OK I'll admit it. I was bored. I was just tinkering around with various /dev/* and piping the output to various others.

That's when I came across a few interesting things (namely xchat leaves all kinds of stuff in memory for days after you last logged on).

But most scary was this command 'strings /dev/mem', which revealed to me my own password. This is particalarly scary since this is an ubuntu system and my user is essentially 'root'.