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I think the one moderate vulnerability is an example of this. I have serious doubts about anyone having wanted to use that remove timestamps parameter in 2023. I'd be surprised if many people know it exists.

I more surprised an os would let you make a user with "../../" in the name though. I'd bet a heap of things would break. A while back I saw a guy name his windows desktop with an emoji and all sorts of software fell over.




>A while back I saw a guy name his windows desktop with an emoji and all sorts of software fell over.

Presumably all of it was written in languages built on old assumptions that a single character is one byte.


Or even that a character fits in 2 bytes, which is an easy mistake to make in languages like Java or C# that have a 16-bit `char` type


> I more surprised an os would let you make a user with "../../" in the name though.

There may be protections at some levels, but eventually a username is just an entry in a database. Admittedly, you do have to be on the other side of the airtight hatchway to do it, but modifying a line in /etc/passwd to have the field before the first ":" be "../../" is something the os can't really do much about once it's there.


Funny enough, my iphone has an emoji-only name and everything seems to work. I haven’t dared try with a machine I might want to ssh into though.


An emoji SSID can be hit and miss at times on what can detect it.


This is the actual device name, not just the network but that’s a good point. Tethering via the network manager GUI from a macbook works as expected with the network name same as device.

You got me curious so I checked arp -a which shows host name as a ?. Nmap also isn’t able to resolve the emoji name, neither is host, and I don’t think dns-sd either, though my mdns-fu is poor. I did test Terminal.app and I can echo an emoji so I’m guessing this is mostly a limitation of some of the ancient bsd utils that are packed with macos.

Thanks for the little rabbit hole!




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