At least the AC is now down mod'ed to -1. So mission accomplished. I think some people confuse well-deserved straightforward insults in connection with a factual refutation to a twit ... "flamebait", but plenty of others plainly do not.

why do people keep picking on Bash when many other software programs have had these problems

Those programs are not shells. Now show me bugs in BSD's POSIX sh, or dash, or mksh, or zsh that approach anywhere near the unacceptable gross severity of Shellshock in bash. If you can do that, we might lay off flaying bash. Until then, it is bloody obvious why we keep "picking on" bash.

/bin/sh is linked to /bin/bash and vulnerable

Only for a distro which is designed and implemented STUPIDLY. Granted a lot of major distros do this. RHEL for example. And yes, it is stupid and lazy. It is stupid because bash does not perfectly implement POSIX sh behavior. Even when $0 is /bin/sh, the reduced emulation is flawed. It still allows extensions which expose bugs. And it is lazy because they allowed crap scripts to creep into the system so that they decided it was too hard to weed them out. A crap script is one whose shebang line says "#!/bin/sh" instead of "#!/bin/bash, which claims that all it needs is POSIX sh, but which still relies on bash extensions, because the writer never tested it on a real sh.

Debian and ubuntu link /bin/sh to dash instead of bash. The BSDs do not link /bin/sh to anything; they start with a proper POSIX sh. Dash, and BSD sh, are much better implementations of POSIX sh behavior than bash is. They doesn't have the buggy extensions and are much lighter weight. The best interactive shell is not the best, or even necessarily an acceptable, scripting shell. You can install bash in debian or ubuntu or BSD and it doesn't hook into and take over /bin/sh.

Let's not forget that the multiple bugs which have recently come to light are all in bash. I have seen nothing similar exposed in BSD sh, dash, mksh, csh/tcsh, or zsh. Looks to me like the coding of bash was crappy going back at least 25 years.

Er, if you have a wireless LAN, you might as well have router to an always-on internet connection, and say a Beaglebone Black for smarts to collect the data and forward it. That way you don't need any of these modules at all.

If you're hooking up things in your house, use something like the ESP8266. It does WPA2/bgn, has a range of a 100 feet with just the chip antenna, max transmit for less than 250 mA, sleeps 10mA, and only costs 5 USD single module pricing.

I was going to ridicule any piece of junk with that collossal level of sleep current. Then I looked up the specs and found it's a more palatable 10 microamps power-down and 1 mW standby. Still higher than it should be IMO, but at least usable.

Example: a PIC18 can easily handle measuring remote temperature (outdoors, cellar, hot and cold water pipes, unused rooms, etc) using a Dallas 18B20 sensor, sleeping at under 1 microamp and waking once a minute for a few milliseconds. That would make possible powering with a lithium coin cell for a year. You wouldn't want the WiFi interface raising that requirement from one coin cell to 10 or 100 or 1000 coin cells.

Mod parent informative and informative.

Show us some OS source code or shut the hell up, shill.

OK, here's the full source to Apple's version of bash, and here is the source to the entire open part of OSX, including the XNU kernel.

Now YOU shut the fuck up, you clueless knuckle dragging cowardly fool,

Ahem. Apple is legally compelled to issue source code for whatever version of bash they use. It's called the GPL. For the rest of their core operating system (but not the proprietary GUI), yes, Apple voluntarily has released source code. It's mostly derived from BSD licensed stuff, and nothing compelled them to do so.

It is entirely possible to run bash on Windows, too. I'll let you figure out how. And the provider of that bash is compelled to make their source code available too.

He has no answer to that, and neither do the micro softies and apple corps who mod'ed him up.

Rename /bin/bash to /bin/bash.bak then create a link [cyberciti.biz] from /bin/dash to /bin/bash ..

And get ready for a whole lot of scripts failing. Scripts that start with #!/bin/sh but are written dependant on bash features will fail. Scripts that start with #!/bin/bash on the other hand will just fail to start. You'll have a busted-ass system, but at least it won't be attacked.

Now if you were running debian or ubuntu /bin/sh would already be a link to /bin/dash, and there wouldn't be any screwed up scripts because the design of the file layout was made by people who weren't brain dead.

Agreed, but that's not "using bash as the cgi handler". Not explicitly.

You're right; not only should you be unconvinced that he is right; he in fact misses the whole point and is completely mistaken.

You mod him up, and people who are smart will mod him down.

Try to understand, this is not about executing bash scripts as cgi, and it's not about sanitizing input. Period. It is about httpd setting environment variables from unsanitized user input when calling ANY cgi. And if perl or python or php then invoke bash by, for example, executing a call to system(), the environment gets passed to bash, and bash can be made to execute something bad just by having the environment set badly, and you can be pwned.

It took me a bit to "get it" myself.

The "With many eyes all bugs are shallow" myth is busted again.

I mean, isn't the fact that we're talking about this vulnerability at all thanks to the open-source nature of the software, and that someone has spotted the problem?

It would be pleasant to think so, but isn't it just as possible that the discovery of the exploit was thanks to eyes on the source code? I may be naive, but it's difficult for me to believe that someone thought up the attack vector from just thinking about shells in general.

I would have guessed that $75K figure would be higher.

75 grand is just the salary; not the accounting cost of employing one engineer. The latter is probably at least twice that figure. There are a lot of costs not paid to the employee directly: overhead/administration, employer matching 401k funding (used to be direct pension funding, but that's pretty much dead these days), employer share of "payroll" tax (Social Security), unemployment insurance, usually-to-almost-always health insurance, etc.

Also, the 75 grand is not what the employee actually gets in his pocket. Lots of stuff is taken out: employee 401k contribution, employee share of "payroll" tax, federal income tax withholding, usually state income tax withholding, sometimes municipal income tax withholding, etc.

The rotten level of engineer compensation in the U.S. is a sin when you compare it to the sky high pay and benefits showered on parasitic leeches such as government bureaucrats, politicians, judges and the like. It is also pretty pathetic compared to privileged lawyers and doctors, as well as other people who actually do genuine work, such as unionized laborers and (OK, this is stretching a bit) teachers.