make apt-get stop bothering me about signatures

Johnny Rosenberg gurus.knugum at gmail.com
Fri Sep 5 15:47:27 UTC 2008


2008/9/4 John Hubbard <ender8282 at yahoo.com>

> Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
> > Excuse me for asking a stupid question, but how can it be dangerous?
> > Will a knife come out of my screen and cut my throat off?
> > But seriously, what's the worst thing that could happen?
> > That everything is erased from my drives (I have a backup that on an
> > USB drive that is always turned off, except when I am running my
> > backup script)?
> > Or that someone can read my files (like I cared… that person doesn't
> > need much entertainment…)?
> > Or maybe that my computer could send viruses to WIndows machines
> > (again, like I cared…)?
> > Or someone would get information about my father and go killing him
> > (he died eight years ago anyway)?
> > What is the threat, really? I guess I really missed something. Would
> > be interesting to know what.
> If you use Thunderbird I can grab the contents of ~/.thunderbird. From
> there I can not only see your email but I can probably also view your
> passwords.

I don't, I use Opera and Swiftweasel, but I guess that doesn't matter much.
So yes, there's one point (except that I think that none of my passwords are
any important).


> If you do any Internet banking or internet shopping I can see
> who you use. I could then steal your money.

Then you can login to my back accound and move my money around. If you want
to move them to another person's account you will need to input a code (8
digits I think) into a device that I got sent to me from the bank, then it
will reply with 9 digits (or was it 8 or 10?), which I am supposed to enter
to a field in the banks site. Well, if you have my password you are a step
closer to my money, but I think the remaining steps are quite a bit harder
to pass. But again, I understand your point, it's very unnecessary to give
away bank passwords, of course, even if they are encrypted.


> Maybe I am just malicious
> and have no better use than to send fraudulent emails under your name.

If you do that to people I know, that would probably be a problem for me,
but then you need to know who I know. That's maybe not so hard to do, just
look for the Opera contact list (I am not sure, but I think it's a binary
file, maybe not that hard to crack, though). If I didn't have it, you would
need to go through GMail. If that's hard to do or not, I don't know. Is it?

>
> But regardless of if I try to do anything malicious to you it would be
> nice if you didn't let your computer become a part of a botnet. Far less
> likely since you aren't running Windows but why not be safe.

Well, I am not a gangster, so of course, if I know a way to improve safety,
I would do it, at least if it is easy.
However, I still that "extremely dangerous" (found in first reply to this
thread) is an exaggeration (not sure about the spelling) as long as it won't
kill or hurt me or others badly. But okay, economical catastrophy might hurt
too… but I still think that if you want money, you would look for someone
who has a lot of it, wouldn't you? On the other hand, a few euros from many
people is a lot of money too…
Well, OK, OK, OK, you guys are right and I was wrong (even though I didn't
say much…)
J.R.
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