On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:33:10 +1100, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Steve Hayes <hayes...@telkomsa.net> wrote: >> Yes, my initial reaction was "that's awesome". >> >> And my second thought was that it was scary. >> >> I ran it. It worked, and printed "Hello world". I was awed. >> >> But what if I had run it and it reformatted my hard disk? >> >> How would I have known that it would or wouldn't do that? > >You trust that (a) Steven D'Aprano isn't going to give you outright >malicious code (or that he trusts that the original author won't), and >that (b) your hard disk cannot be reformatted by a non-root user. >Every major platform has this kind of privilege separation (Windows >doesn't call it "root" but "Administrator", but the effect is, AIUI, >equivalent), so unless you're running random scripts from the internet >with maximum privileges, you should be safe. Well yes, (a) is what I did and why I ran it. But a hacker who can write that kind of stuff can probably bypass any safeguards built into the OS. As others have pointed out, it's not so much coding as black magic! -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
