Martin Gregorie
>On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 20:06:01 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>
>Doing more than you absolutely have to as root
>leaves the machine open to bigger and better attacks for no good reason.
>
>Routinely running Windows boxes as SystemAdmin or, worse, assigning that
>privilege to their usual login is what gets so many home systems infected
>by malware because it too gets access to everything.
>
>Similarly, reading mail or running a web browser while logged in as root
>gives any malware in mail or on infected websites unlimited access to
>your system by letting it also run as root, but those are only the most
>obvious dangers.
>
>That is why sensible people never run as root for any longer than
>absolutely necessary, don't configure servers to run as root and don't
>recommend running as root to newbies.

1) I do not run Windows.
2) I need to be in control of my 'puter all the time, in a flash.

Apart from the steering your car from the passenger seat, which is extremely
dangerous,
to protect your property you can do 2 things basically:
1) you can put locks on every door, passwords, cipher locks, steel sheets over
the windows,
a combination lock on the cookies jar, etc etc
and that would make life very difficult if you actually had to live there.
Or you could put a good fence with one lock around it, have some crockegators
..
OK, hope you get the idea of a *firewall* for outside 'events'.
Now you can get to the cookies and eat all of it without having to fiddle with
keys and passwords.

On This World
 recently a Boeing went down.
The complete idiot who programmed it to put the nose down if some sensor did
see some low speed indicating stall
was no pilot and did not seem to know that putting the nose down at very low
altitude is basically crashing.

Many (160 people IIRC) were killed when the airspeed sensor failed an indicated
a too low airspeed.
The poor pilots did not know how to stop that computer.. had no root access.

We are moving towards a situation where artificial neural nets are going to run
everything,
in the medical world those already make diagnoses, in traffic those steer cars,
in the military those are in autonomous weapons.
Nobody can pull the plug so to speak [1].

Much scifi has been written about that, but the real situation is much worse
already.

Computers and things run by those, are to serve us humans, and we need full
control always.

It is a myth that your browser will get infected and taken over by some malware
if you run the right software and know what you are doing that will never
happen.

We live in a world where we now need a quadcore 2 GHz to send a simple email
containing a few lines of ASCII text
resulting in 10 MB junk being transmitted over the internet with likely many
dangerous untested leaky
infiltrated by Big Brother, advertising, tracing from google, what not.
You have already been hacked.
You read about hospitals being hacked, or big companies that are brought to a
standstill and asked for money...
The whole IT is run for a large part by people who 'sudo' all the time and
still have no clue.

THAT is dangerous.
Just in an other group we were discussing somebody who had all his company
files controlled by what's it? 'dropbox'.

So, understand your 'puter, be root, or else play with something else.

It is all really simple, I come from an electronics background, in those days
there were no computers available for
the masses, processor for designs, we did everything with logic, analog, from
the ground up to later microprocessors
code, binary, asm. C, on most 'puters I run my own software, post this with the
newsreader I wrote
video processing and much is on my website.
Screaming root is dangerous is a sign of total cluelessness, those people are
dangerous themselves, sing that idiot song,

Basically you are wasting the time of everybody.
I will leave it at that.

[1] those will outsmart many of you :-)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05