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

[George Carless]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 04:22:34PM -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 15:46 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> > >>Re-flashing the BIOS is minor to rebuilding past work.
> > > 
> > How do you flash the bios to start with?  You must boot the machine, 
> > usually from a floppy.  Before you get there, the bios has to run.
> 
> You pull the chip out and put in a new one.  One hour tops if you
> _don't_ know what you are doing and have the new chip in hand.
> Seriously, you are trying to make this a bigger thing than it is.

But it's STILL an hour wasted, assuming you have the spare to hand.  And let's say that 
you also wind up with a mis-flashed DVD burner, etc.; it starts to add up.  Didn't need to 
be that way...

Now, if you were MERELY saying "I believe the trade-off between security and the 
general convenience of running root to be a reasonable one" then that would be one thing - 
irresponsible, perhaps, but still.  But this has been about whether it was in any way SAFE 
to run as root.  Of COURSE there are degrees of 'safeness', but running root all the time 
is about the least safe you can be on the machine, even with other safeguards in place.

--George