On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Richard Stallman wrote: > > It appears that, rather than the operating system itself being at > fault, > > a number of Windows applications take over a sector in the boot track > > and store bits and pieces of data there. > > I am surprised applications can do that. Isn't that a security hole > in Windows? >
Is it a security hole if the linux superuser can write to /dev/sda ? If you block this level of access, how's fdisk (or any number of other partition managers) supposed to do its job? How's one supposed to install grub in the first place, if access to those blocks is forbidden by every OS? We are talking about the owner of the machine, and software they choose to run. An OS that prevented the owner from having full control over his own machine would be something to complain about, letting the owner write to his boot track is not. If we think there's a real security hole here, like unprivileged applications able to overwrite grub code, I'll go advocate with Microsoft to have it fixed. Until then I just agree that it's a tragedy that applications which aren't bootloaders or partition managers mess around in this area, but it shouldn't be up to the OS to decide which applications run by the superuser are specially privileged to manage partitions, and which aren't. Yours truly, R Benjamin Voigt Microsoft Visual C++ MVP and Windows private beta tester P.S. Does anyone know if the Linux versions of those same proprietary license managers abuse the boot track like their Windows behavior?
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