[URGENT] How Do I Fix Thunderbird Email Client User Profile Corruption?

[Ernest Doub]

Not a direct response but an observation:
Having observed the posts from Teo En Ming over a period of time there is a
consistent background theme to all of the questions and issues brought to
this forum.
No insult or slight is intended but I have observed what I can only
characterize as a certain hyper-sensitivity and proclivity to the
likelihood  that some sort of "government tampering" through the agency of
"government hackers" are responsible for the current [whatever the problem
is] difficulty instead of going directly to the possibilities of human
error through either a data entry error [miskeyed] or trying to get
incompatible packages to "play nice", both of which are more likely to
happen in the digital world that I personally inhabit. Investigating those
possibilities and seeing if that investigation turns up any evidence of an
outside agency being involved seems to me to be a more efficient use of the
forums time than jumping to conclusions that inevitably bog down the
troubleshooting process.
I am in awe of the breadth and depth of the knowledge freely given on this
forum and as someone who considers himself a "noob" [even though I have
been using Ubuntu since release 8.10] I am humbly grateful for whatever aid
and assistance is offered.

- - - - -

-"God is not fooled." - Eric Metaxa

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable." John F. Kennedy

- "Authority that can not be questioned is tyranny" - Sir Terry Pratchett

-  *Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity.*   Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

“The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted” (Psalm
12:8)“  - - - - -

GNU Terry Pratchett

Monster =  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXP4tRUuqUY





On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 11:56 AM, <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Oct 2015 01:43:36 +0800, Teo En Ming wrote:
> >Maybe Singapore Government hackers hacked into my Lubuntu 15.10 Linux
> >virtual machine
>
> Perhaps, but why should they hack this file? This makes no sense.
>
> >How can I prevent the corruption of the file prefs.js in future?
>
> One layer of protection could be to make the file write protect and
> assumed Thunderbird won't work, if the file is write protected, then
> write a wrapper that will restore the file from a write protected
> backup. The .desktop file could launch the thunderbird wrapper instead
> of thunderbird. It's not really secure against violation, it just
> wouldn't allow to directly write to the file, even not with root
> privileges.
> I won't write a wrapper for you today, but here's an example how to
> write protect and how to restore from a write protected backup, assumed
> the original file is corrupted.
>
> Generating a file as an example
> $ echo "test" > test-file.txt
>
> Making a backup
> $ cp test-file.txt test-file.txt.secure
>
> Write protect the backup
> $ sudo chattr +i test-file.txt.secure
>
> Showing the files contents
> $ cat test-file.txt
> test
> $ cat test-file.txt.secure
> test
>
> Trying to corrupt the files
> $ echo "corrupted" >> test-file.txt
> $ echo "corrupted" >> test-file.txt.secure
> bash: test-file.txt.secure: Permission denied
>
> As you can see, the backup is protected
>
> $ diff test-file.txt test-file.txt.secure
> 2d1
> < corrupted
> $ cat test-file.txt
> test
> corrupted
> $ cat test-file.txt.secure
> test
>
> Now restore the file assumed it's different to the backup
> $ diff test-file.txt test-file.txt.secure || cp -pf test-file.txt.secure
> test-file.txt
> 2d1
> < corrupted
>
> No difference anymore, the file is restored
> $ diff test-file.txt test-file.txt.secure
> $ cat test-file.txt
> test
> $ cat test-file.txt.secure
> test
>
> I suspect you made a mistake and it isn't worth the hassle to write a
> wrapper. As already pointed out, even a write protection isn't secure
> against violation by a hacker.
>
> FWIW even root privileges don't allow to write to the file or delete the
> file
> $ rm test-file.txt*
> rm: remove write-protected regular file ‘test-file.txt.secure’? y
> rm: cannot remove ‘test-file.txt.secure’: Operation not permitted
> $ sudo rm test-file.txt*
> rm: cannot remove ‘test-file.txt.secure’: Operation not permitted
>
> After removing the immutable attribute writing and removing works
> $ sudo chattr -i test-file.txt.secure
> $ rm test-file.txt*
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>
>
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