This actually made me laugh a little bit as it brought me back to my college days. The first week of February every year was when the yearly OS class covered fork(), and as a result the compute clusters all over campus were basically unusable due to people trying to run their homework. Ahh, memories.

I am surprised by the attitude against what he did, both on reddit and even more so here. Afterall this is "hacker news" and the submission is called "hack your way...". Any definition of hacking that I know includes cleverly exploiting the limitations and boundary cases of a system. I see this attitude as part of a larger trend of "sandbox"-ification, "theme park"-ization of computing.

It is against the rules (and against common etiquette) to DOS the machine in CTF events. I don't see how fork bombing the machine helped him solve any challenges so I can't see how someone could approve to that.

the competition wasn't "DOS the box", it was "capture the flag". this is charlie sheen "winning" at best

The competition was "Teach Stripe the fundamentals of computer security". Resource quotas is one of those fundamentals.

Not sure about Charlie Sheen, but hacking is all about ignoring what the competition is supposed to be and doing what is possible.

And another way of looking at it is: someone offered you free entertainment and education and you slapped them in the face and ruined the fun for everyone for quite some time. "Hacker" certainly does not include or entitle you to being a dick.

Ugh, this sucks. Got to #3 and which looks pretty challenging for me and took some time to document my steps there and now someone has pulled this again. It just seems childish.

LETS HACK HIM

Seriously though, fuck that guy. Half my night was spent waiting on vi.

This person? http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba I don't get the "not surprised" part? :\

ted used to run uncov. think maddox but actually coherent about startups and programming. here is an idea of his now grown up writing style: http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html and here is an old hackernews post dicussing uncov... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328217

I'm surprised. He is usually at least witty or clever when trolling. Forkbombs are pretty unoriginal if you are older than 14.

That is only one of them and please do not give such people the attention they try to get through this.

Anyone have any suggestions for preventing this on sandbox systems?

Googling it says limit user processes via /etc/security/limits.conf http://goo.gl/RJJhN

Is it not that simple?

I believe that for each level of the challenge, all users were ssh'ing in to the same user account, so even with per-user process limits a fork bomb would use up all the processes available to the competitors at that level.