Scott Long (scott@swiftview.com) wrote:
: -- I am, at least, a programmer and understand your discussion). If they
: believe their OS could damage their disks, then they will switch to a
: different OS REGARDLESS of stupid technical issues and technical points
The OS - as in "normal usage could damage the disk" or as in "allows a
hacker to damage the disk". The first isn't the case here, the second
is what (it appears) Andre is trying to make harder.
Any OS with the concept of "root" type privs is vulnerable. I'll just
write the smasher code to your boot sector so next time you reboot the
disk automatically kills itself *BEFORE* the OS has loaded. Harder,
sure, but not impossible. Now it's your BIOS that's letting you do this :-)
You'd better move to a different hardware platform totally!
To be honest, I would almost go with the "Andre, please wait until 2.5"
except that I can foresee that 2.4 will be mainstream for 2 years, which
means a known "yuck, I hate this" piece of code is going to be running for
2 years unless Andre's patch is in place.
OTOH, 2.2.x hasn't been as "frozen" as it should have been, so maybe
2.4.2 will find itself with this code anyway!
--
Stephen Harris
sweh@spuddy.mew.co.uk http://www.spuddy.org/
The truth is the truth, and opinion just opinion. But what is what?
My employer pays to ignore my opinions; you get to do it for free.
* Meeeeow ! Call Spud the Cat on > 01708 442043 < for free Usenet access *
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:18 EST