> "A month of sundays ago Andre Hedrick wrote:"
> > The method to kill linux is out, the patch to stop it is gone.
>
> I'm just slow. Only root can do this trick?
>From what Andre has said, it appears there is an IOCTL which allows
things like playing with the drive firmware as root should you wish
to.
Just like playing with nvrams, flash, etc, this is dangerous. But we
give people with root access _many_ ways to kill their hardware, and
even if they don't have the access directly it can always be inserted
by a module. Hard drives used to be able to be destroyed by just doing
the right seeks...
CIH virus reaked havoc on DOS/Windows because it was undetected, destroyed
the motherboard and required no special privilege to run.
Compare to what can be gathered from Andre's posts;
* requires root access (more than is needed on Windows)
* only works on IDE (less common in servers and permanently connected
machines - and less common than chipsets - motherboards, video cards,
etc - with rewriteable flash in modern systems)
* destroys only the controller board (less important than the data to
many - although as root you could destroy the much more valuable data
quite easily)
It sounds to me Andre wants to remove a feature for fear of it being used
for bad purposes (destroying hardware).
Protecting access to only permit root or root with given capabilities would
be the Linux model. Removing a feature out of fear of misuse is just
wrong - even if nobody yet has found a use for that feature.
Flame away...
David.
-- ---------------------------------------------- David Luyer Senior Network Engineer Pacific Internet (Aust) Pty Ltd Phone: +61 3 9674 7525 Fax: +61 3 9699 8693 Mobile: +61 4 1064 2258, +61 4 1114 2258 http://www.pacific.net.au NASDAQ: PCNTF << fast 'n easy >> ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:16 EST