Remove Root Pbuttword from Shadow file Sender: Linux

On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 01:37:09 GMT, Dave Brown

Its a waste of time "against experts", but it may be useful against "un-trained hackers" like a spouse, teenager, friend, or rogue cop trying to "sneek-a-peek" into your system. Maybe put in a backdoor or keystroke recorder into your system.

For instance, if you turn off "booting from cd and floppy, so you can only boot from harddrive" in the bios, then you "pbuttword-protect" the bios, AND have pbuttword protection in the boot loader, THEN the hacker would be forced to remove the computer cover, to get the harddrive out, or drain the bios to reset it to boot from a cd. (It also protects from the "init=-bin-sh" ).

Now you can put a "padlock" on your computer cover, also. Sure, it only takes a pair of tin-snips to get around it, but you WILL know that a break-in occurred, and can do the neccesary things.

You can also setup your system, so if left running in X, and someone hits "cntrl-alt-backspace", your X server script will self-logout, so they can't get to your shell.

By far, the biggest use for this, is to prevent people from running Windows, if you have a dual-boot machine. You can pbuttword protect the booting to MSWindows.

In this day of tv shows like "Alias", "24, etc, alot of fools think they are self-appointed "secret agents" protecting society from "evil-doers", and take it upon themselves to snoop around. I had my "eyes-opened" when I was at a university, as to what was going on with the "secret-agent-types". I had to step into an adjacent room, to shower, and I always made a habit of locking my door. Well, I ran out of soap, and figured I would quickly run to my room, get some more soap, without turning off the water. Was I surprised when I opened the shower room door, and saw a guy(not a student), with a cell-phone to his ear, trying to open my door, saying "he's in the shower now, but I can't get through his lock". He saw me, and just started running.

Nowadays, I never leave a door unlocked. The "gangs on cellphones" are out there. It only takes 30 seconds to get into a place and set a camera or audio bug.

Now the guy trying to get into my room, could have just smashed the door in, but he was relying on stealth...hoping I would just "leave the door unlocked" for the 2 minute shower.

Same with alot of hackers. They could just steal your whole box, but they want to remain stealthy. Put up as many "roadbloacks" as you can to a hacker, even if it won't stop an expert, it will thwart alot of people, which puts the odds in your favor.

-- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.