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When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

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101–110 of 180 posts

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#101
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux's security model is lacking It's not lacking at all. The root + users model is common not only across OSes but also all sort of physical devices.

Linux's security model doesn't become better just because everybody is doing it that way, and besides that, everybody is doing it because they are copying Linux.

> Linux's security model doesn't become better just because everybody is doing it that way

I didn't claim it does.

> everybody is doing it because they are copying Linux.

This is not true. The model existed decades before Linux.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the US is the main country that loves these messages. Have you seen the size of universities or the government ? It's just clerical staff doing make believe work. Go to any .gov website. They'll throw up a wall of bs before you log in (e.g., https://ttp.dhs.gov/ ).

Sounds like you have never been to Europe. Here they make you actually sign (as in pen and paper) this stuff before they give you access.

I used to read an Eastern European world traveler photoblogger who’d been to damn near every country (even a lot that most folks from even semi-developed countries would consider far too dangerous or boring to be worth going out of your way to visit—he’d surely been to at least 150 countries, several more than once) and according to him the specific behavior of posting regulations and signs all over the place is practiced nowhere as much as the US, with only Australia coming sort-of close.

I was a bit blind to it, being a born American, but once he pointed it out I can’t un-see it. The land of the free really does love posting regulations everywhere.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a kid I saw a sign going into the bathroom at Sears that said "prohibited behavior not allowed". I had to ask my mom what prohibited meant and was quite surprised when she explained that it means "not allowed".

Love it! I've seen a lot of signs like, "prohibited items are not allowed in facility." Especially TSA signs at the airport which also include guns and knives and such in big red circles with lines through them. I always wonder if those signs were made by a brilliant low-grade troll or not. I once added text that said, "Unauthorized access is not authorized" as a low-grade troll, and people liked it so it stayed

No Spitting. The Mgt.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#104
post #93
post #16

Back in the 90s we were told ostentatiously to include "unauthorised access is not permitted" to the login prompt. Why? Because the login prompt said "please login:" and this was being read by some bush lawyer as an invitation to connect, and therefore would impede a case if we had a hacker login with a stolen password. I think it was founded on urban myth, but I assure you this is what we were told to do: add text t…

For anyone else who hasn't heard it before, a bush lawyer is "One who is not qualified in law yet attempts to expound on legal matters." https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bush_lawyer

Perhaps "bush lawyer" was the inspiration for "hedge wizard."

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/zetwkt/what_exactly_is...

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ratio of linux desktop users:sysadmins I know is something like 50:1

Other way round for me

What kind of sysadmins are they then? I don't want to sound dismissive, but is a "windows sysadmins" a thing? Do companies run windows on servers?

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#106
post #3

It’s a funny artifact because most people today use, and have only used Linux in a “single user” context. The “local system administrator” is me!

> It’s a funny artifact because most people today use, and have only used Linux in a “single user” context. The “local system administrator” is me! Except if you're on a team of sysadmins running a fleet of systems, either a whole bunch of cattle and/or numerous pets. There are numerous occasions that I have to SSH to look at something on an individual system, and it's best practice to go in as yourself and then sudo…

If you are in a team of sysadmins, you are still the local system administrator.

The only ones this message applies are the HPC ones and the "app folks", and the number of ssh-apps that require you to log in another computer is very small nowadays.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#107
post #59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was experimenting with taking that to a median using containers in nixos. IMO the distinguishing feature of qubes is the fact that there's chrome indicating the security level of a window based on its vm - I put together https://github.com/andrewbaxter/filterway to use with window manager rules to hopefully get the same result.

Interesting! I use Guix, I wonder if the fundamental idea can be translated here too. Do you have any links for the Nix-related stuff?

Arrg, I just realized I lost my demo system in a recent drive failure. So I don't have anything I can show directly... but this is my recollection.

I used systemd-nspawn containers https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_Containers .

For each container I'd run a `filterway` process with a unique app id outside the container and mount the filterway wayland socket inside the container, then wayland programs in the container would just work IIRC (maybe needed to set an environment variable for the wayland socket, or xdg_runtime_dir or something).

I think the wayland compositor itself was running as a user, so I had some setuid commands so that the system bar launch icons could start/stop the containers as the wayland user.

IIRC wayland was pretty flexible, just mounting sockets in various places and making sure permissions were set on the socket worked great.

Some other quick notes: App ids are optional in the wayland spec, but as long as you don't run any such apps in privileged contexts (outside of a container) you can still visually distinguish those. Also IIRC Sway didn't have the ability to vary chrome based on app id - I thought I'd try to indicate the permission level in the task/system bar instead but I think other compositors do have more powerful window decoration rules.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#108
post #93
post #16

Back in the 90s we were told ostentatiously to include "unauthorised access is not permitted" to the login prompt. Why? Because the login prompt said "please login:" and this was being read by some bush lawyer as an invitation to connect, and therefore would impede a case if we had a hacker login with a stolen password. I think it was founded on urban myth, but I assure you this is what we were told to do: add text t…

For anyone else who hasn't heard it before, a bush lawyer is "One who is not qualified in law yet attempts to expound on legal matters." https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bush_lawyer

TIL, this was my first time seeing the term. I just assumed that the poster had left out the second word of "bush league". That would mean something similar but subtly different, though (a lawyer not up to professional standards).

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#109
post #16

Back in the 90s we were told ostentatiously to include "unauthorised access is not permitted" to the login prompt. Why? Because the login prompt said "please login:" and this was being read by some bush lawyer as an invitation to connect, and therefore would impede a case if we had a hacker login with a stolen password. I think it was founded on urban myth, but I assure you this is what we were told to do: add text t…

We had a client insist that the SSH prompt be changed to include a half-page rambling about it being an "proprietary system" and "access prohibited for non-authorized users", something like that. Failing to include their specific wording, when we did their new staging setup, was a critical, must fix now bug. Their argumentation was that it was a regulatory requirement and would allow for prosecution.

This is a regular sight when accessing a US government computer system. Even managing things like Global Entry come with such a warning.

Re: When was the famous "sudo warning" introduced? (2019)

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you have never been to Europe. Here they make you actually sign (as in pen and paper) this stuff before they give you access.

I used to read an Eastern European world traveler photoblogger who’d been to damn near every country (even a lot that most folks from even semi-developed countries would consider far too dangerous or boring to be worth going out of your way to visit—he’d surely been to at least 150 countries, several more than once) and according to him the specific behavior of posting regulations and signs all over the place is prac…

It's the sort of cultural blindness that comes with not being able to read the native languages in all 150 countries this person's claimed to have visited.

Once you're able to read a new language, you see all kinds of new signs, especially when you visit a new country.

It's like how people who only read English think of Japan as some kind of blissful artspace, when the reality is that it is far more overloaded with ads than Western countries. Your mind just processes it as abstractions because you can't read the language.

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