Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 5 Posts
  • 238 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That reminds me…

    In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

    Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

    Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.












  • KDE had a policy editor back in v2.0… honesty I never really followed whether those features stuck around. But the simple version is to lock down write access to folders in $HOME, such as .config or similar. Linux already prevents most users from installing programs over the system directories without root, but I’m not sure if you can restrict new programs with +x in $HOME unless you write-lock the whole folder… Someone with more network admin experience probably knows this :)


  • Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.

    I’m actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.