It's not blamed on MS and in fact, I haven't seen the name of the company quoted in comments before yours. This is not so frequent... This time, we have real reasons to believe that this package has been created by Windows users. Just take a look to the installation page on their website: the Winzip icon in front of the.tar.gz link, the section name within square brackets, the./autorun program that should be run by the user, and so on...
2. When the Administrator Login window appears, type in root in the Login field
and enter the system password.
3. Download and extract the driver
[root@localhost root]#tar xzf [Downloaded File Name(XXXX.tar.gz)]
The "Administrator Login" window. Fun. They also want to open a graphical root session, then download the file from here. However, the user still have to understand by himself that he has to open a console, go into the right directory and type the command written after the #.
Even on this way, I still don't understand why a program that exploits something that is plugged on USB or the parallel port should have to run as root. On my system, cupsd runs as "cupsys".
In which case probably some under-paid and under-skilled monkey got the honour of figuring out how to install that stuff in Linux. These aren't typically the kind of guys you'd ask to do a security analysis and design, and they're not given ample times and funds for research either.
That's what I tended to think as well, but we have to remember that this guy is working with people that wrote a kernel module and a function library (which is freaky, considering that we couldn't explore these binaries yet). My guess is that the guilty developer is either a trainee, or more likely a Windows developer that was pissed off being asked to write a Linux installer.
Unfortunately, more and more users seem to adopt the same schema : "how can I easily get root so I can work in peace". I've been asked once to tell how one can remove the root password on his machine. The guy knew that it was silly but we figured out that he actually was running gproftpd frequently, and was bored having to enter his password each time ! So he was about to run a FTP server on a machine with no password to the root account. Well...
We had to explain that gproftpd doesn't forcibly need to be run as root, he doesn't forcibly need gproftpd to edit the proftpd config file, and that in fact, even the FTP daemon doesn't require to be run as root neither. The port 21 could eventually be claimed by xinetd.
Sadly, as a user reaches the limits of his own default environment, he usually assumes that the only way to circumvent the problem is to ascend to a user with an other level of power.
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It's not actually a script but a binary executable. Still it's not meant to be anything else than a wrapper ...
Still have to make it run first
Which also means that you will have to uninstall the driver first if you plan to remove OpenOffice or something.
It's not blamed on MS and in fact, I haven't seen the name of the company quoted in comments before yours. This is not so frequent ... This time, we have real reasons to believe that this package has been created by Windows users. Just take a look to the installation page on their website: the Winzip icon in front of the .tar.gz link, the section name within square brackets, the ./autorun program that should be run by the user, and so on ...
http://www.samsung.com/uk/support/productsupport/d ownload/FileView.aspx?cttfileid=828690&type=Print+ Solutions&typecode=&subtype=Multi+Function+Product s&subtypecode=&cmssubtypecode=&model=SCX-4200&file type=DR&language=&LSSI=/uk/module/ssi/left/lmenu_p rintsolutions_multifunctionproducts.sec&RSSI=/uk/m odule/ssi/right/rmenu_printsolutions.sec
Some passages are delicious:
The "Administrator Login" window. Fun. They also want to open a graphical root session, then download the file from here. However, the user still have to understand by himself that he has to open a console, go into the right directory and type the command written after the # .
Rookies.
Even on this way, I still don't understand why a program that exploits something that is plugged on USB or the parallel port should have to run as root. On my system, cupsd runs as "cupsys".
That's what I tended to think as well, but we have to remember that this guy is working with people that wrote a kernel module and a function library (which is freaky, considering that we couldn't explore these binaries yet). My guess is that the guilty developer is either a trainee, or more likely a Windows developer that was pissed off being asked to write a Linux installer.
Unfortunately, more and more users seem to adopt the same schema : "how can I easily get root so I can work in peace". I've been asked once to tell how one can remove the root password on his machine. The guy knew that it was silly but we figured out that he actually was running gproftpd frequently, and was bored having to enter his password each time ! So he was about to run a FTP server on a machine with no password to the root account. Well ...
We had to explain that gproftpd doesn't forcibly need to be run as root, he doesn't forcibly need gproftpd to edit the proftpd config file, and that in fact, even the FTP daemon doesn't require to be run as root neither. The port 21 could eventually be claimed by xinetd.
Sadly, as a user reaches the limits of his own default environment, he usually assumes that the only way to circumvent the problem is to ascend to a user with an other level of power.