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Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

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Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#161
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.

There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avio…

It's a bit tricker than that though.

In software, if I build a toy, and release it to the world, many people may find it useful. They might trust it with their most personal data, or vital business documents. But, it is still a toy.

If I build a toy bridge no-one tries to make it span the grand canyon. They see it for what it is - its faults are obvious. They try to cross my toy bridge and it easily collapses under the weight of their foot without costing the lives of anyone. And, if they somehow managed to string along my toy to the point where it could span the grand canyon, do you think anyone in their right mind would find me liable as the toy maker?

Ultimately, this is where the differences are huge. People are building toy bridges, pet bridges, foot bridges, bridges for single cars and bridges for 10 lanes of traffic. It's very difficult to accidentally substitute a bridge built for 1 person into a spot you need a bridge for 10 lanes of traffic.

But it's trivial in software to put a "toy bridge" or "pet bridge" where you need something like the golden gate bridge.

So, when someone takes my toy and tries to use it as the golden gate bridge, whose at fault?

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the basic idea behind the sandbox in OS X? I think OS X (and mobile app development in general) shows both that this is great in theory and a net improvement over not having it, but that there are some common pitfalls to address. First, there are a handful of apps where this model doesn't work so well -- e.g. text editors, FTP clients, etc. So you're inconveniencing quite a few legit apps which need broade…

Sandboxed applications in OS X can read/write to arbitrary locations if they use the system Open/Save dialogs to ask the user about those files (after opting into sandboxing, of course). See here [1]. For files and folders the user cares and knows about (documents, projects, etc), this shouldn't be a problem. For files the user doesn't care about (caches, configuration), you can just leave them in your sandboxed cont…

Lots of applications (like Emacs and vim) don't use the system file dialogs though. It'd be nice to preserve old-fashioned file access for them.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a problem has been solved several times over, that's a sign that it has never really been solved. If there's a thing that most apps should do, then doing it should be the default, and avoiding the default should be the thing that takes work.

So what, your definition of a solved problem is one that never occurs again due to uniform implementation of countermeasures? That isn't realistic. That is like saying that plane geometry isn't a solved problem because people are still walking around having not read Euclid's "Elements", doing geometry wrong.

For the record, plane geometry wasn't solved by Euclid's "Elements"; the conjecture about the 5th postulate remained open for a substantial amount of time, and other axioms were introduced when it was pointed out that Euclid's work relied on numerous implied axioms.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#164

This seems like yet another good example of why robust application-level access control would be a helpful thing to build into modern operating systems, in addition to the typical user-based controls. This may have been both a rookie mistake and a regrettable failure of code review processes, but in any case it simply shouldn’t be possible for an application running on a modern system to wipe out all user data withou…

Isn't this the basic idea behind the sandbox in OS X? I think OS X (and mobile app development in general) shows both that this is great in theory and a net improvement over not having it, but that there are some common pitfalls to address. First, there are a handful of apps where this model doesn't work so well -- e.g. text editors, FTP clients, etc. So you're inconveniencing quite a few legit apps which need broade…

Why not have Apple require apps to run usefully with just basic permissions? Anything beyond access to own files is optional. This could certainly be gamed, but scrupulous app authors could gain a ton of trust from playing ball.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#165

rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* This is why serious bash scripts use set -u # trap uses of unset variables Won't help with deliberately blank ones, of course. Scripting languages in which all variables are defined if you so much as breathe their names are such a scourge ... I did this once in a build script. It wiped out all of /usr/lib. Of course, it was running as root! That machine was saved by a sysadmin who had a similar…

While you're at it:

    set -e # exit on unchecked failure
That way you don't trudge forward through an untested code path after a failure, you stop there and then.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise. I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would lite…

Your analogy is flawed. What is happening instead is someone is making a lamp, and then putting a sign on it says "LAMP is a lamp that lights your home! It's compatible with electricity and is under no warranty, express or implied!" and offering to let you take it home. And you seem to have missed the part where I explicitly said that both commercial and noncommercial software should be exposed to liability lawsuits.…

Hm, that's fair.

For what it's worth, I didn't miss that part, I just disagree with it.

But let's explore the idea that anything distributed in an executable format should expose the distributor to liability.

How do you define executable? I mean, what about languages which are optionally compiled, or python or ruby packages for example? And when you say distributor, do you mean distributor or do you mean author? Eg, is Github responsible because they hosted/distributed my code?

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the basic idea behind the sandbox in OS X? I think OS X (and mobile app development in general) shows both that this is great in theory and a net improvement over not having it, but that there are some common pitfalls to address. First, there are a handful of apps where this model doesn't work so well -- e.g. text editors, FTP clients, etc. So you're inconveniencing quite a few legit apps which need broade…

Why not have Apple require apps to run usefully with just basic permissions? Anything beyond access to own files is optional. This could certainly be gamed, but scrupulous app authors could gain a ton of trust from playing ball.

This is essentially already the case as Mac App Store apps must be sandboxed. This works fine for a lot of apps, but has presented issues for many prominent developers. (e.g. Panic had a fairly difficult time adapting Coda to the sandbox, if I recall correctly.)

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what, your definition of a solved problem is one that never occurs again due to uniform implementation of countermeasures? That isn't realistic. That is like saying that plane geometry isn't a solved problem because people are still walking around having not read Euclid's "Elements", doing geometry wrong.

For the record, plane geometry wasn't solved by Euclid's "Elements"; the conjecture about the 5th postulate remained open for a substantial amount of time, and other axioms were introduced when it was pointed out that Euclid's work relied on numerous implied axioms.

Damn it. Well at least I can still trust in Plato's theory of forms.

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#169

To those name-calling the author of the script: The product/update is hyped and the release date is set in stone. Tensions are high and your boss has already let you know that you're on thin ice and not delivering on the project goals. A last-minute showstopper bug comes in, caused by file leaks. Everyone is scrambling, and the file belongs to you so its on you to fix it alone. There is no time for code review, and d…

Totally agreed but isn't Valve a company famous for not having all that corporate deadline stuff?

Re: Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything owned by user

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise. I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would lite…

Your analogy is flawed. What is happening instead is someone is making a lamp, and then putting a sign on it says "LAMP is a lamp that lights your home! It's compatible with electricity and is under no warranty, express or implied!" and offering to let you take it home. And you seem to have missed the part where I explicitly said that both commercial and noncommercial software should be exposed to liability lawsuits.…

No, what is happening is someone making the instructions on how creating a lamp public and saying "I use this lamp in a controlled environment where using it cannot hurt anyone. If you try to use it outside of a similar controlled environment it may explode in your face, create a black hole and/or anhilate the universe. I don't really know, since I did not test it in that environment. Use it at your own risk." Then people go and use it outside that controlled environment, maybe making other people pay for using the lamp created following the instructions.

And now the creator of the instructions is liable for damages? Wait, what?

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