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Missing the bright side of all this...
Authored by: MattHaffner on May 13, '04 11:25:22AM
Someone on /. got to this before I did, but it bears repeating here.

Losing your home directory to some random act of bad karma/decision-making is a huge setback. It is a real loss, of course, if you don't do regular backups. As many, many have pointed out here, there is very little you can do about this 'weakness' without crippling the user's access to their file space or the system's flexibility.

But keep the big picture in mind here. This particular, easily written, easily understood 'trojan' (which is a stretch) only affects a home directory. There may not be a lot of distinction for the average home user (especially those of us that migrated from OS 9) since we keep most of our 'data' there anyway, but in a corporate setting (and even in a multi-user home setting), this is a tremendous benefit. Windows (even XP I believe), OS 9, and tons of OS's before them that have less respect for user-space privileges would have rendered the computer completely useless with such a simple script.

Now, there's nothing to say that a more complicated attempt wouldn't be able to leverage the Installer or something similar to ask you to grant itself amin privileges, but we haven't seen that yet. But there's nothing on any other OS that couldn't do the same. Scripts run regularly on many *nix systems as a part of installations (Rethat RPM's, Debian packages, etc.) and a single malicious line of code in such a thing can wipe your whole installation when you are installing system-wide software.

I completely agree with the parent post in the assertion that the press release written by said company was absolute hyperbole and written (deliberately) completely out of context of the whole OS picture. I personally wouldn't have minded a very strong statement from Apple rejecting such claims, but then again, maybe it's not worth drawing attention to such idiotic statements.



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