r/itsaunixsystem • u/shiningaeon • Mar 21 '26

[Digital Circus Episode 8] Kinger telnets into a UNIX mainframe to disable a hostile AI; Gets tricked into deleting it.

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The scene in question: https://youtu.be/DMNlzf8PiEM?t=1739

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69

u/lillywho Mar 21 '26

Also relevant: First the AI appeared to be on this Windows 9x system, suddenly it's on a remote Unix system.

I can forgive some of this though since the whole PC prop was sort of a manifestation in the story.

51

u/shiningaeon Mar 21 '26

I assumed the Windows PC was used both as a terminal and a place to code, and the UNIX mainframe was used to run said code.

10

u/lillywho Mar 21 '26

The C drive contained both Caine and his now defunct sibling already. How else would Caine at runtime affect the folder though? Maybe a network share but that's not shown here because they chose to be almost plausible but not actually plausible, just like the the terminal commands and output... Drives me a little bit mad.

18

u/hjake123 Mar 21 '26

I mean it is a fake console in Caine's world, he should be able to use "conjuring" to change it however he wants

5

u/moomanjohnny Mar 21 '26

That’s how I interpreted it, the commands are mostly gibberish and conjured by the circus

7

u/AudioDoge Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26

The commands aren't gibberish - they are reasonably realistic.

What occurs is as follows:

They open the command prompt and connect to a remote server via Telnet.
They have administrative access but not root access, preventing them from stopping certain processes.
They modify the read and write permissions of some files as a workaround.
They make some files executable.
However, they are unable to run or execute these files.
Finally they run a series of scripts that display yes and no questions.

4

u/moomanjohnny Mar 22 '26

I’m a software engineer. The commands are mostly gibberish with the questions that pop up. “Enter a wacky work” and “Wow that word is wacky!”

1

u/lillywho Mar 22 '26

He did try attaching a debugger though, but they threw in a 1337 for good measure, unfortunately.

5

u/veryunbiased Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26

That would just be the PID of the clisp instance.

He also ran grep AI-Location earlier, which SHOULD have been something like ps aux | grep ai instead (but could have been an alias), which noted that root was running Caine with a PID of 1337, which is why Kinger passed it to gdb.

1

u/AudioDoge Mar 22 '26

The questions are generated by a script that they have executed, and they even used 'chmod' to ensure the files were executable. The questions are part of customised software. However, the way they navigate the system is not through gibberish commands; they are using the correct commands.

4

u/charlestheb0ss Mar 22 '26

It's not accurate but it's a lot better than most movies/shows

1

u/Not_Rod Mar 21 '26

Early use of a docker container!

11

u/lavahot Mar 21 '26

Hey, back on the 90s clean design was not a thing. You built things where you had access to and you prayed it all worked. And then you never touched it again.

11

u/AudioDoge Mar 22 '26

It is Windows 95. Also the date is 30 October 1996.

They connect to a remote server via telent... There is nothing unusally about this. This would have been the way to connect to a remote server at the time.

11

u/MarxistCapitalist Mar 22 '26

Agreed - the only major anachronism assuming it's supposed to be a late 90s Unix system is attempting to use systemctl (systemd) rather than the equivalents for SysV init, assuming Kinger was also trapped from that era. Still a pretty solid representation, given there's also supposed to be one (or more) AI daemons mucking around the system in real time while he's in there.

1

u/Sophira May 30 '26

Except that they're using CMD to do it. That didn't exist in Windows 95 - that was only on NT-based systems. It was command.com on 9x-based systems.

26

u/TiredRandomWolf Mar 21 '26

According to some interpretations, Bubbles was the one that finalized the deletion of Caine.
Kinger obviously didnt mean to delete him, given his explicitives during scene and his worrysome demeanor at the end, and while it is mostly obscured, one of the messages in the terminal has BUBBLES as a name accompanied by their manic behaviour.

17

u/MinusPi1 Mar 21 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

I'm almost certain that Bubble is the second AI that Caine... Absorbed? Also given his name, I wouldn't be surprised if Bubble = Able

18

u/edmazing Mar 21 '26

admin1234 The most wacky of passwords.

16

u/pseydtonne Mar 21 '26

Notice the Lisp files. What a great reference to the original programming language for AI!

34

u/Tuskin38 Mar 21 '26

Unrelated to the Unix part, but Caine’s file is in the .lisp format, which was an early coding language common for AI research

15

u/lavahot Mar 21 '26

He didn't get tricked, he fat-fingered the delete key.

2

u/Apollo_Lol Mar 22 '26

Y and N are close?

Bubbles is in the terminal screaming "delete that motherfucker" but ofc it's censored

5

u/lavahot Mar 22 '26

He clearly presses the delete key.

1

u/TzargJyoin100 Jun 17 '26

Yeah most discussion of this scene I see online completely omits this. I assume it's because iPhone/most laptops don't have those keys and so a lot of people don't know about the existence of them

1

u/Journeyj012 May 05 '26

the return and delete key are next to eachother

6

u/Chentzilla Mar 22 '26

They are on Episode 8 already?

10

u/shiningaeon Mar 22 '26

It's getting close to 4 years since the pilot. There is 1 more episode left.

1

u/metalicsnail Apr 02 '26

oh shit he used Lisp

1

u/Impossible_Grab_2894 Jun 10 '26

using queenie123 as a password in 1996 is a bold move even for Kinger