Release status update (or, Hoary and you)

[Nick Loeve]

Martin Pitt wrote:

> 
> Not a text appropriate for the announcement, but a more in-depth
> explanation:
> 
> When we started with Ubuntu, a lot of daemons ran as "root" and a lot
> of programs were installed setuid root. This means that every security
> bug in these could potentially be exploited to compromise the system
> without any limit.
> 
> Since then I evaluated many of these root processes and minimized
> their privileges to the absolutely required one. As a result, many
> setuid root programs are now only setgid to a particular
> application-specific group, and many processes now run as a dedicated
> normal user (with some additional kernel capabilities in some cases).
> This confines the potential impact of vulnerabilities to the process
> itself, they cannot affect any other processes any more.
> 
> In short, this greatly helps to improve proactive security.
> 
> Already derooted apps:
> 
> klogd 
> syslogd 
> cupsd 
> hald 
> ntpd 
> procmail 
> smbmount/smbumount 
> jackd 
> login 
> gpg/gnupg 
> hpoj
> at
> 

Hi Martin, i added a bit to the release notes.

It is not as thorough as what you provided but check it out at 
http://people.ubuntu.com/~mako/docteam/release-notes/release-notes.html 
(under the Ubuntu for the Developer/Administrator section), and let me 
know if you want anything stressed in particular, or even if you want it 
totally redone :)

Cheers,
trickie (Nick Loeve)