standards? was: [POSSIBLE GRAVE SECURITY HOLD]
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Thomas Quinot wrote:
> Le 2000-02-02, Michael Stone écrivait :
>
> > By "unitiated" I mean "not schooled in debian's private method". I don't
> > recall that the mbr program is used universally by linux distributions,
>
> Exactly. I can even say that I had never heard of any MBR in use
> on PCs that would take care of booting a floppy drive. This is
> simply not the way things are done in the PC universe, except
> in Debian. Such fundamental deviation from industry's common
> practice MUST be documented, if not deprecated in favor of
> compliance to accepted standards.
Even if such "accepted standards" are broken? This argument means that
Linux needs a kernel patch to cause random oopses. We'll have to add GPF
capability to all of our apps as well...
I really don't care one iota what the default is. I might possibly need to
the ability to boot from a floppy on a system that I've hosed and almost
definitely won't be going though the security stuff well enough to keep
someone with unsupervised physical access to my box from doing things I
won't like.
In any case, the lemming argumentation is not a valid defense. Point out
an RFC or a recognized, documented, committeeized standard and you have a
point, but "everybody else does it" doesn't make it a standard.
ciao,
der.hans
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