[CoLoCo] UBUNTU SURVIVAL : SAVE THY SELF

[Neal McBurnett]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 08:31:07PM -0700, Brett Trigg wrote:
> What about some sort of "sudo tutorial" built into Ubuntu?
> Maybe something along the lines of when a user first tries to sudo, it gives
> them a warning that they have to read (indicated by entering their password at
> the end or something) that gives them a brief rundown of stuff like this.
> Maybe something like that, along with the regex script TJ is putting together,
> would provide enough education.
> Which, I think, is the primary problem regardless of OS.  Lack of education
> causes problems.

I think a sudo tutorial is a very interesting idea.  Don't know how
hard it would be to do it right since there is ongoing frustration
with the lack of "root" in some quarters, there are language barriers,
and it would in some sense break most of the help pages out there.

I think that it would be very difficult in practice and impossible in
theory to do a regex script that did more help than harm.  As many
threads have discussed, planting trojans is a very sophisticated art
form these days.  If there was a cool-looking script to check for
trojans that people recommended and knew about, it would provide only
a false sense of security, because it would be know by many attackers
and could be trivially bypassed.  The virus/anti-virus wars prove this
all the time, and software seems to constantly need to tell people
"turn off your anti-virus software before installing this" which
must just make people's heads spin....

Another approach is to help people understand what sorts of things
they can trust and what they can't trust.  Trust software from
official repositories and official documentation.  Be cautious about
wiki pages and forum posts, especially if they are very recent.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/

>         phillip tribble wrote:
>         > "I'd like to take a moment of your time to discuss a recent
>         disturbing
>         > trend the staff has been noticing on the forums, and also take this
>         as
>         > an opportunity to raise awareness of this situation through
>         > education." - tfa
>         >
>         > http://ubuntuforums.org/announcement.php?a=54