security issues

[Michael V. De Palatis]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 06:04:20PM -0600, Lamp wrote:
> Why on God's green earth was the password ever written to a file in
> the first place?!?!??  I use ubuntu because it's "easy," not expecting
> it to be ultra secure, but this is ridiculous.  To compound the
> problem the explanation given is awful... "since these files were
> world-readable" should have been, "some dumbass wrote code that wrote
> clear text passwords to disk"--the readability of the files is
> irrelevant.    I'm switching distros ASAP, there's no way I can trust
> ubuntu after this.

I think that this is a bit of an overreaction. Every distribution
has their own "oops" security issues. Human error is unavoidable.
Provided I understand the issue correctly, the only way that this
could affect you is if you are running a system with multiple users,
and they happen to log in and look at the file. Since Ubuntu is
geared more towards personal desktop use, the scope of this is
really not that huge.

So, if you want to switch distros, go for it. But I seriously doubt
that that will prevent you from ever having these types of security
issues in the future.

Mike