Even worse than it seems [LWN.net]

Even worse than it seems

Posted Feb 13, 2009 0:07 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Follow up: How to write a Linux virus

Yikes, the followup makes it clear that things are even worse than feared. Not only can the desktop file choose its own icon (disguising itself, say, as the normal 'Home' thing you use to browse your home directory) but it can also specify Name=x to disguise the filename that appears. So it could look like a .txt file to all appearances.

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thanks fd.o

Posted Feb 26, 2009 12:15 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I've yet to see anything really thought-out from freedesktop folks.

So far they seem to fail to understand that XML is not really human readable, that security *is* something to consider, and that they're prolly not the brightest folks on the planet to skip learning from previous experience and mistakes.

Okay, I'm a humble maintainer for some ~200 packages with quite few patches submitted anywhere and even fewer things designed and implemented. I'd probably just shut up and drink that pepsi until getting fed up and dropping all of this crazy superfluous "hi-tech" altogether.

thanks fd.o

Posted Feb 26, 2009 19:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

what, you think configuring your font system with underdocumented XML and
configuring your keyboard and screen with underdocumented HAL fdi XML
isn't clear and easy? What are you on?

(Sanity, I suspect. I'm still not sure exactly what the hell an .fdi is
for, whether it documents what your hardware is *capable* of, or how it's
*configured*, or as seems likely both in an ugly mess... and I'm not even
sure how to figure it out. There's no useful docs in the HAL source tree
nor the fontconfig one and this stuff isn't in man pages. *sigh*)