An early 16 bit home computer based on the 68000 microprocessor. Versions released from the late 80s to the early 90s. It earned a cult following because it was the first home computer to have arcade quality graphics and sound (80s and 90s arcade games, obs).

It had a decent OS and business software, but at heart it was a gaming computer. It lost out to the home consoles, partly because as a fully fledged computer, piracy was rife, so big games developers moved to the very locked-down games consoles instead.

Modern programming languages and IDE’s are so complex it’s enough to put a lot of people off ever learning to program - it seems such a massive learning curve. There’s something to be said for learning Basic then assembly on an 8-bit computer, where everything is so much sampler and direct. Writing a value to memory and seeing a blotch of pixels change on the screen gives such a direct understanding of what’s going on inside the machine. And if you only have 48k of memory, you can genuinely understand everything the computer is doing.

Being the second tenth best language at everything

FTFY

Although rug-pulls like this are dubious to say the least, neither should FOSS contributors be hauled over the coals simply because, to justify continuing to commit more and more time to a project. they need to generate some kind of revenue. If more FOSS advocates donated reasonable amounts of money to the projects they use, this kind of bollocks would be much less frequent, and the long term stability of projects would increase dramatically. Sadly, way to many people donate nothing. And way too many companies, as well.

I first saw this joke back in the days of 8-bit home microcomputers. Of course then it only needed 256 lines of code, and took up about 8k of your precious, precious RAM.

But if they don’t know they have to knock “shave and a haircut” first, your job gets a lot easier and you’re dealing with a lot fewer nuisance password promptings.

Very good explanation. And the benefits are even greater: because there is absolutely no response until the entire secret knock is correctly used, the random guy trying to get in doesn’t even know if there’s anyone at that address. (In fact, set up correctly, they won’t even know if there’s really a door there or not)

If you want to go down that path, a password is only security by obscurity.

Port knocking is an extra layer of security, and one that can stop attackers from ever knowing your private server even exists. A random scanner won’t even see any open ports.

Always bear in mind that any random guy advising people not to use port knocking may be doing it with malicious intent. I’m sure there’s someone out there advising that random passwords are a waste of time, and everyone should just use monkey123.