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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

#201

Post by nodata »

im3w1l wrote: post #199

Just wanted to remind everyone that deleted files can be recovered until their space is reclaimed for something else. So if you notice something like this happening, shut down computer asap, so they can't be overwritten. Plug drive into another computer but do not mount it. Instead run some file recovery program on it. For an SSD it becomes murkier though, what with their trimming and automatic garbage collection.

Yeah if you have time to manually guess the filenames on half a million files. Great.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

falcolas wrote: post #78
Chris_Newton wrote: post #51

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…

Like AppArmor, or SELinux, or any of the other applications which have their hooks in the LSM? They do a fantastic job of this, if you can figure out how to use them. The truth is that they are too hard for even your average Sysadmin to configure & manage, let alone your average desktop user. setenforce=1 (yeah, right).

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by teddyh »

unwind wrote: post #189
enneff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta question why they used -f.

That's normal, but why the trailing slash?! That's just pointless, and almost looks like an explicit deathtrap. Without the slash, an empty variable would result in a command line of "rf -rf" which would simply fail due to the missing argument. There is absolutely no need for having a trailing slash, it's not as if "rf -rf foo" and "rm -rf foo/" can ever mean two different things, there can be only one "foo" in the f…

I have observed that ,any people feel that directories “need” to have a slash appended to them. They are afraid of ever doing, e.g. “cd /foo/bar” and will always do “cd /foo/bar/”. I”m guessing they feel like it would be some sort of type error, like treating a directory like a file or something.

This behavior is especially common with regards to URLs; there are many flamewars about whether URLs “need” a trailing slash or not.

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

#205

Post by im3w1l »

nodata wrote: post #201
im3w1l wrote: post #199

Just wanted to remind everyone that deleted files can be recovered until their space is reclaimed for something else. So if you notice something like this happening, shut down computer asap, so they can't be overwritten. Plug drive into another computer but do not mount it. Instead run some file recovery program on it. For an SSD it becomes murkier though, what with their trimming and automatic garbage collection.

Yeah if you have time to manually guess the filenames on half a million files. Great.

$ extundelete /dev/sda{n} --restore-all

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

#206

Post by pjc50 »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #51

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…

Broadly I agree; the original work on access control assumed that it was users who might be untrustworthy and programs were safe, in a "classified documents" context.

However, applying program-level access control is very un-UNIX. How do you compose multiple programs with different security regimes? This bug happened because the "steam" program called the "rm" program via the "shell" program. Inheriting capabilities mostly solves this, but we're familiar with how hard selinux is to use as a result and it still doesn't save the user from command line typos.

I think it's time to make a stronger case for time-reversible filesystems. Accidental deletion matters less if you can just get in your time machine.

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

#207

Post by pjc50 »

dietrichepp wrote: post #125
Karunamon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really a net improvement? There are a number of developers out there that have pulled out of the app store (off the top of my head, Atlassian for SourceTree, and Panic for Transmit) because the sandbox restrictions would force them to remove functionality from their applications. As far as Apple's implementation goes, sandboxes are for kids, not adults that need to get work done.

SourceTree and Transmit need to stomp all over directories to get things done. Yes, it's useful. But it's not common for applications to need that kind of access. The sandbox seems to work fine for the other 99% of applications. I think Apple even uses the sandbox heavily for their own apps, check ~/Library/Containers next time you use an OS X system. The only complaint here is about the app store, sandboxing is wond…

Steam is another category of application which wants to write to directories used by other applications...

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

#208

Post by mercurial »

jblow wrote: post #132
colanderman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the previous line was: STEAMROOT=$SOME_OTHER_UNSET_VARIABLE/ "rm -r " is a code smell, as much as "cc -o myprog .c" is. You should always know what files make up your system, and track them in a MANIFEST file. There's rarely a good reason to use wildcards when a program is dealing with its own files. xargs rm -df -- fixes this.

Steam doesn't deal with its own files. It deals mainly with random games that are creating tons of random files.

Doesn't it have an API? It could mandate that "random files" should only be created and deleted via the API, and update the manifest accordingly. Put the game in a read-only folder to make sure it happens.

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

#209

Post by skeoh »

noarchy wrote: post #147
stevewilhelm wrote: post #54

Many of the comments mentioned this should have been caught in the code review. I suspect they don't perform code reviews. Makes me wonder, is there a tool, system, service for auditing how many 'pair of eyes' have reviewed a given line of code. This would be hard to determine, but could be useful. I am envisioning a heatmap bar or overlay that indicates the number of reviews a line of code has received.

It is trivial to find systems where you can assign specific people to review code, of course. Plenty exist. But to guarantee that they truly read a line of code, rather than skimmed/scrolled through it? Even if they paused their scrolling on that line, it doesn't mean that they really read it, or did so with proper understanding of what it was doing. Short of placing an actual comment or question for that line (demon…

I think there's merit in the idea -- not tracking what a code reviewer reads but more of tracking how many times each line of code has been _included_ in a review, by being modified or maybe within so many lines of a change (like how diffs show X lines of surrounding context). The idea would be that code changes _near_ a buggy line would be more likely to draw attention to that bug and perhaps lines with less attention would be more likely to facilitate hidden bugs.

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

#210

Post by EliRivers »

charonn0 wrote: post #144
stonogo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can anyone design a safe and reliable bridge with a span of indeterminate length across unpredictable geography?

Which leads back to the number one reason why software projects go bad; not knowing what you're meant to be building because you didn't get clear requirements. The number of times the requirements gathering has ended up with questions genuinely being answered "we don't know what we want" makes me want to hurt myself.
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