Problems of a desktop Linux distribution GUI sudo

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 06:16:11PM +0300, Elazar Leibovich wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il>wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 05:47:36PM +0300, Elazar Leibovich wrote:
> >
> > > Again, sudo is super.
> >
> > Surely it's not. Super is a sudo replacement.
> > http://packages.debian.org/super
> 
> 
> It is hard to find an adjective which is not a debian package yet ;-)
> 
> 
> >
> >
> > > I even considered a using it on some windows machine
> > > which unfortunately lack this feature. It's the Ubuntu GUI for leveraging
> > > permisions which bothers me.
> > > I took a quick look of the *Kit stuff. I don't see immediately what
> > > ConsoleKit is doing, but indeed disabling any possibility to sudo through
> > > the GUI, and only running a package daemon is a nice step towards a
> > better
> > > authentication scheme.
> > > However I don't see how is it a solution for the general problem of
> > > executing untrusted binaries in Desktop environment.
> >
> > It's not. Nither is sudo. It's intended to help you solve the problem of
> > a giving a semi-trusted user partial sysadmin permissions. Different
> > problem.
> >
> 
> sudo doesn't solve the problem, however it might help with solving it. For
> instance Ubuntu uses GUI wrapper for sudo in order to try and solve the
> problem.
> And indeed we're talking about different problems.
> Usually for the personal computer the user is totally trusted, but the
> software he's installing is not always trusted. We wish to make sure that
> administrative actions are initiated by the user, and not by a software he's
> running. I've yet to hear a different solution than the Vista one.

I really fail to understand you. Could you please state the exact
problem you believe needs solving and how it is solved?

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