Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Signed Packages, Sans Root Privileges

eqisow writes "The new default policy for Fedora 12 allows local, unprivileged users to install signed packages without root access. This change apparently went mostly unnoticed until after the Fedora 12 GA release, at which point it sparked a mailing list thread that is, as of this writing, over 100 posts long."

Comments

Re:What a mess...

[sakdoctor]

I calculated the total cost of ownership of continuing to not use RH, and found it was too low,
so we stuck with windows.

Re:You laugh, but....

[hairyfeet]

As much as I enjoy Windows, especially Win7 because it is actually quite nice and makes a great Media Center, The reason that will never happen to Linux is because there is one thing Windows has that Linux don't, and I doubt ever will- The Velma problem- Which I named after a user that sat there with me telling her 'don't DO that!" and turned off her AV and opened a password protected .zip, which of course pwned her PC. Why? Because it was supposed to be a screensaver. I have another customer whom you could send Lesbian_steal_your_pc.exe and he would run it, because it had the word lesbian in it.

Linux is actually lucky that it is a PITA, with bleeding edge packages and CLI and "update foo borked my sound" because it means you really need a brain to run it. Things like the "fun" of getting firmware for your wireless and getting WPA to work, trawling forums to find out which printer will work, having to tweak conf files to get your sound working, all of this keeps the "Velma" users at bay.

So all you Linux users pray to the beard of RMS that there is NEVER a "year of the Linux desktop" because a week later there will be the "year of the Linux malware" because for Linux to hit mainstream it'll mean you'll have to take the Velmas. And trust me, after a couple of weeks of dealing with malware from hell because Velma and her friends will happily run as root, hand out their password, and generally do stupid shit, well then you too can have your face look like this, which is pretty much a permanent look on us Windows repair guys.

Re:This makes sense

[TheRaven64]

You are wrong. The reason that GNU su does not restrict root logins to members of the wheel group is that RMS didn't want a 'cabal' of admins to be able to control the system at the users' expense. BSD su only works if you are a member of the wheel group (you can do this on Linux now via PAM, but you couldn't for a long time). With the console marked as insecure and root SSH logins disabled (both default on most BSD systems), knowing the root password gains you nothing. You need both the root password and the password (or SSH key) of a member of the admin team to be able to log in as root. From the GNU su info page (written by RMS):

Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The “wheel group” feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

This is why I wouldn't want a GNU system to be Internet facing.