[H-GEN] Supporting Mozilla

Trent WADDINGTON s337240 at student.uq.edu.au
Sat Oct 18 03:21:55 EDT 2003


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On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, Robert Brockway wrote:

> I've heard that everything runs as root under Lindows.  If this is true,
> encourage the use of another user-friendly distro (imho).

I _really_ don't understand that attitude.  If your machine is being used
as a single user machine then what is the point of having a seperate
account for that single user?  Sure, the user can delete things that would
be bad for them to do so, but that's always been the case with Windows and
no-one seems to have a problem with that.

Is it because we fear what viruses or worms can do to the kernel or the
standard linux base?  Just about any application that a user downloads and
installs will have to be done as root anyways...

Ultimately, what we need for single user operating systems is to protect
the user from untrusted applications.. that's a very hard thing to do and
a completely different kettle of fish to protecting multiple users on the
same machine from each other (which is what unix security is all about).

Trent



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