hate Google but my pihole is configured to use their DNS resolvers. Lesser of two evils.

It shouldn't be that bad, CloudFlare's anycast should direct you to a nearby resolver, and doing your GeoDNS on that resolver IP instead of ECS is probably not that much worse than doing it on the actual client IP. Both approaches aren't great at picking an ideal CDN node, GeoIP is notoriously unreliable, and it tells you nothing about network topology.

Breaking DNS entirely is much worse behaviour, especially because GeoDNS itself is arguably not in the spirit of DNS which is distributing a consistent database, not making it up on the fly based on the client's info. The archive.is admin is being ridiculous, the least they could do is block anyone not using a resolver supporting ECS to be consistent, but no they have something personal against Cloudflare.

Hey, how did you get my Hacker News password?

> Hey, how did you get my Hacker News password?

Relax, they didn't. Your password is 3 characters longer.

Indeed, over the years a symbol gets added for length/complexity/rotation purposes.

chef's kiss

So you're saying the server pings but nobody knows where it's at?

Host resolves, packets are dropped (ICMP timeouts, but nothing is "unreachable"). My sysadmin gut says that the server is there, behind a firewall, and the webserver is down/stopped, or the firewall is killing everything.

The IP is not shared. It reverse-resolves, too.

So, it's not dismantled and thrown to side.

Looks like the hosting provider, Idologic, got bought by Stablepoint. Maybe they have somehow blocked the site during the merger?

Whoosh

One of the most famous quotes was about a server that is online and pings, but the sysadmin doesn't know anymore where it physically is.

Ah, I probably missed it because we had the following dialogue at the office.

    <senior-sysadm> Hey bayindirh, is the log server up?
    <bayindirh> *SSHs to server* Yes, it's up and running nicely.
    <senior-sysadm> Where's that thing in the system room?
    <bayindirh> *Scratches head* Umm, I don't know?
    <senior-sysadm> Go find it, we'll upgrade it to newer HW.
    <bayindirh> Uh, OK. *leaves desk to dig the system room*.

P.S.: I'm the one who installed that server physically and configured it in the first place. :D

I once resolved a similar situation by having the PC speaker play the simpsons theme song.

Funny, we used to do the same with random pcs in our lab that people would setup and forget about. We used the Duke Nuken 3D theme song from when the game first loaded.

Ah the fond days of being able to identify a machine remotely by ejecting its CD-ROM drive.

You mean the cup holder?

Famously it ends with the server being behind drywall or something after some construction project.

Also known as "the mexican cartel".

Yes, it is this one:

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?5...

Gotta use audible pings and leave the PC speaker plugged in haha! Many network devices have a "blink management LED now" feature for the same reason.

There was a lab I hung out in back in college. The nature of the room and the devices that we had in there, there was 10bT, 10b2, and 10b5. Twisted pair, coax, and thick.

The someone had what was termed "the connector of evil". Apparently coax and thick had the same signal... just thick was more rigid about where you connected into it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap ). The connector of evil looked like a 10b5 terminator on one side and 10b2 on the other... and passed the signal between them.

When adding another computer onto the 10b2 segment, we would invariably disrupt the wave in the wire and some devices would drop off.

The trick was to have each machine ping -f one of the systems on 10bT and redirect its output to /dev/audio. If the machine was making noise, it was good. And so then we'd fiddle with different lengths of coax between the T connectors until everything was buzzing away.

And decades before the Raspberry Pi.

Happened to me recently when moving. Couldn't find one of my zigbee temperature sensors, but it was still reporting information diligently, so it had to be somewhere in the house. Took about 6 months before I found it.

Where was it?

Anticlimactic, partly unpacked moving box. I was mostly surprised it was able to re-join the mesh while being in a completely different spot, something that a lot zigbee chips struggle with.

I’m reminded of the time I dropped a Juul behind/beside a makeshift workshop table and it magnetically attached itself a foot or so below to the freestanding metal shelving unit directly next to it.

I don’t advise using Juul products for this and other reasons.

You didn't set each room on fire until you found it?

I'd love to find the contact details for this old server I used to use. It's been online continuously since 1996 and I know the first name of the guy that has it, but I don't remember his last name. Shit, the server hardware might even be mine, I don't even remember. I can't even remember if it is Linux or *BSD at this point.

http://resworld.eolith.net/staff.html

The email address is no use as that is my domain name and I dropped it in like 1997 o_O

Dustin: if you see this I would love to pull my DMs off Resworld :)

This sounds complicated. I should grab my robe and wizard hat.

Hah! I see you've never dealt with Rackspace hosting.

That was a few years ago now… it’s probably up to hunter19 at least.

* At least 1 capital letter is required

* At least 1 number is required

* At least 1 symbol is required

These days it's probably 'Hunter2024!'

Hunter2 holds such a special place in our hearts, let's keep politics out of this!

Besides, we know it's Hunter2028! No way he's running this cycle.

I'm so European I didnt even make the connection to your politics

Hunter is already a symbol to MAGA world

well, his junk mostly

My work password changes every 90 days. It is at 52nd iteration now.

You don't go back to 0? Generally you can after the 24th iteration. Also congrats on sticking with it for nearly 13 years!

They should have made everything available as a torrent or something

Did you put on your robe and wizard hat first?

Oh man, that is so sad to hear.

bash.org has given me endless laughs. It always cheered me up.

Its too bad the the top 100/200 hadn't changed in years. I guess that's because IRC has been mostly dead for a while now (no more new submission) and that the voting algorithm favored a self-feeding feedback loop. Nonetheless, it was fun to come back once every few years and re-read the top quotes.

Hopefully someone revives the site. Hopefully it's just that the server needs some love or something. Do we have any idea who is behind it?

> Its too bad the the top 100/200 hadn't changed in years.

I checked it every couple years or so when I remembered some part of some top quote and wanted to get the full thing. I always saw the top quotes never changed, so I just assumed the entire site wasn’t really updated.

> I guess that's because IRC has been mostly dead for a while now

False

I haven't stopped using IRC!

Hence why I wrote mostly dead.

you are living in an alternate reality if you don't agree with the fact IRC is mostly dead.

no enterprise is using i seriously, chat platforms of course don't use it, and niche/hobbyists have long since moved to discord and reddit.

Of course there's holdouts, but I think it's fair to say 90 percent of IRC type chat hosts are dead/gone.

> you are living in an alternate reality if you don't agree with the fact IRC is mostly dead.

200K daily users[1] would disagree

> no enterprise is using i seriously

No surprise. I'd hate to use IRC for anything related to work.

> chat platforms of course don't use it

Twitch still uses IRC.

> niche/hobbyists have long since moved to discord and reddit.

Many popular open-source projects, gaming groups, youtube channels, and forums still use IRC.

[1]: https://netsplit.de/

Why not just comment this link originally instead of “False” with no context

What a shame. IRC is one of the few protocols left of the early Internet that hasn't been aggressively commercialized and colonized by corporate interests, and this is just another nail in the coffin.

Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web, and if all that historical baggage and complexity is really necessary, or even worth it at all.

Even many social services provided by governments in the west are not available to you unless you have access to the web.

Sounds like we're headed in the right direction... if you're in the business of selling shovels.

IRC was commercialized very successfully. It’s called Slack and Discord.

Twitch chat also uses IRC

So does the online multiplayer for Worms: Armageddon, ChanServ and all.

IIRC the original Battlenet (Starcraft etc) also used it.

Yes! We had Diablo 2 Battle.net bots that were IRC clients. :) Fond memories.

random fun fact, the creator of Worms used to hang out on a #worms channel on IRCnet. It was a lot of fun for many years, but eventually Andy left and people slowly drifted away as the Amiga scene shrank, and now all that's left is me and a few people who weren't even there in the original era, in a #worms channel on ARCNet (I forget why we moved from IRCnet).

Sadly, I have no logs from the old days, so all I have is memories of lots of CTCP SOUND shenanigans.

Can you connect to it with a regular client?

You could back in the early days (I did it), not sure today.

You still can, it's very useful for bots and game integrations because you just need an IRC lib in your language of choice. However, the servers aren't IRC anymore, they just have a compat shim that speaks IRC for those purposes.

yes, i use irssi to hold persistent sessions for all the twitch chats im in. doesn't require anything special beyond an oauth token sent as the server password

neither of those things use IRC. unless you're just referring to channel-based instant messaging.

the original "protocol not commercialized" sentiment in the OP is a bit odd. nobody commercialized HTTP per se (okay, you could make an argument for SaaS CDN proxies, but i don't think that was the spirit of the original argument), they commercialized things you could deliver using it. the channel-based real time chat model is what mattered, not the intricate details of how the underlying bits are delivered

functionally, Discord and Slack have commercialized that model, with clear and obvious effects for people that were using IRC. every community i was part of via IRC has migrated to those services, and i haven't encountered a new community on IRC in forever, but have encountered plenty of new Discord communities

The particular point about protocols is that IRC is dead-simple to implement. It's all ASCII/UTF-8, CRLF-delimited messages of space-separated tokens. You can get a working implementation with the stdlib of most languages in about 200 lines. The protocol hasn't really changed much over the years.

Contrast with HTTP and other related web technologies, whose specifications are so complex that only the largest tech firms can even dream of building their own implementations, let alone achieving full standards compliance. Moreover, those standards are also often driven by those same corporate interests who own significant usage share in the browser space.

To the extent that corporate interests will advocate for standards in their own self-interest (recent example: Google WEI), I would say that the protocol has been commercialized.

Even if Slack doesn't IRC it is absolutely based on it, down to slash commands and channel name syntax.

i mean, i hope people remember that slack had an irc bridge and it was awesome. i used to use irssi there was no linux slack app.

Yep. And then they discontinued it saying they wanted to add features that wouldn't work on IRC.

Yes. That's why I was using the IRC bridge.

I still use irssi...

I was able to have literally months of logs from a dozen servers streamed to a single app running with 1/256th the memory I have in the laptop I'm writing on, and it was both more responsive and had more features. And you didn't need to deal with anyone's custom emoticons or gif spam. That is a serious loss from my perspective.

Hell, just today I was trying to figure out how to use native emoji in Discord. Turns out, you can't, and they just force you to deal with those god-awful cartoony ones. Ugh. One day someone will come back around and reimplement basic text chat as a "minimal", "sleek", or "uncluttered" experience and we'll come full-circle. Maybe it'll even use XMPP this time....

You actually can, you have to preface your emoji with a backslash.

Oh wow, thank you!

We need to take a serious step back as a society to declutter our digital lives. It’s why I want beeper to succeed so badly. It’s become atrociously difficult to just transmit text, it never needed to become this bloated of an experience.

> Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web

Because for the great majority of users, i.e. those who thought that "the internet" lived inside the blue "e" icon for IE on Win XP, or those who "break their cup holders" [1] they have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes and so everything has coalesced around "web based" as the lowest common denominator in an attempt to accommodate everyone.

[1]https://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/computer-cup-holder-joke/8...

I'm pretty sure the great majority of users nowadays have only ever interacted with the internet through apps on a tablet or phone. And even the dinosaurs who "logged on" when desktops and icons were a thing knew how to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes because that's how Windows worked, and people were using home computers before the web and web browsers even came along.

The decision to appify the web was an economic one made not on behalf of the end user, but corporations. It's cheaper to write a website or a webapp than a native application, to distribute bits than burn a CD or cartridge. It's cheaper to publish in bits than ink and paper. It's cheaper to handle electronic forms than physical, mailed in forms. It's cheaper to send an email than call someone on the telephone.

Do you have any data to support your assertion that a "great majority"(whatever that means) of users in the present "have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes"?

Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We're not in the year 1995 anymore.

> Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We're not in the year 1995 anymore.

That's exactly what I was thinking. We're not in the 90s when people thought AOL and the internet were synonyms.

Yeah; now they think that Chrome is...

I don't think people are ditching internet relay chat because they can't figure out how to run an app.

But if I had to think of a modern equivalent of this joke, I would say now they think that Wi-Fi and the internet are synonyms.

PSA: there is an Android application named "Google" (sic) which is a browser, but it's not Chrome. This browser application stores every interaction (browsing history, etc) on the server-side. My mother-in-law uses it .. to buy sweaters from bloggers? She uses it for everything. And yes, she thinks the internet is just named Google. :(

Yikes, that's unfortunate. I have elderly family members with that level of technological literacy, and I've just accepted that they'll never end up on the Fediverse, or IRC (even if I point them to a webchat like Libera's in-browser Gamja and KiwiIRC clients).

The great majority of people grew up with the internet at this point, and this is largely not true.

not for the want of trying, (see freenode)

>I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web

NAT. You can thank NAT for making the internet far worse.

That's right. The death of P2P is in many ways thanks to NAT. How reliable is hole punching these days? Where is the activity in the peer to peer space today?

I miss direct connect terribly...

Contacted their/Stablepoint's support bot:

Today

What happened to bash.org?

Hello there! YR

I will be happy to assist you but it appears that the support PIN you entered might be incorrect. Can you double-check, please?

Yordan R.

I haven’t entered any support PIN

Can you please provide me with it as I need to verify the account? YR

You should be able to see your verification number by going to the client area —> Support—> And on the left side you will see your support pin.

Yordan R.

I’ve not got an account YR

I see that the website you mentioned (bash.org) is hosted with us, it’s resolving from our server, but without your support PIN I’m unable to check it further due to security reasons

Yordan R.

OK, can I suggest you reach out to the owner of the site and, in a kind, proactive way, let them know it’s not working and the internet is upset with them?

See discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950721 YR

Got it, thanks

> let them know it’s not working and the internet is upset with them?

That part seems like a dick move, to me personally. That implies that the site operator did something bad.

Someone needs to put on their robe and wizard hat and fix this properly :'(

I cast a level 99 resurrect spell on the server

Easy there, bloodninja.

"I pry apart that battleship you call your ass" xD - what a tremendous loss!

... and wand. https://i.imgur.com/SQjQz.png

I just had an argument over IRC with a stranger on the internet last week. We're still out there.

I thought the humor on this site hadn't aged well, but this one got me:

    < pronto> :(
    < GiftdKook> Turn that frown upside down!
    < korozion> ):

Sorry, I don't get it!

People say "turn that frown upside down" as a phrase to mean "don't frown, smile!"

But the poster flipped the emoji so it was a frowning face pointing right, then a frowning face pointing left

"Turn that frown upside down" means to smile, instead, :( to :)

But the chatter just flipped the whole face, so it's still sad: :( ):

"Turn that frown upside down" is a way of saying - don't be sad, be happy. Instead of having the corners of your mouth point down (frown), have them point up (smile). The joke is that if you move the eyes to the other side of the mouth, it remains a frown.

Expectation

:( becomes :)

Subversion

:( becomes ):

It's a very American expression. In British culture a frown refers to a forehead expression, not a mouth expression.

How interesting - I'm British, and I got the joke immediately. Yet, I'd hardly move my mouth if someone asked me to put on a frown. I'd never really thought about that one before.

Yeah, it's a well known expression, but it only makes literal sense in American English.

The implication is that if you are sad there are more associated tells than just your mouth. Imagine a clown doing a mock sad face and exaggerating sadness by frowning.

I've always felt this was a forced contrivance and never that anyone literally thought frowning had anything to do with smiling.

Oh! I didn't notice the :( and the ): signs. I thought it was a play on the usernames < pronto> and < korozion>!

The intended goal was to get the other person to reply :) by inverting the mouth. Instead, the whole "frown face" was inverted.

And you never will!

Geez, the number of people that don't recognise bash.org quotes saddens me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230401050146/http://bash.org/?...

.bef Duck friends

You're trying to befriend a non-existing duck!

(some sort of duck game for HN could be neat. Can't see why it wouldn't be possible...)

I remember a similar quote that was something like:

    <user> :b
    <someone> how did you make that backwards d?

I remember that one! It was d-_-b

There's also,

  <user 1> <3
  <user 2> 3> wait how do you do that
  <user 2> ε> nvm figured it out

Very Eternal September.

I know everything is logged but I basically quit using irc when tons of channels started having bots that would log EVERYTHING in a room to public urls.

But it is really cool that I can read channel logs from events, like 9/11.

Last successful archive (July 2023): https://web.archive.org/web/20230719194509/http://bash.org/

Thanks to the folk who put it together and ran it nearly 20 years. I wonder how much the whole thing cost?

Kind of thing that gets put together as a "hey this is cool" project, it runs and people use it, so we'll just leave it up... months later its more popular, the original authors of the system moved on, but no one can just pull the plug now. this is a public resource, so we'll just keep feeding it.

Years later, someone may go through and fix the design problems; or not. It might be no one figured out how to resolve the dependency on PHP2 or Python1 the original code may have had.

I’d feel kinda sad if bash.org wasn’t using Perl or something.

IIRC it smelled of php.

Definitely PHP, I seem to remember it being mentioned in some blog/news post sometime.

surely it should have been written in bash

of course it should have been ported to BoB (Bash on Balls, the modern portable slick web framework)

And favored framework among the CBT community

Cognitive behavioural torture.

Was the Bash.org code available somewhere? I'd love to have a look at it, just for fun.

A few years ago, I read all of bash.org from beginning to end. It took about a week of transit rides.

There were a lot of laughs, but a huge proportion of it was slurs directed at Black people and women. It's probably time for it to fade away.

The quotes I remember the most were (paraphrased)

1. Best ebay review ever -- bought item for my brother who had cancer, item never arrived and my brother died

2. Something about writing a warranty about installing a cinder block in a window and then throwing it through a window at the Sony headquarters

3. "There's no such thing as a sin on the battlefield." "Opposite over hypotenuse. dipshit"

Once upon a time I eagerly showed a promising newbie the top page, and they said exactly the same thing. Felt bad.

> As we all know, the most secure computer is one not connected to the internet. That’s why I recommend Telstra ADSL.

One of my all time favorite sites on the interenet, I am glad there is an archive version.

IRC and being ASCII only had their benefits. These days, Discord displacing IRC, for most people who even have PCs, there is a much different vibe of re-posting meme pics and gifs, or even youtube videos.

Yet, I don't know if this is because of the higher production requirements, or not, but there isn't a database of spontaneous funny moments.

Ironically, many of the "respectable" discord servers (i.e. revolving around hobbies people under the age of 18 aren't/can't get into) seem to not allow cross-server emojis (which mostly stops all usage of them and discourages gif-memeing as well).

Combined with "compact" mode in user settings, I find myself having a vaguely IRC-like experience in the servers worth participating in.

Terrible shame how many of us have come full circle just to do the same things on the corpo's surveillance state owned land instead of our own.

Yeah, I am getting prompted to subscribe and pay to even participte. Perhaps it's part of the larger theme of capitalism and monetization consuming all parts of human existence, including those that come from a purely artistic or communicative self expression. It's supposed to be part of the technological progress that builds us up, as a society, but I am strugging to fill the bash.org void.

A lot of the Discords I've experienced have a dedicated channel for gifs/memes, seems to work quite well.

The reasoning behind the banning of cross-server emojis in most "respectable" servers is that you can split an image into a 5x5 grid of "emoji" and post images in channels you're not supposed to. It's a mess.

> being ASCII only

Somehow, in the age of TikTok and Discord, ASCII art has survived

>IRC and being ASCII only had their benefits.

I still use IRC every day and you can send unicode emoji, Japanese, etc. just fine (via external tools or copy/paste typically). It's up to the client/terminal emulator/font on the other end to make it look right. Plus posting links to images/videos, either at random public spots or ones you just uploaded to a filesharing site, is pretty common.

I have only been to bash.org a handful of times, but multiple channels I'm in have their own bots that can store quotes and spit them back out later, so it's a bit more small and local than bash.org. It's only for single-line messages, though, so not the same as capturing a whole conversation. I do also occasionally grab some lines to dump in a text file for personal enjoyment.

IRC doesn't actually specify an encoding for messages, only limiting each message to 512 bytes IIRC. This could and did cause encoding issues when dealing with non-english language text.

While IRC imposes no such requirement, the world has mostly agreed on utf-8 by now.

>old internet

Reminds me of Gigablast disappearing, a search engine that was in the spotlight in the early 00's, a sole developer competing amongst AlltheWeb and Google.

When their site disappeared there was barely a mention.

I guess since the mass of geocities was uprooted it's become the norm, the churn of the web and generally accepted. archive.org is great, but it does seem strange how transient information has become on the web. HN and archive.org have good memories.

There were also national versions, e.g. http://bash.hu is still online. Would love to have a collection, there is far too little sociological/folklore research about the net.

http://www.ibash.de for Germany :-)

I think I recognize some of these from bash.org. Are all of these just translated? xD Or maybe I read them somewhere else ... god, it's been so long.

There was another site, called german-bash.org, but it went down last year :/

Newfangled stuff... german-bash.org was the original.

Has also been dead for 2 years now. I found a 20 year old quote of mine on archive.org. How time flies.

Not quite. The very first German bash.org clone is https://bash.pilgerer.org/

https://warpdrive.se/ is a Swedish variant.

That reminds me about the time when I used to run a similar website but focused on quotes from the IRC run by Flashback Forum (one of the larger/the largest? discussion forums in the Nordics).

Apparently I put the source for the site on GitHub (https://github.com/victorb/Flashback-Citat [12 year old PHP code!]) but I cannot find any actual archive of any of the quotes nor the running website, sadly :/

bash.im, the Russian version, was replaced with a "NO WAR" message for a while, and now it's gone.

bash.org.ru/bash.im is now башорг.рф

Different team.

https://danstonchat.com/ (previously bashfr.org) for France/French speaking countries

https://ircquotes.fi is the Finnish equivalent

https://lamer.cz/ in Czech Republic. Definitely thought that was the original long time ago.

Polish: http://bash.org.pl/

ccTLDs, inexhaustive

https://web.archive.org/web/20100222/http://bash.org.az

https://web.archive.org/web/20070217/http://bash.org.by

https://web.archive.org/web/20060424/http://bash.org.il

https://web.archive.org/web/20071022/http://bash.org.kg

https://web.archive.org/web/20061203/http://bash.org.lv

https://web.archive.org/web/20090830/http://bash.org.md

https://web.archive.org/web/20060101/http://bash.org.pl

https://web.archive.org/web/20090421/http://bash.org.ro

https://web.archive.org/web/20040611/http://bash.org.ru

https://web.archive.org/web/20110523/http://bash.org.tj

https://web.archive.org/web/20080105/http://bash.org.ua

https://web.archive.org/web/20101117/http://ibash.org.pl

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609/http://ibash.org.ru

https://web.archive.org/web/20091004/http://bash.cc

https://web.archive.org/web/20030805/http://bash.cx

https://web.archive.org/web/20080315/http://bash.ee

https://web.archive.org/web/20040608/http://bash.hu

https://web.archive.org/web/20090322/http://bash.im

https://web.archive.org/web/20060205/http://bash.lv

https://web.archive.org/web/20180314/http://bash.no

https://web.archive.org/web/20060112/http://bash.ro

https://web.archive.org/web/20080219/http://bash.tj

https://web.archive.org/web/20120114/http://bash.tk

https://web.archive.org/web/20061115/http://ibash.de

https://web.archive.org/web/20160109/http://ibash.im

https://web.archive.org/web/20040212/http://bash.fi

https://web.archive.org/web/20070227/http://qdb.gr

https://web.archive.org/web/20060402/http://qdb.hu

https://web.archive.org/web/20040420/http://qdb.us

Wikimedia has their own bash.org clone: https://bash.toolforge.org/random

The last snapshot in the Wayback Machine seems to be from 19 Jul 2023: http://web.archive.org/web/20230719193319/http://www.bash.or...

Always surprised when some of these sites shut down. The operating cost seems low and putting on a few ads (ethical, non-intrusive, etc.) can net you passive $100+/mo.

It's more than money, they still require care and feeding.

At some age (and I'm getting to that), you just tire of being a sysadm, esp. for "home"/hobby stuff.

A historical archive of something should allow for robust, non-interactive ways to persist. Maybe there should be standards for this. In the mean time we can find gratitude to archive.org and similar services

Even if it's a static HTML, you need to patch your webserver, OS, and migrate the whole stack to newer versions.

This is why I'm scaling down my home infrastructure to SBCs and run everything on Debian with stock package repositories. It reduces tons of burden to something very manageable.

Non-sysadmin here. For static HTML, why is server patching/OS needed if things are locked down?

A webserver like Apache and NGINX are way more complex than they look. It's sometimes possible to exploit bugs with benign/simple requests, even if you don't run advanced stacks on them. See [0] for example.

If you're not running strict firewall rules to limit your SSH access and if you expose other services outside, they also need constant patching against newer attacks.

Lastly, security standards evolve. Your SSH and SSL layers need to be kept up to date to patch holes and add newer algorithms while deprecating others, further reducing the attack surface [1].

[0]: https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/50383

[1]: https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-announce/20...

Because no software is perfect, which means every lock has weaknesses that sooner or later get found out. Chances are that, say, a Linux 2.x server that was considered "very secure" in 2005 would now be pwned in a few hours.

Because both the Linux kernel and whatever SSL and web server stack you use regularly have their remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

Static HTML means you don't have your own code to worry about vulnerabilities in. Vulnerabilities in the server or OS software don't just go away.

If it's static HTML you can put it on Github Pages and leave it alone.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

Sometimes you will, sometimes you won't.

"Even if it's just static text, you need to patch your OS, update your text editor and migrate the whole document to newer versions."

Nah. That's bull. A static site can be put on a web server and the site never needs to be updated again. I have web sites people started hosting on my servers in the '90s that are still there, still serving, and haven't been touched in twenty years.

Sure, I update the servers and software, but the actual amount of work needed for the site is, quite literally, zero.

Which ones? …for research purposes only, of course.

I have several dozen that go back at least two decades, but I don't think I should post them without asking the owners. OTOH, here's a rather public one:

http://www.baloneypotd.com/

Someone has to run the server. That's the point.

For $100+/mo you can easily have someone manage that.

For simple servers, unattended upgrades and an automatic mail whenever server needs a restart (like kernel updates) is enough. I'd put that $100 to a piggy bank every month instead.

Easily said when it's not your $100/mo for something that no longer interests you.

I was taking this comment into account

> and putting on a few ads (ethical, non-intrusive, etc.) can net you passive $100+/mo.

My response is: In what decade?

What?

> Sure, I update the servers and software, but the actual amount of work needed for the site is, quite literally, zero.

I think this is what I said? Quoting myself:

> Even if it's a static HTML, you need to patch your webserver, OS, and migrate the whole stack to newer versions.

I don't think I said "you need to update/patch the webpage itself".

Huh. The password masking algorithm changes some words possibly.

I was making the point that the web server can just keep getting updated by virtue of being part of an active server. Separately, the site doesn't need any updating / maintenance.

The same person or people who run the servers aren't necessarily the same person or people who make the web sites.

People can just as easily have static sites on SDF.org. There'd be no reason for anyone to fret about whether the servers are up to date.

Also, nobody ever needs to "migrate the whole stack to newer versions". That's just not a thing with a static site.

Of course, I'm generally on the side which maintains the servers. Some of these servers happen to be my own servers which stores my own stuff.

BTW, I'm on SDF. I love these guys. They sometimes nuke my TTRSS user, but that's OK. :D

The whole stack, at least in my parlance, means anything and everything between your (static) webpage and hardware. From kernel to the server which serves your page.

IOW, I use stack as in "LAMP" stack. In this case it's only LA, but it's a stack nonetheless.

Stick it on s3, tell cloudfront to serve from the bucket, and let that sucker run almost unattended till aws shuts down.

Why complicate everything when I can serve it with webfs (a tiny webserver), from a tiny SBC from a cabinet in my room, or from a VM and concentrate all my services to it while paying not too much money and have all the flexibility in the world?

I don't like to use oversized tools for small jobs. Also, it's not fun.

No, you definitely don't. I'm pretty sure no-one has performed one single update on my old server since we installed it in 1996:

http://resworld.eolith.net/staff.html

I don't remember if it is Linux or *BSD now, but I don't even know how you would update a kernel or libraries that old lol

I can say that the server in question is updated at least until 2010. However, some of the software running on it has some (read: quite a few) weaknesses as far as I can see.

...and it has ports open.

Maybe you should give it a backrub, IDK. It's possible to iteratively update that thing AFAICS.

> a few ads (ethical, non-intrusive, etc.) can net you passive $100+/mo.

No way. That's barely true of Adsense anymore much less whatever non-Adsense network you have in mind. And not for a dead site like bash.org.

My fav quote of all time was:

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

  \* ab is away – gone, if anyone talks in the next 25 minutes as me it's bm being an asshole –
  HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

This was the original prompt injection attack.

My all time favourite:

<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!

<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key

<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!

<Judge-Mental> fuck me

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bash.org/?835030

This is my favorite "brain brown-out" moment:

    <i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b
    <BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?
    <BonyNoMore> wait
    <BonyNoMore> never mind

https://web.archive.org/web/20230709002522/http://bash.org/?...

I want to believe the "d" in inverted being right next to the "b?" is what set the lights off right away.

Also, from memory:

<h|tler> HOW CAN YOU TELL IM 13 BY HOW IM WRITEING???????

https://web.archive.org/web/20021129061103/http://www.bash.o...

CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!!!!!!!!!

I didn’t remember that one. Thanks, I haven’t laughed that hard in a while.

I'd be happy to host the site in perpetuity on one of our dedicated hosts (for free). Have hosted the sites for a number of notable open source communities for decades.

I'm sure most people here on HN already know about the famous hunter2 meme, but it turns out that it is quite hard to find and link to the original transcript, especially since it appears the original website (bash.org) is no longer active. This URL contains the sha2-256 digest of the transcript itself, so that it can be preserved indefinitely for posterity. static.space is a website I built to allow creating this kind of content-addressed URLs of existing content (e.g. text, images), to ensure that it can always be referenced even when the original location changes.

https://static.space/sha2-256:d5b215dd588bda164aca31a2eb08aa...

Great! Now I just need to memorise the sha2-256 digest of my favourite memes

If anyone is interested in seeing a gallery of Bash.org-inspired websites (over 100 of them), I've made a gallery as a tribute:

https://qdb.us/image.html

(original creator of QDB here, before it moved to bash.org)

Wasn't it already dead for ages?

I remember back when it got popular it seemed to stop accepting submissions after a short time.

And the hunter2 stuff got stuck on the top list forever, probably because the mechanism is self-reinforcing by making it easiest to vote for the stuff already on the top.

The "Top 100", when I first read it, long long ago, had me laughing so hard I was afraid I'd wake up other people in the house. https://web.archive.org/web/20230709210553/http://bash.org/?...

That’s ok. A bastion of nostalgia that seemingly hadn’t been updated in literal decades, or at least the top submissions hadn’t. I was using the internet in the 90s when Bash.org was created, and appreciated the humor a lot, and laughed very hard many times at the same jokes for years.

However, (very unpopular opinion) after decades of people repeating the exact same jokes from Bash.org, the formerly nostalgia inducing jokes started grating on me a lot. The password *** hunter2 joke has made me cringe at its extreme overuse for at least ten years, or the computer responding to ping but being physically unfindable. If they weren’t going to do anything with the site, it would have been better to kill it in 2010 with fond memories rather than let the jokes be beaten like a dead horse for 20 years.

Huh, it really looks like it's not coming back this time. It has been offline for ~6 months. At least most of the quotes are backed up.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230701000000*/bash.org

https://gitlab.com/dwrodri/bash_irc_quotes

Would make for a nice webservice, like those Pokemon/StarWars/etc apis.

Ironically, those quotes will likely survive a lot of more modern content. Even viral stuff, these days, will disappear incredibly quickly - bat an eyelid and the imgur link is broken, the twitter post is paywalled, the reddit thread is taken down... And any private service like Discord or Slack will happily burn everything after a few months.

"The internet does not forget" is such a massive lie.

The Internet only forgets stuff you wish it wouldn’t, and remembers everything you wish it wouldn’t.

> "The internet does not forget" is such a massive lie.

This is a warning, not a guarantee.

What do they mean by "cleaned"?

"The numbers missing from the sequence correspond to the quotes that are either still pending review or have been rejected. However, my dataset is by no means considered to be proven complete."

Ooh, we should make a Fortune database out of them! (Am I the only person still using 'fortune' as their shell motd?)

I've created https://randombash.cf42.workers.dev/ which serves random quotes from the linked dataset.

Mirror from 3 years ago: https://gitlab.com/dwrodri/bash_irc_quotes

So sad to hear that. QDB brought me so much joy to read.

I take off my robe and lower my wizard hat in respect

I still wonder if those two ever met up at the beach.

If they forgot the root p/w its hunter2

Wait a couple of weeks and some guy in the middle of nowhere will have mirrored the site with one of those tools that clones a site from web.archive.org and put some ads on it.

When I press "up" on the website opened in Firefox, it scrolls up very slowly and with a noticeable jitter.

It is nice to see the display model easily rotating in 3D, but the on/off button is not clickable. The logos at the top and on the bottom-left corners are blurred.

The font size at the bottom of the page is too small (barely visible).

Anyone got a screenname for the dev originally behind it?

Maybe this helps?

> Managers: Ninety

> Moderators: Amanda, vx0, kastein

I'm guessing they might be around on Libera or Freenode

It was one of the only websites that worked on my old Nokia phone, so I'd read it non-stop while on transit.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326177 is a previous discussion on this that mentions a database. I'd love a copy of such a quote DB but the site mentioned now requires a login/password

I have a couple of quotes in there somehow from the efnet #quake days. Good times. Reading bash.org always made me laugh.

Literally was looking it up a couple days ago for the quote about taking the warning labels off everything and noticed it was offline!

Most recently, I was using bash.org as my go-to non-HTTPS site for captive portal purposes (back when HTTPS Everywhere was a useful extensions). But the built-into-Firefox HTTPS only treatment handles captive portals gracefully already, so I didn't actually visit in a while.

Goodbye!

I use http://alwayshttp.com for this.

https://neverssl.com/

http://http.rip/ is better, if you want https to actually fail.

One of the classics: https://web.archive.org/web/20040604194346/http://bash.org/?...

RIP #linuxhelp and #linux. Some good times there. Now bash.org is gone its like it never happened.

RIP ... So many gems from IRC! I definitely think the siteowners should have an archive copy of it. Just zip the bash.org files and put it on Archive.org or something

I put on my robe and wizard hat.... for the last time. :'(

I remember first being pointed to the site for having said: Wanting a man who doesn't smell is like wanting a woman who doesn't talk.

Its importance was immediately obvious.

Oh man. This would be the perfect site for ProtoWeb to restore.

Would love to write a Bash function that selects a random quote from a DB of all of them and prints it out (for use when opening a new terminal, for example)

The server that runs it probably got updated to Windows 10

No doubt now archived forever and available in ChatGPT.

I put on my robe and wizard hat...

total bummer. i had contributed a bunch of great convos over the years. is there a mirror?

Going through it again I now remember how much of my humor is derived from there.

But... but... What happens after I put my robe and wizard hat on?!

Someone remind the admin his password is hunter2

"Danny?!?" "Mom?!?"

sad :( I still prefer IRC over all these other solutions like discord. They just don't feel right.

RIP BibleBot

^<@< has left the chat.

Just wanted to mention here, this website was a great laugh for me and my friends, but looking back there was a lot of antisemitism up at the top of the list for a long time that me and my friends spewed and laugh about without thinking about it.

Honestly I've never heard it mentioned, but it's interesting how those sorts of concepts can be spread in such an innocuous way.

No! Bring it back now!!

rightisleft slaps you around with a large trout

i put on my robe and lower my wizard hat

HATE

HET

just crown it with a LLM

    > i just shit on the floor and heard it land but can't find it
    > uh ??
    > dropped shit****

This is what happens when you don't use a proper capital-S Stack. Probably they weren't even using Kubernetes and a separate multi-cloud management DB for monitoring their data pipeline ingest.

On-point sarcasm. Have an upvote.

Rather they have some bare metal, FTP-ing files directly to prod, right?

At least one thing has stayed constant: bash brings up both the kube cluster today as it brought up the prod server in the 90’s

Generally brings them down, too.

     i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

We aren't encouraged to have this kind of fun on public forums anymore. I don't know why exactly, but I do know we're not better off for dropping this humor.

Oh please, if you’ve interacted at all with a video game community in the last decade you know this kind of humor is alive and well…

It is, but it will get you banned.

Has no one else noticed the rise of censorship evading slang among zoomers? Eg saying "unalive" instead of "kill". I remember there was a big file with a bunch of these for chinese youth I found fascinating some 15 years ago. And now we have to do it too.

Oh yeah because burdening children with the challenges of… using slightly different words… is a real shame.

Are you saying censorship is fine because people can just use other words?

There really is no point engaging with you then.

It's not censorship, it's new^H^H^Hbetterspeak (tm). A more friendly and inclusive version of the English language.

You call it censorship, I call it freedom of association. These are private organizations deciding what they allow on their own platforms.

But more importantly the “kind of humor” your originally highlighted is absolutely alive, as evidenced by your own point that people use words to get around whatever censorship there is of the most extreme versions of that humor.

The older I get the less useful I think this distinction between "official" and "unofficial" is. "Officially" King Charles can dissolve the UK parliament, but "unofficially" he can't. Power is power and we know it when we see it.

So yes I would call being banned or having your language limited by major global platforms "censorship", despite the fact that officially they're just private organisations.

You're just saying you only care about some people's rights and not others. Part of the 1a and the general concept of freedom is that you don't have to put up with people saying stupid shit everywhere, such as in your own home.

"My own home" and "twitter" are very different in scope.

How? What about a bar? A stadium? Is it just the number of people to you, then? If I can pack enough people who agree with me into a field, do I now own that field?

You either agree that people who own things get to decide how those things are used, or you think that people don't get to own things. There's no "well, a lot of people use this thing" exception to property ownership.

Or, I guess you could try to nationalize the space since so many people use it, but I'm guessing "as you get older" any form of government is objectionable, despite this being exactly what you seem to want.

Why do you believe that private corporations should be more powerful than the government?

Why do you believe some people should be more powerful than other people?

I don't. Where did you get that viewpoint from?

So why do you believe that private corporations should be more powerful than governments and have censorship powers that the government doesn't even have? Twitter, Meta, and Google affect our day to day life and control what we see far more than the government does. Why do you think this is a good situation to be in?

So why do you think some individuals should have their rights prioritized over others? Twitter, Meta, and Google are owned by people who want to do specific things with those companies, and you want to ignore their rights entirely. Why do you think ownership isn’t meaningful?

The similarity to China isn’t a coincidence. This is all coming from the cultural dominance of TikTok among young people, which (to my knowledge) algorithmically downranks any content that has those words in them.

It’s a common Chinese strategy, born of Chinese censorship requirements, which TikTok naturally used when presented with similar-enough problems outside of China.

This goes far beyond TikTok. Twitch, Youtube, the jurisdictions of Canada, the UK, Australia... this is one thing I'm not willing to blame China for, I am just noting how close it is the same thing that China does.

It's probably from the era of content silo algorithms that really do not like and punish your content for saying certain words, like COVID-19 in mid 2020, or "dead" today (I seem to recall a YouTuber having to beep himself saying that word very recently)

These kids grow and learn with Youtube after all.

Don't blame zoomers, blame American puritanism in tech.

I'm not blaming zoomers, no more than I am blaming chinese youth who have to talk about "aquatic producers" to avoid being censored for even discussing censorship.

Ironically I tried looking for a list of officially banned words on twitch. All I found was journalist spam 'summarising' and telling me how I should feel about it.

One site had a list of 50 words, all of which they censored, literally:

- N-word

- F-word

- C-word

- S-word

- T-word

When I scrolled to the end ( "A*kissing" ), I got a newsletter popup.

Is everyone abandoning bash?

Zsh?

Fish?

Wrong bash. Bash.org didn't have anything to do with the shell, it was a database of funny IRC quotes.

I tried going to the website, but well it's no more. Guess I'll be taking my downvotes and flagging now for being an idiot.

I upvoted for your gracious acceptance.

can't they just put all the quotes on wikipedia or twitter or something

far better off as an independent entity beyond those centralised place's ever changing rules.

Is it? It was its own private entity and now it's offline probably forever.

Edit: I think it'd be far better off on Wikipedia than Twitter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950912

Mirrors still exist

(Also, Twitter already deleted old data, so these quotes wouldn't be much safer there)

Backed up on centralized gitlab and centralized archive.org, huh?

My point is that the comment was praising independent services when it doesn't make sense: bash.org, the independent service, shutting down and people want to store backups in a more trustworthy centralized service, much like the two backups you linked.

Yes, for the reason mentioned but also because it has a longer lifespan than Wikipedia and Twitter to date.

Wikipedia deletionists would cull it. Twitter is going down the drain if you believe the popular opinions but it would mess up the formatting anyway.

Wikiquotes?

Wikipedia isn't an appropriate place for Bash quotes because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia about broad concepts. Also, Wikipedia as a policy is not a primary source.

Wikiquotes could be appropriate. Submitting a dump of the entire database to Archive.org could be appropriate. (For example, Archive.org hosts user-submitted dumps of things like product manuals, old TV shows, old computer games.)

Considering the quotes have an unknown, and almost certainly not public domain or CC BY-SA license[1], they wouldn't be appropriate for any Wikimedia project.

[1] And even if submitting required licensing the contribution under some Wikimedia-friendly license, considering each person included in a quote would also have to agree to such a license... and I have a feeling bloodninja wasn't following up their conversations with "would you mind sending me a signed release of the above six (6) messages under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license version 3.0?"

Twitter itself got deleted.

It's all on archive.org

https://bashforever.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com