When reading the title I literally thought someone managed to break into asos.com (the clothing store) as the branding itself is also in capital letters and everything.
The VisionFS SMB server referenced in the article has some interesting history: <a href="http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html</a>
Even if F8 didn't exist, maybe it would be possible to just open the hd image in a hex editor and search for the "QUIET=true" string and patch it out?
I wonder how secure it would be to put some ancient super obscure system on the internet these days. Ideally with a CPU with an obscure instruction set.<p>All standard exploits would fail. Just make sure you don't have a shell escape, shell commands would work of course.
Interesting. That looks like some quaint parallel world<p>I'm surprised that /etc/shadow was already a thing (ok 1999 is not that old) but that rwroot device I'm not sure what it can be.<p>The custom bootloader is "funny" but that would be expected for a proprietary Unix
Interesting that the passwd file contains actual users; I wonder if that's actual users of the appliance, or developers who weren't pruned when they shipped the image.