281–290 of 302 posts
Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).
Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program has performed an illegal operation" dialogs. As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law somehow.
This is why I don't put easter eggs or obscure programmer-lingo into programs anymore. Every error is potentially user-facing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the only effect of the warning is to scare people Good. If you're not familiar with what sudo does, then you shouldn't be using it in the first place.
Are you familiar with every part of the stack you are working on, down to the hardware?
Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).
You might enjoy reading ann Atlantic article titled something like “I don’t wanna see you smoking pot”. It is an opinion piece about the importance of community norms.
> I’m glad that draconian anti-marijuana laws have disappeared. But we need a taboo against public consumption.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/weed-smell... by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Some snippets:
> I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.
> Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms...
> The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces....
> When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.
TL;DR: Only display the warning if sudo is configured to send emails.
The behavior shouldn't be configurable; it shouldn't exist. No administrator wants to be bothered by reports of a legitimate user who failed to type a password correctly a couple of times.
Just because jschmoe seems to get his password wrong 95% of the time doesn't mean that I don't find the 9500 times he flubbed a sudo command valuable signal that something may be up. Especially if he can only recall ever using sudo himself once in a blue moon.
There is the user in the context of the system, then there is the ultimate person interfacing with and feeding the system input and output.
Hell, sudo itself is the perfect illustration of why an operator would want such a log.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an interesting example of the Clever Hans Phenomenon. You think you're comparing GPT and Google equally but you're actually giving GPT much more manual help. A search as simple as "UUG acronym" gives me the answer in a box at the top: "Unix Users Group" (tested in incognito). GPT is useful, but there's an annoying tendency of it's proponents to promote it with examples they haven't validated.
Interesting. The same search term returns "UUG is an acronym for: Uniface Users Group. Universal Underwriters Group." in the top box for me. Also in incognito.
> UUG is an acronym for: Uniface Users Group. Universal Underwriters Group. Unix User Group.
The behavior shouldn't be configurable; it shouldn't exist. No administrator wants to be bothered by reports of a legitimate user who failed to type a password correctly a couple of times.
...only true of course if you forget that user != user agent. Just because jschmoe seems to get his password wrong 95% of the time doesn't mean that I don't find the 9500 times he flubbed a sudo command valuable signal that something may be up. Especially if he can only recall ever using sudo himself once in a blue moon. There is the user in the context of the system, then there is the ultimate person interfacing wit…
Doing that just once is reported with an e-mail to root. (Would you believe it?) People have been complaining about this for years. It's a pretty poor feature.
If the intent is to remind root that some users are missing sudo access who ought ot have sudo access, the phrasing is all wrong: "this incident will be reported" is disciplinary language, like the user has done something wrong.
Likely they are just copying and pasting something from a web search (or got from an AI chat, nowadays).
The entirely separate su program generates no e-mails from people guessing the password wrong. You can grep your auth.log for that, if you care.
I just tried su with one bad password attempt on a Debian box. The program quit immediately and logged this:
Apr 30 2023 15:37:21 localhost su[22401]: FAILED su for root by kaz
Apr 30 2023 15:37:21 localhost su[22401]: - /dev/pts/6 kaz:root
The correct requirement of a failed sudo would be to emit a message conveying this meaning: "Sudo didn't execute your command because your account is not listed in the sudoers file. If you think you should be, contact your administrator." It should not be contacting the administrator for you.