That site is terrible without ads blocked… it’s like a local newspaper site, you had to try and read the content in small snippets wedged between ads!
Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
71–80 of 421 posts
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purpose: > That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character
It's surprising to see an OS, dominant as a sever platform, now optimizing catering to people who are unsure whether they've pressed a button on their keyboard. What's next, replacing asterisks with a progress bar?
Password recovery where you enter your mothers maiden name and favourite food.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#73For more than four decades, typing a password after a sudo prompt in a Linux terminal
What?!
2026 minus 46 is 1980. There was no Linux, at all, in 1980.
Someone is quite confused.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#74This is such a good decision. It's one of those things that's incredibly confusing initially, but you get so used to it over the years, I even forgot it was a quirk. In the modern world there is no plausible scenario where this would compromise a password that wouldn't otherwise also be compromised with equivalent effort.
I also think it is a good decision. Nevertheless it breaks the workflow of at least one person. My father's Linux password is one character. I didn't knew this when I supported him over screen sharing methods, because I couldn't see it. He told me, so now I know. But the silent prompt protected that fact. It is still a good decision, an one character password is useless from a security standpoint.
I may or may not use a single char password on a certain machine. This char may or may not be a single space. It may or may not be used in FDE. It's surprising what (OS installers) this breaks.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#75Could we not have used braille patterns? Start on a random one and you can just replace the character with the next one so it is possible for the user to see something was entered, but password length isn't given to someone looking over the user's shoulder? ⣾, ⣽, ⣻, ⢿, ⡿, ⣟, ⣯, ⣷
why can't they just look at the keyboard...
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#76Why not just display a single character out of a changing set of characters such as / - \ | (starting with a random one from the set) after every character entered? That way you can be certain whether or not you entered a character but and observer can‘t tell how many characters your password has.
There was a software package a couple decades ago, I want to say it was Lotus Notes but I'm pretty sure it wasn't actually Lotus Notes but something of that ilk, that would show a small, random number of asterisks corresponding to each character entered. So you'd hit one key and maybe two asterisks would show up on screen. And kept track of them so if you deleted a character, it'd remove two. I thought that was kinda…
Back around 1996, Notes would show hieroglyphics that changed with each new password character.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#77> sudo password is the same as their login password — one that already appears as visible placeholder dots on the graphical login screen. Hiding asterisks in the terminal while showing them at login is, in the developers’ estimation, security theatre. So hide the first one as well? But also, that's not true, not all terminal passwords are for local machine > Confusing — appears frozen So make it appear flashing? Stil…
This is literally never identified as an issue in any other system processing passwords. This feels like a debate by someone who once thought they had a clever idea and can’t let go despite everyone telling them it’s awful.
Feels like you're talking to your own strawman re. whether hiding password length makes sense, which I specifically didn't address, only pointed out that the arguments I've quoted do not support the change.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#78The title kind of implies that silent sudo passwords have been a part of Ubuntu for the last 46 years.
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#79I did this! I didn't actually know that Mint had enabled this by default. That would have been a useful counterpoint to the naysayers. If you want the original behaviour you don't actually need to change the configuration - they added a patch afterwards so you can press tab and it will hide the password just for that time. > The catalyst for Ubuntu’s change is sudo-rs Actually it was me getting sufficiently pissed of…
> If anyone wants to rewrite PAM in Rust... :-D If you do, offer support for writing modules in a scripting language like Lua or Python. PAM could make it a lot easier to just add OAuth with your company IdP, for example…
Ah, but then you choose the wrong language or language runtime and distros ship old versions for 10+ years :)
(compare: polkit. Both sides have their point, but I've been annoyed by this standoff a few times).
Re: Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
#80For more than four decades, typing a password after a sudo prompt in a Linux terminal What?! 2026 minus 46 is 1980. There was no Linux, at all, in 1980. Someone is quite confused.
sudo is from 1980, that's probably what they meant