palordrolap

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy and paste come from non-Unix (I’d say Windows itself, but they may have stolen it from elsewhere), and so it makes sense that those two keys have other special meanings under Unix and its descendants.

Specifically, they mean “Stop what you’re doing” and “The next character is to be entered without special meaning” in most shells, the most common programs that run, often as the main program, in/on a terminal.

As such, most terminal emulators in Linux GUIs reserve those keypresses for their Unix-y functions. Most of the good ones move copy and paste to Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V instead.

MS-DOS and Windows command prompts also inherit their use of Ctrl+C from Unix, by way of 86-DOS and CP/M, and were in there long before Microsoft adopted Ctrl+C for copy in a GUI, which is where those other Insert-based keybinds you mention came in.

For an example of Unix Ctrl+V, try echo hello[Ctrl+V][Ctrl+H]world in a Linux terminal shell and press Enter. You’ll see the command as echo hello^Hworld and when you press Enter, it will display hellworld, because that embedded Ctrl+H is a backspace.

“Suckle” would be my preferred horrific reading.

For reasons I won’t go into, and probably not the first ones you’d think of, “squeal” holds a different negative connotation for me.

Some of us say hard g GIF, but prefer “ess-cue-ell” for SQL.

The former is an acronym and the latter is an initialism, and for me, that’s what makes the distinction. Anything else is secondary.

What I’ve read just now is what I’d deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out.

Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that’s merely an affectation.

It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor’s serial number.

I do not like this one bit.

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.

The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.

OK, I’ve done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @[email protected] for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.

IMO, this sort of information shouldn’t be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.

… and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.

The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU’s specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.

My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it’s a 64-bit value.

I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I’ll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won’t be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)

So the upshot is, if you don’t want to be identified right down to your CPU, don’t run programs as root if there’s any chance of them phoning home.

It is worth noting that the same metric is the exact reason that web browser version numbers are so ridiculous.

What’s that saying? Something about the moment a metric is used to measure performance, it ceases to be a good metric.

That’s what’s happening here. In one of the stupidest ways possible.

" ‘I was only following orders’ […] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness

No, I’ve no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it’s a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.

In an ideal world, she’d win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.

She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.