[ale] Sunday 05-22-05 6PM RUN-AS-ROOT CHALLENGE

[Jim Popovitch]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 18:18 -0400, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
>
> The simple fact is this:  If you are so smart as to have devised a way
> to run as root while invalidating every single point posted to this
> list, you're a bloody genius and ought to fix your own problems.  That's
> the simple fact.

At the risk of sounding redundant... the only two suggested problems
that have been posted seem to only have to deal with "rm -rf /" and
fsck.  Both are dangerous things, but minor compared to what the
non-root user can do to data in their own directory.  From an
administrator of other peoples systems "rm -rf /" can be a headache, for
an administrator of their own system "rm -rf /home/user" is a bigger
headache.  The prior requires root to do, and yes if the system in use
is not administered by the user then the user needs a user account.  The
later can be accomplished by a user so non-root is just as bad as root.
Remember, we are talking about someone's desktop/laptop here, not some
shared shell server running at sf.net.

-Jim P.