Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

qwms-avib AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:
> 
> Day Brown wrote:
> >
> > the sabotage software will never think to look for
> > your dos drive, whose boot could be off a FD with the
> > write tab shut.  Let them try to figure out how to write
> > to a locked floppy.
> 
> It's even simpler than that.  Delete /dev/hda1 from Linux
> and it won't be able to mount your C: drive.  So you can
> boot Linux from C: without exposing it.  If you also delete
> fdisk (and similiar) from Linux, then your C: drive is pretty
> safe from anything Linux could do.
Well that's pretty kewl. 
But with root, most distros tell you not to run it. Slackware 7 pops up
this huge warning across the screen. Mandrake sets the background to
bright red. To newbies, this is intimidating, as perhaps it should be.
Surfing as root is reportedly dangerous.

But with BL, and techniques like you cite above, which consider using
another os to store your personal data, the risk of surfing as root seem
trivial.

Given all the Linux postings about 'permissions', 'chown', shutdown...
all from single user desktops, you'd think the other distro programmers
wouldda picked up on what pisses people off by now.