Spoilers for TADC epidode 8
Okay so I've seen a lot of outcry for an explanation of what kinger is doing on the computer in episode 8 and while this is kinda random for this blog as a programmer I thought i would share an explanation of what he's doing.
Now there is ALOT to unpack so im gonna break it down mostly line by line and try and explain it for people who've never used a command console before, aswell as try not to speculate much on what it means. As I'd prefer to have this as a rescource for theorists rather than a theory itself.
Starting out this is the first set of commands we see.
The first 3 are simply telling us what the system, date and host are.
The system seem to be the device the circus is running on, The date being the date of its creation (It could be another date as its ambigous but that would make sense to me) And the host being the name of the device the circus is running on.
Next he "Initializing telnet connection" Telnet is a communication protocol that allows a computer to access another computer's terminal.
This is just telling us kinger is connecting to the circus host's ( circus digital in this case) terminal.
The login, pass are just the login details of kingers account.
The first actual command is "whoami"
whoami is a command that shows information about the user, what groups its in (such as user, superuser, etc) and what permissions it has.
We can see kinger is part of the administrator group/has administrator priveleges.
On to the next screen shot.
"grep AI-location" This is using a commad that looks for text patterns in files. Grep is a very versetile command and can do quite a bit, but in this case kinger is using it to find the files for caine's AI.
The next 4 lines after that is a list of files for caine's AI
The next command is "/secured/" This one i dont know, I dont recognise it, it doesn't look really like a command, it looks for like the name of a folder? Feel free to correct me if anyone knows what this is.
[EDIT: Having looked at it again, I think hes just asking the terminal for what files are stored in the folder. The total being the total number of files in the folder. (WOW thats a lot) but it only shows us, a few files, and then the last 2 files in the folder.]
Then we get a couple of files with some data.
The first 2 lines start with "drwxr-xr-x" this is fancy terminal speak that lists what things you can do with that file path.
d - means the file is a directory (a folder, litterally like a folder on your computer rn)
rwx - this means that the owner of the file can do things like 1: read (r) (look at the file), 2: write (w) (this means you can make changes to that file) and 3: executed (x) (run it like a program.)
r-x - This means the users in the wheel group (i'll explain what that is later) can read and execute the files.
All of these have a second r-x which means users who are not in the wheel group (so essentially anybody) can also read and execute.
next you have the number of hard links (for the first line its 3) follwed by the owner (all of them are owned by root, which is the computer system itself, not any actual human users. THIS DOES NOT MEAN CAINE OWNS THEM NECCASARILY) and all have an unspecified wheel group.
Now wheel is just a tool for creating groups of users, and a wheel group is a group of users made using the wheel tool.
This is then followed by a number representing its size (probably in bytes) The file's date (either its creation date, or the date it was last modified) and its name.
The next command kinger runs is "stop caine process".
The stop command is used to exit a program, Like hiting the X on a window on your pc, so kinger is trying to essentailly put caine on pause.
This returns a WARNING "WHOOPS WRONG APPROACH THERE"
a warning in programming is when a program (in this case the command kinger is trying to run) encounters a problem, but the problem isn't severe enough to cause the program to crash. (in this case the command he ran didn't do anything, but it wasn't forced to stop.)
The next command kinger tries to run is "/usr/bin/gdb /usr/local/bin/clisp 1337" This is kind of complicated. Most linux systems (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux for more info on linux) they come standard with a GNU compiler. A compiler is essentially a tool to run code. It's more complicated than that but that's all you need to know to understand this, its neccesary to run code files as programs. This GNU compiler is stored normally at /usr/bin/gdb, kinger then uses the GNU compiler to run CLISP, this is another standard Linux program, its... also a tool to run a program, so he's using a tool to run a tool to run a program.
The command is followed by "1337" I dont know what this means. Again if anyone knows feel free to put it in the comments.
[EDIT: Someone commented, apparently it is a reference to leetspeek, a way of spelling words used by hackers! Tysm @acidshadow! ]
Whatever this command is doing, it returns an error saying "Operation not permitted" So whatever kinger was trying to do with this command didn't work.
The reason for this is stated as "ERROR: Protected by 57x immersive AI defense system". Idk what this means but the 57x more immersive AI system is what blocked kinger from doing whatever he was trying to do with that command.
There is another part to this scene a little later, where we see kinger try and modify a script with chmod (a tool for dealing with scripts) and he tries to set the permission of the script file so NOBODY can read, write, or execute it. This is what the 000 means. The first number is owner permissions (4 for read, 2 for write, 1 for execute, so 7 is 4+2+1, meaning all 3 permissions etc) the second being group permissions, and last being others permissions.
This gets another warning "Unfinished work detected, Access restricted"
Then kinger uses the rm command (short for remove, as in delete) on a file called /secured/paraphernalia-engine.dat, this is data file, presumably for the paraphernalia engine. Wutever that means.
2: "Error: can not inject torment. Torment must be 100% accidental"
Okay the next scene is large so I'm probably going to make a second post about this, when I do I'll put a link to it at the bottom! Have fun theorizing for now.