[oliyoung]

"this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible"

Having done rm -fr / on a box before, I think it should stay. The incident was fake, the problem is real, it elicited real responses and has value.

[JdeBP]

You should read the Italian news coverage. Marco Marsala points out that the problem is fake, that (as several people also noted on Hacker News) the command mentioned has been benign since 2006, and that Ansible doesn't permit this anyway. He observes that "serious administrators" would know this, but apparently there were no such people at ServerFault answering his question because otherwise they'd have spotted such a blatant error ("altrimenti saprebbero che quanto ho descritto non può accadere").

* http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500711

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514666