sudo without password

[Florian Diesch]

Alan McKinnon <alan at linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:

> On Sunday 11 June 2006 03:52, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> On Saturday 10 June 2006 21:47, ubuntu at rio.vg wrote:
>
>> > This would be the ZoneAlarm style, which Linux really lacks,
>> > unfortunately.
>>
>> My experience with this has been that there are basically two
>> choices:
>>
>> 1.  Lock things down.  The user gets frustrated and uninstalls or
>> turns off the firewall.
>>
>> 2.  Ask if something needs a port opened up going out.  User
>> virtually always says yes.
>>
>> Either way, unless there is a lot of user training and
>> understanding, I don't think these GUI firewalls do much good for
>> the masses.
>
> By gut feel, I'm inclined to agree with Scott. This is what large 
> numbers of Windows users tend to do, so I can't see future Ubuntu 
> users being any different.
>
> Which raises the question: what _will_ work? I believe this question 
> needs some attention and a solution now, before the malware problem 
> hits Linux in a big way (which it surely will).

As long as windows is such an easy target I don't think this will
happen.  

And malware needs critical bugs that aren't fixed for some time or a bad
user interface design that makes it easy to fool the user about what's
happening or make him ignore warnings. In both cases Ubuntu is much
better than windows


> We know that popup dialogs ala ZoneAlarm are better than nothing, but 

IMHO they are much worse than nothing as they interupt people's work and
teach them to click on everything that's not fast enought to go away.

Most normal users just don't have the knowledge to decide whether a
program should be allowed to open a network connection or listen to
incoming connections so they just say "Yes".

If your system is infected by malware it's to late. The way to go is to
prevent the infection.


> are easy to ignore. We know that Ubuntu can easily install a 
> well-configured system suitable for a desktop, but the Achilles heel 
> is stuff installed afterwards.

People should know that it may be dangerous to install stuff from
obscure sources. They should know that most of the software they want
is available from their distribution.




   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>