“It’s for security” is not a good reason to take away user choice. And yes, this is a massive problem in FOSS, too, see every distro with an installer that doesn’t let me set a one-character password

@aens wait why would you want to set a 1-character password? I presume for like a public machine that needs some kind of screen lock or something that's not that critical?

@freya Because not setting a password is often screwy

@aens hmm. why would you not want to set a password? I'm guessing, again, non-critical machines?

@aens “root password has to be different from user password”

@freya Disposable VM, disk encryption doing it for you, or in the case of my desktop, I just don’t want to deal with it

@aens yeah that'll do it. desktop though..... hmm. given who you're living with, that's a bit concewrning

@freya Ehh, I have privacy in my room at least. Plus my overall thoughts on security is I wish nothing would complain if I logged in as root

@aens @freya on my servers I just ssh in as the root user lol

it's behind an ssh key (with password login disabled) though, so I see it as fine

@freya Ideally it’d be easy to just have no password and autologin would just have a dropdown where you could pick between your user account and root during setup

@aens meanwhile the distro has sudo and adds you to wheel & sudo group so it doesn’t fucking matter anyway

@freya Honestly I should probably try that. Maybe I’m lucky and I don’t have anything that’s going to complain about being run as root

@aens that is cursed, kitten

@aens petting the silly kitty

@solonovamax @freya Yeah, my concern is that I think a lot of GUI apps complain if you give them root

@aens @solonovamax they do, because.................Waaaaaaaaaaayland! the most cursed choice in display servers!

@freya @solonovamax I genuinely think making new users do system admin with TUI and CLI apps they aren’t used to is going to break far more systems than running GUI apps with sudo ever did. Unfortunately, no one wants to bother to keep working on xorg, and my monitors have vastly different refresh rates

@aens @freya tbh for your desktop you really should run as a normal user and not as root

it prevents things like accidentally deleting files unless you intend to

@solonovamax @aens that's acceptable..... ish. I do that too, but that's only because my server runs absolutely everything in containers, so root to the host is kind of a weird interface anyway

@freya @aens I mean, I don't run things as root. that would be dumb.
any service I run gets its own user

@solonovamax @freya Honestly I probably will run things as root when I have my own server. Lets me get more convenient port numbers. But IDK

@aens @freya you can let it use the lower port numbers even when not running as root

@solonovamax @aens yeah I was gonna say, I know there's a freebsd way to do it but I don't know the Linux way

@solonovamax @freya No? I’ve been pretty much conditioned to respond to “permission denied” with “sudo !!”, and it’s not like I’ve ever accidentally deleted files

@aens @freya @solonovamax

I usually log in as my own user, partly because I wanna have a consistent username and home directory across all my devices, and partly because typing “sudo su” to become root when things get serious feels cool :D

@freya @solonovamax sudo is probably easier though

@jcm @aens @solonovamax pffff. sudo. babies. in the real world we use pfexec...

@freya @solonovamax Some complain even on x though

@aens @solonovamax huh, cursed. they're propbably using per-user whateverthefucks, portals or dbus whatevers or whatever bullshit linux is slopping all over itself in order to become "what if windows, but with zero code quality?"

@aens @solonovamax @freya PLEASE use CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE instead of running things as root, smh
(sorry for replying to an old post and being rude)

@h @aens @solonovamax or run things in a (zone|jail|container)

@h @solonovamax @freya Yeah, fair, but also sudo is fewer characters to type, and therefor better

@aens @solonovamax @freya No. Please no. (sorry for being rude)
if you’re running things as systemd services, it’s extremely convenient to just systemctl edit cat-over-tcp.service and add a AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE line, certainly easier than compromising your system’s security for stupid reasons and handling the problems that are caused by doing so
hides

@aens @solonovamax @h that is................... not how that works, dear. rm -rf is more characters to type than apt-get -yq upgrade, that doesn't make the former better / more useful

@freya @solonovamax @h True, but privilege escalation just isn’t really a concern with my threat model

@aens @solonovamax @freya even if you trust yourself, do you trust Shitty Low-Quality “selfhostable” Node.JS Application #538 to be secure and resistant to both remote and local attacks when running with no guardrails whatsoever against e.g. an attacker abusing a local file write vulnerability to write their own OS image to your disk + tell your server to reboot?

@h @solonovamax @freya Basically I just don’t see how that has me any more screwed than if it’s not running as root and all they get is everything in userspace, which is to say all my private info and my passwords and stuff like that

@aens @solonovamax @freya if it’s on a server as its own user, it wouldn’t have your passwords or anything, I’d think, meow?

@h @solonovamax @freya Oh, no, this is for my desktop. If it’s a game server, I’d want it running on there and not a home server anyway

@aens @solonovamax @freya even for a game server, you can and should have that running as a different OS user quite easily, and that eliminates many of the attacks that can be done against you in theory, meow

@aens @solonovamax @freya will point out that your beloved sudo can be used to both run things as root and run them as other unprivileged users :3

@h @solonovamax @freya Okay, yeah, still, seems like more setup work, but IDK

@aens @solonovamax @h it is more setup work, but it's worth it, love

@freya @solonovamax @h IDK, I just don’t really care about security that much

@aens @solonovamax @freya can this creature meow about how she does things on her desktop and servers perhaps? meow

@h @solonovamax @freya I don’t have a home server currently, and TBH when I do probably won’t have it accessible without a VPN, desktop is Debian where I’ve basically had to disable as many security features as I can find to get it convenient enough for me to actually use regularly

@aens @solonovamax @freya curious what security features would get in your way tbh

@h @solonovamax @freya Basically I don’t want to have to bother with entering a password, especially on boot, that’s kinda the main thing. Also I just don’t want mundane system administration to be slowed down by annoying security measures. Maybe one of these days I’ll set up a cronjob to set the executable bit for everything in my downloads folder every 10 seconds or something

@aens @solonovamax @freya

Maybe one of these days I’ll set up a cronjob to set the executable bit for everything in my downloads folder every 10 seconds or something
WHY WOULD YOU DO SUCH A THING
(sorry for being rude :c)
points out that fat32 doesn’t have a notion of an execute bit, at least iirc, and would probably let you have everything executable no matter what at the cost of having no data integrity

@h @solonovamax @freya Uh, because I don’t see why not and having to do it manually seems really annoying for no security benefit. (To be clear I’d probably filter to just .sh and .jar)

@aens @solonovamax @freya yk, you could do that without needing to have a cron job running every few seconds :3
inotifywait -rm --format '%f' ~/Downloads/|grep -vE '^$' may be useful

@h @solonovamax @freya Ooh, fancy, I’m not very good at bash, so I don’t understand that

@aens @solonovamax @freya basically, inotifywait lets you monitor accesses to files, and grep -vE '^$' is a low-quality way of discarding blank lines, meow

@h @aens @solonovamax @freya this only works if you use systemd. if you don’t, you can also use setcap to give the capability to the binary, or set the net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start sysctl to 0 in order to allow any user to bind to any port (if you do this you can then use eBPF to control which users are allowed to do this, but if you don’t care about security you probably wouldn’t bother with that)