MAC addresses are 48 bit, and half of that is just the manufacturer. So 24 bits really, and those bits aren't random, I think manufacturers just assign these based on some scheme, like a serial number. Point is you could easily reverse the SHA by brute force.

You can't calculate any useful statistic from a hash so literally the only use this would have is some sort of tracking.

Edit: I just looked up some data and I found someone using hashcat on an RTX 3090, which looks like it can do almost 10000 million SHA256 hashes per second of salted passwords (which are longer than 48 bit MACs, so MACs should be faster). 2²⁴ is 16.8 million, so it'll take about 1.7 ms per vendor. I found a database with (all?) 53011 vendor ids:

>>> 2**24 * 53011 / 10000 / 1000 / 1000
88.93769973759998

Yup, 89 seconds. You can calculate the SHA256 of every single MAC ever potentially issued in 89 seconds on a bog-standard 3090.

As others have said, if you quote your variables, they won't get split on spaces. The Unix shell unfortunately has ton of gotchas like this, and the reason this is not changed is backwards-compatibility. Lots of shell scripts depend on this behavior, e.g. there might be something like:

flags="-a -l"
ls $flags

If you quote this (ls "$flags"), ls will see it as one argument, instead of splitting it into two arguments. You could patch the shell to not split arguments by default, and invent some other syntax for when you want this splitting behavior, but that would break a ton of existing shell scripts, and confuse users who are already familiar with the way it works right now. It would also make the shell incompatible with other shells, and violate the POSIX standard.

I did it during the gcc 3 transition. I used a very new gcc 3 (maybe even pre-release), which wasn't at all recommended. A couple of (most?) C++ packages didn't compile (some change having to do with namespace scope), which meant I had to fix the source of some packages (generally pretty trivial changes, usually having to prepend namespace:: to identifiers). Overall this problem was pretty rare, like it affected less than 1% of C++ files, but with things like Qt or Phoenix (or whatever Firefox was called back then), with thousands of files, I had to fix dozens of things. I guess running into problems made it more interesting and fun actually.

Did I learn anything? The main thing I learned is about all the different basic packages and what sort of binaries and libraries are included in them and why you need them. Also about some important config files in /etc. And a bit of shell experience, but I dare say I knew most of that stuff already. How much you learn depends a lot on how much you already know.

Overall what I learned was not very deep knowledge, nor was it a very time-efficient way to learn. But it was a chill learning experience, goal-oriented and motivating. And it made me more comfortable and confident in my ability to figure out and fix stuff.

Also it's obviously not practical to keep that up to date, so I switched back to a distro after a couple of months of this.

I don't think so. And it's not a business.

Our previous account with the Bank for Social Economy was closed in 2019 because of our support for BDS. This happened after agitation by Israeli journalist Benjamin Weinthal and pressure from the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

The context is that the defense minister said Germany must be "fit for war". That's not clickbait by DW, that's actually what anyone following the news would take away from this. They're just emphasizing the most important part.

Make immigration harder??? Nice euphemism for this fascist shit. They're throwing human rights out of the window. They're literally putting migrants into concentration camps, if they're don't drown first thanks to Frontex pushbacks. Greens defended this so-called compromise to their base while fascist Meloni was giving victory speeches.

"Endlich im großen Stil abschieben" (Scholz). I can't tell the difference an NPD slogan and the SPD chancellor.

And for the other shit, there's some extra police authority or surveillance law proposed every other month or so. Pro-palestine protests are criminalized and they're threatening Muslims with deportation for not being loyal enough to Israel. All the parties are discussing what sort of services they can cut so they have more money for the military. Real wages are shrinking. You can't open a newspaper without reading about how Germany needs to prepare for war. Things are not okay.

slow progress in the right direction

lol

Oh people tried to do something about the Houthis. In fact, they starved Yemeni children to death to hurt the Houthis. Turns out that only made them more popular.

The makers of this map, Freedom House, receive funding mainly from the US government. They also took money from BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms manufacturer.

Yeah it actually says that in the text on that root password screen. But nobody ever reads that, me included. Literally everybody I have told this to was surprised when they hear about it. It's a total UI failure.

Yes, the US cultivates influence groups that then, at the right time, take over real protests involving actual people with actual grievances, as a cover to carry out coups. They have done this many times. They do this because they want to loot and exploit countries for cheap labor and resources, and in this case, also to put a whole army in Russia's face.

Some questions about your explanation: He just wants to be dictator? Why? Who's backing him and why? Why would he be so stupid as to shoot at the protestors?

Have you ever seen that documentary about the failed coup to overthrow Chavez, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"? Private pro-coup TV channels told everybody the pro-Chavez protestors started shooting at the opposition, which was the mainstream narrative at the time. This was used as justification to oust him (temporarily). But the documentary filmmakers (which happened to be there filming at the time) show that it was snipers shooting at both pro- and anti-Chavez demonstrators.

Obviously protestors have a reason for protesting and the CIA isn't handing out cash to random schmoes. They're just giving money to various groups that organize and support the protest, or they pay for positive media coverage. Groups they've been cultivating for decades. Groups that are coordinated by the US state department and will do basically what the US embassy tells them to do.

Again, imagine you had protests in Estonia, and the groups involved were long-time funded by Russia, and Russian officials made appearances at these protests to hand out cookies and shake hands, and Russian-funded media was riling up the protestors, and some of the people involved are straight up far-right fascists that hate your ethnic group. And then you hear a leaked phone call of Lavrov discussing who's going to be the new PM of Estonia, and a couple of weeks later, shooting starts (no one knows how exactly and nobody is too interested in finding out) and your old PM gets ousted without proper procedure, and the guy the Russians said they liked is in, and the far-right fascists also gets posts, and they hate you. WHAT WOULD YOU THINK?