New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

But it's the same kind of problem as general environment vars - rather than just a name, maybe it needs metadata of where it came from.

To be clear, I'm talking about the unprivileged to allow_active CVE-2025-6018, not the allow_active to root.

* https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs?tab=readme...

Well that makes it useless for $WORK (for now), as we use LDAP as our central policy repo (and more generally our user account store). Will have to wait until (at least) that's implemented before we can even consider it.

> It's permissively licensed, unfortunately. Wonder why.

So it can be used distributed with fewer legal hassles.

The last place in security is iOS.

It looks like some software projects are now entirely reliant upon PAM for authentication and don't support shadow passwords anymore. What a travesty. It's sort of like what happened with Systemd, where so many apps now entirely depend on Systemd, you can't run a Linux desktop without a "fake Systemd" to make things work. (see: Alpine Linux desktop, Slackware desktop)

All of this seems to be due to a kind of creepy crawly takeover of the system components, with new ones designed by enterprise companies and a few highly-opinionated software developers (who work at those companies). They design these components to do a million different things, but they also make them highly coupled and interdependent (which is terrible software design, but standard for enterprise products). This then results in a much more complex system with many more moving parts, and makes breaking it easier.

Since these companies hold sway over the most popular Linux distros with the most users, when they make a radical change, everybody else has to adopt it, just like with the browser world. Powerful incumbents exert an unfair (and unhealthy) amount of influence on our environment.

If you went back to a distro from 20 years ago, there really should only be a couple components: The X ecosystem (kernel drivers, userland drivers, rendering libraries), a console login program, a tty manager, a wifi manager, and, well... i'm struggling to think of anything else you need [after the system has booted]. Kernel drivers used to make up 90% of the hardware interfaces. Originally you just wrote to a device file for things like sound, printing, etc. It was an extremely simple system and it worked very well.

Today you have 80 different daemons all running at the same time in order for the system to work at all. Event buses, policy engines, management frameworks, a couple dozen libraries, and multiple layers of components to do something as simple as run a graphical app in a windowed environment. Is this all necessary? Clearly not, as we did without all this crap 20 years ago. Somebody screwed the pooch on system design.

Luckily, it's Linux, so nobody is forcing us to use all this shit. We can just start over with a new, much simpler system (and try hard as hell to avoid second system effect)

While I cannot agree nor disagree on the quality of BSDs (haven't used one in 20 years), I find it funny that in this case a design by committee is proof of quality.

I guess it's better than design by headless chicken which is how the Linux user-space is developed. Personally, I am a big fan of design by dictatorship, where one guy at the top either has a vision or can reject silly features and ideas with strong-enough words (Torvalds, Jobs, etc.) - this is the only way to create a cohesive experience, and honestly if it works for the kernel, there's no reason it shouldn't work in userspace.