61–70 of 77 posts
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We're sharing a computer as we speak.
Right, in the sense of "the network is the computer". Tangent: one of the most talented engineers I ever met gave an amazing (tho sadly company-private, unrecorded) talk about how the OS was his IDE. Kind of analogous... anyway, I like this type of re-framing or meta-level-shifting.
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Those multiple users could be used to implement sandboxing. And of course if one has a family then one might want accounts for Mom, Dad, Alice and Bob.
Yea, I'd like to see a system where each application runs as its own user, especially third party applications not vetted by the OS vendor, the package manager and so on. Maybe this already exists--I think it would be a good step forward for security and privacy. You can no longer trust 3rd party applications to stay in their lanes. Running an application with full access to everything that I as a user have access to…
That's how Android works.
I attended a Tanenbaum lecture once where he talked about how silly it was that nothing happens if permissions are reduced for a file while some other user/process has an open handle to it, and this is something Linux doesn't care to handle and MINIX does (or perhaps just that a kernel/filesystem should handle it, and few do -- I don't recall exactly). Surely an edge case (logging? what else? I never keep files open…
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Not a problem in practice. I've seen a lot of systems having user homes in places other than /home for various (usually historical) reasons. Never broke anything afaik.
It probably is fine. Still makes my spider sense tingle about some unforeseen failure that will crop up one day.
It's understandable too, because Linux doesn't provide a nice way to retrieve that information. You'll have to parse /etc/passwd (which might not contain all users) or hope that whatever language you're using supports path extrapolations so that you can do realpath(~username) or call a third party tool that does, like a shell.
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>Sticky bit Interestingly, I have come across some people who confuse the sticky bit with the setuid bit.
It's pretty common for people the misuse the terminology but not the semantics.
ahem
Yes, I mean the setuid bit. The bit that makes the groups work for read/write to a directory. The same bit that's dangerous if it's set for a root user or group, and can be iffy if it's executable... yes that bit.
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Those multiple users could be used to implement sandboxing. And of course if one has a family then one might want accounts for Mom, Dad, Alice and Bob.
Depressingly i think sharing computers at least in the western world has become a thing of the past. At the very least, sharing your main form of computing.
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It took me a shockingly long amount of time before I realized it was silly to have a username on my machines. I am the only person using this, why am I typing unnecessary cruft? Username switched to “a”, which ends up saving space in my home path and terminals.
It took me a shockingly long amount of time before I realized it was silly to have a username on my machines. I am the only person using this, why am I typing unnecessary cruft? Username switched to “root” on all my machines and I remove the username from PS1. /root is shorter than /home/a (:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those multiple users could be used to implement sandboxing. And of course if one has a family then one might want accounts for Mom, Dad, Alice and Bob.
Yea, I'd like to see a system where each application runs as its own user, especially third party applications not vetted by the OS vendor, the package manager and so on. Maybe this already exists--I think it would be a good step forward for security and privacy. You can no longer trust 3rd party applications to stay in their lanes. Running an application with full access to everything that I as a user have access to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those multiple users could be used to implement sandboxing. And of course if one has a family then one might want accounts for Mom, Dad, Alice and Bob.
Depressingly i think sharing computers at least in the western world has become a thing of the past. At the very least, sharing your main form of computing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I'd like to see a system where each application runs as its own user, especially third party applications not vetted by the OS vendor, the package manager and so on. Maybe this already exists--I think it would be a good step forward for security and privacy. You can no longer trust 3rd party applications to stay in their lanes. Running an application with full access to everything that I as a user have access to…
> Maybe this already exists That's how Android works.