This is just changing the default permissions on a home directory -not a more complicated encrypted/systemd setup I thought it would be.
Way more background than I expected for such a seemingly minor change.
Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
11–20 of 100 posts
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#12Even ubuntu can't keep themselves from smacking you in the face with a full-page cookie acceptance pop-up that illegally fails to provide an opt-out. Sad.
" Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I respectfully disagree this time. This is neither "website formatting", nor "back-button breakage", i.e. generally not a presentation issue.
This is the Ubuntu website being deliberately annoying about their tracking choices in the hopes that you just click "Accept all" and be done with it.
And I really don't know why Ubuntu specifically needs tracking when you just want to read an article on their blog, and personally think it's worthy of discussion.
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#13Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#14Isn’t this what Windows has done by default for a while now? Every user’s home directory is private to that user.
It is in fact an simple change to UMASK in /etc/login.defs. The default value is different between various Linux distributions and in fact Unix systems as a whole depending on the "pedigree". On the multiuser systems the default tends to be 022 (ie. 755 permission bits => read and execute to everyone), on "internet server" systems 033 (ie. execute to everyone, such that finger and http://foo.bar/~quux/ works) and 077 on workstation unix systems (ie. $HOME is completely private). And I have strong feeling that the whole story about "systems shared by family" is just PR spin as that setting is simply default in upstream Debian...
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#15Even ubuntu can't keep themselves from smacking you in the face with a full-page cookie acceptance pop-up that illegally fails to provide an opt-out. Sad.
It's worse than that. There is an opt-out, but you have to scroll down on the full page modal, even though there's no indication that you can scroll . It's not incompetence; it's malice.
I get a scroll bar on the modal on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Are you sure there isn't something wrong with your browser, or with a plugin you are using?
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#16Even Ubuntu's calling Linux home desktop 'quaint' now..
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#17Ubuntu should develop shadow accounts - the user will log in to a completely different account of the same login depending on password. That is if someone forces you to log in you could use different password and pretend it is your stuff.
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#18Makes sense to me, but I'd be much more excited to go back to not having the snap directory shoved in my face.
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#19Tl;dr home directories now default to 750.
Re: Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
#20> This change now means that in the future if an attacker were to exploit some previously unknown vulnerability in a given system service that is running as a separate user, they would then not be able to access the data of any other user (both human or system service) on the system.
If the attacker can already access arbitrary files on your box, I don't think simple unix permissions will save you