new thing to make people turn crazy

François Patte francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr
Tue Mar 17 20:08:51 UTC 2009


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Bonsoir,

I plugged an usb drive on my computer and, instead of being mounted as
usual, a popup window opened claiming that some application was trying
to mount a device and... I had to enter the root password!!!

What's this mess?

The story is not finished: I discovered a config tool for this in
System>Prefs>system>permission which run the polkit-gnome-authorization.

*As a simple user*, not root, I found a line:

"mount file systems from removable drive" for which the permission is
set, by default, to: "No" for everybody.

*as simple user* (again), I changed this permission to yes for everybody!!!!

I am wondering what is the meaning of this: either it is something that
everybody can do and no tool is needed, or it is important that only
root can modify some system wide config and, in that case this tool is a
nonsense.

Same thing as for the gnome keyring manager (see another post on this
list): I cannot disable it and everytime I want to ssh a remote host a
popup ask me for a password, I refuse to give a password (I was not
asked to define one) and I can ssh.... For what purpose are these stupid
tools?

I tried to yum remove these things but it is impossible: so many
packages depend on them: scim!!! evince!!! totem!, eog, f-spot....

In f11, shall we be forced to set a password to log-in, another to use
emacs, another to use TeX, another to see the result of what we have
typed with emacs/tex...

Is this security policy a heritage from Bush administration?

- --
François Patte
UFR de mathématiques et informatique
Université Paris Descartes
45, rue des Saints Pères
F-75270 Paris Cedex 06
Tél. +33 (0)1 4286 2413
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr/~patte
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