why do I bang my head against this wall?

… because it fees so good when I stop. Or so goes the old joke. A long while ago, I mentioned we have a customer who self-inflicts pain by spending too much time using root for day to day work. We advise against this. No good can possibly come of this, only bad. Like the last time when a key-logger grabbed the root password as some windows user was typing it in.

I have tried to convince them that this is a problem. Their problems with their machines started when they began the regular practice of logging in as root. Their compromise happened when they began logging in as root. Now they have other issues, which I can easily trace to them logging in as root. It is sad. Running as administrative user is a singularly bad idea. Yeah, you do it by default in windows world (at least until recently), and if you don’t lots of things break (because they haven’t spent the time/effort to make it easy to run as non-root … as well as some … er … fundamental issues in the OS and security design of it). This reminds me of another joke: Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this (moves arm up) Doctor: So stop doing it.