I like this trend: major internet security vulnerability, new guitar parody. Most recently we’ve had to deal with Shellshock, an issue where a program called bash would execute code provided in environment variables, which non-CS people can think of as a sort of transient set of preferences that a program has access to. In a particular bad combination of features, some server software might happen to (deliberately) store information in the environment (like, say, what browser you’re running) and then run bash to accomplish some particular task. If you say your browser is “Safari”, everything’s okay; if you say it’s “() { :;}; echo vulnerable” then we have a problem.

There is a song here too.

(Continue reading…)