Hello World
Steve Hayes
hayesstw at telkomsa.net
Mon Dec 22 02:46:42 EST 2014
On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:33:10 +1100, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Steve Hayes <hayesstw at telkomsa.net> wrote:
>> Yes, my initial reaction was "that's awesome".
>>
>> And my second thought was that it was scary.
>>
>> I ran it. It worked, and printed "Hello world". I was awed.
>>
>> But what if I had run it and it reformatted my hard disk?
>>
>> How would I have known that it would or wouldn't do that?
>
>You trust that (a) Steven D'Aprano isn't going to give you outright
>malicious code (or that he trusts that the original author won't), and
>that (b) your hard disk cannot be reformatted by a non-root user.
>Every major platform has this kind of privilege separation (Windows
>doesn't call it "root" but "Administrator", but the effect is, AIUI,
>equivalent), so unless you're running random scripts from the internet
>with maximum privileges, you should be safe.
Well yes, (a) is what I did and why I ran it.
But a hacker who can write that kind of stuff can probably bypass any
safeguards built into the OS.
As others have pointed out, it's not so much coding as black magic!
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
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