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Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

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Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#181

Post by philh »

cmsj wrote: post #9
moonboots wrote: post #6

Bash and Zsh provide shortcuts to open a text editor where commands can be pasted and edited before running (Ctrl-x Ctrl-e in bash, need to enable in zsh [2]). I've been using this on Linux not for security but because I'm still confused by X11's primary and clipboard selections [1]. It seems like every time I try to paste a github repo link, I get the last chunk of code I copied and vice versa. [1] http://www.nongnu…

Out of interest, what is confusing? If you select text it always goes into the selection buffer. If you also press the clipboard copy shortcut (so, Ctrl-C most of the time, sometimes Ctrl-Shift-C in a terminal) the selection is copied into the clipboard buffer. Ctrl-V (or, again, sometimes Ctrl-Shift-V in a terminal) pastes the clipboard buffer. Middle mouse button (or shift-Insert) pastes the selection buffer. Is th…

> If you select text it always goes into the selection buffer.

But as far as I can tell, if text is selected for you that's not always true. I sometimes have difficulty with text boxes which insist on self-selecting as soon as I click them, and which I just can't seem to pull into the selection buffer.

Github doesn't seem to have this issue, but I had recently when trying to get a google maps permalink, for example.

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#182

Post by csense »

charlieok wrote: post #130
NelsonMinar wrote: post #51

Why would I bother copying and pasting the code to my clipboard when common industry practice now is just to invoke the output of curl directly? ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go )

I dislike this whole trend. How about we start thinking in terms of leaving the user's default environment, and system, alone, and “installing” software into nice sandboxed areas where we can easily enable/disable it, or delete it with a simple “rm -rf directory/path”

I put all my sensitive files under my home directory. Every subdirectory of my home directory is non-world-accessible, and I have a cron job which chmod's world privileges away from new files and directories that don't match a whitelist of directories I wish to publish (e.g. ~/public_html).

I've started giving each application its own user and group, and do the git checkout, compile, and install as that user. (You don't need root for "make install" if you ran configure with the --prefix option.) Then I know it's not going to be able to write anywhere but its own directories, and won't be able to see my browsing activities or sensitive files, because UNIX permissions won't let it. For added security, once the software is built, move it to a location where only root can write, and chown -R root:root.

You can also use VM's for added security. With the new namespaces in 3.8 (the kernel for Ubuntu Raring Ringtail), it should (in theory) be safe to let untrusted software have root in a Linux container (LXC). (LXC is like chroot but you can virtualize stuff like the network, and since the guest uses the host's kernel memory allocator, you don't have to dedicate a block of memory to running the guest as you would with Xen or Virtualbox.)

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#183

Post by beedogs »

cmsj wrote: post #14
raymondh wrote: post #7

Nicely done! Here's the underlying source: git clone /dev/null; clear; echo -n "Hello ";whoami|tr -d '\n';echo -e '!\nThat was a bad idea. Don'"'"'t copy code from websites you don'"'"'t trust! Here'"'"'s the first line of your /etc/passwd: ';head -n1 /etc/passwd git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/kup/kup.git

I was expecting it to be done with Javascript, which is, afaik, how the horrible websites that tack a URL and a "this quote came from blah" attribution, work. I hate all of this stuff and it is greatly saddening that browser vendors are not protecting us from it. It's like the pop-up-on-click days of old and it must stop. If I select some text and copy it, I am taking a very explicit action. I am giving the computer…

FYI, most of that bullshit "Read More: " injection garbage can be blocked by adding "tynt.com" to your favorite adblock extension. I believe it's already in ghostery, just not enabled by default.

If ever there were a company that just needed to be nuked from orbit, it's tynt.

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#185

Post by csense »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #160
charlieok wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike this whole trend. How about we start thinking in terms of leaving the user's default environment, and system, alone, and “installing” software into nice sandboxed areas where we can easily enable/disable it, or delete it with a simple “rm -rf directory/path”

To be fair to Homebrew (the example I'm picking on here), it does install to a nice sandboxed area. That area is named "/usr/local", but you can give it its own path and everything works pretty well. (I find I have to completely remove and reinstall Homebrew about every two months, generally because libgettext changed yet again.)

That's not a sandbox. If you have ten programs installed in /usr/local, and you want to uninstall one of them, rm -Rf /usr/local is not the tool for the job. (At least on Linux. I'm assuming UNIX-like Macs are the same.)

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#186

Post by sliverstorm »

csense wrote: post #182
charlieok wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike this whole trend. How about we start thinking in terms of leaving the user's default environment, and system, alone, and “installing” software into nice sandboxed areas where we can easily enable/disable it, or delete it with a simple “rm -rf directory/path”

I put all my sensitive files under my home directory. Every subdirectory of my home directory is non-world-accessible, and I have a cron job which chmod's world privileges away from new files and directories that don't match a whitelist of directories I wish to publish (e.g. ~/public_html). I've started giving each application its own user and group, and do the git checkout, compile, and install as that user. (You do…

It sounds like you really want BSD jails.

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#187

Post by nitrogen »

laumars wrote: post #148
arjunbajaj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to use such a thing! I'm bugged with programs I don't use anymore which start on system boot. Even after removing some programs, they just don't go away. A sandboxed environment would be really good to use!

That's just bad administration as even on Windows, you can easily disable them ( msconfig ). With Linux, this isn't even an issue unless you're blindly installing dozens of daemons (which, again, can easily be disabled) as Linux doesn't have hundreds of application launchers that install themselves like Windows does (again, daemons being the exception). The only example I can think of where you might run into problem…

This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but modern desktops are removing the ability to manage services, sessions, and startup apps easily and clearly.

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#188

Post by ricardobeat »

csense wrote: post #185
NelsonMinar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Homebrew (the example I'm picking on here), it does install to a nice sandboxed area. That area is named "/usr/local", but you can give it its own path and everything works pretty well. (I find I have to completely remove and reinstall Homebrew about every two months, generally because libgettext changed yet again.)

That's not a sandbox. If you have ten programs installed in /usr/local, and you want to uninstall one of them, rm -Rf /usr/local is not the tool for the job. (At least on Linux. I'm assuming UNIX-like Macs are the same.)

Homebrew actually uses /usr/local/Cellar, so rm -Rf /usr/local/Cellar/pypy is what you'd want, except that it won't remove symlinks to /usr/bin, launch scripts and such; you still need some kind of uninstall script (brew uninstall).

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#189

Post by ricardobeat »

charlieok wrote: post #176
NelsonMinar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Homebrew (the example I'm picking on here), it does install to a nice sandboxed area. That area is named "/usr/local", but you can give it its own path and everything works pretty well. (I find I have to completely remove and reinstall Homebrew about every two months, generally because libgettext changed yet again.)

Homebrew is ok, and it has arguably improved the situation on Mac OS X a great deal, but I think we can do better still. Using homebrew, one tweaks recipes in ruby code until they work. Why do we not have a common (and widely adopted!) way for software projects to tell other software how to install/uninstall them, and what other projects they depend on for what particular operations (e.g. configure, build, install, t…

Code is reusable data, and regardless of language is much more useful than an arbitrary data format. There was an attempt to port homebrew to linux, but it didn't go far.

dotCloud has just open-sourced Docker[1], an attempt at solving the deployment issue.

[1] http://docker.io

Re: Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal

#190

Post by NelsonMinar »

csense wrote: post #185
NelsonMinar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to Homebrew (the example I'm picking on here), it does install to a nice sandboxed area. That area is named "/usr/local", but you can give it its own path and everything works pretty well. (I find I have to completely remove and reinstall Homebrew about every two months, generally because libgettext changed yet again.)

That's not a sandbox. If you have ten programs installed in /usr/local, and you want to uninstall one of them, rm -Rf /usr/local is not the tool for the job. (At least on Linux. I'm assuming UNIX-like Macs are the same.)

Like I said, Homebrew installs in its own directory pretty well. I chose /usr/homebrew, explicitly so I can rm -rf. I think for most Homebrew users their Macs have nothing else in /usr/local and so that's why it's not an unreasonable default.
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