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I think that was the first time I ever saw Tridge deliver a conference presentation and it was to a packed lecture theatre at the ANU. He described how he 'hacked' BitKeeper by connecting to the server via telnet and using the sophisticated hacker tools at his disposal to convince Bitkeeper to divulge its secrets, he typed:

help

The room erupted with applause and laughter.

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Every single action, including Telnet, including typing help, the nc command, was suggested by the audience with Tridgell prompting with a minimal “how are we going to find out…”

A bk client was hacked by the audience in 2 minutes.

It was the most devastating take down I’ve ever seen of the attacks. Linus later said the “git” wasn’t Tridgell at all, but in fact Linus himself.

I think that was the only lca Linus missed for a few years either side.

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