Re: [GIT PULL] kdbus for 4.1-rc1

Linus Torvalds
2015-04-23T18:04:37Z

On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> If somebody is printing something, it shouldn't matter if it's "lpr"
> or "firefox http://horses.and.trannyporn.my.little.pony.com/" that
> does the printing.

And btw, it's not just "this is information that shouldn't be logged".

It's literally "information that should not *ever* be used". I can
easily see some phone manufacturer deciding to do "value add" by
adding a special case where a special vendor system manager program
gets a back door to some service, because it needs to access the
camera for user identification at login time, so there's some magic

if (!strcmp(client->pid_comm, "vendor-login-pr"))
return ACCESS_OK;

because "it was the simplest way to do this", and the programmer knew
it was a hack, but he needed to get it working because he had a
deadline yesterday.

And then somebody figures this out, and makes an app that takes
pictures on your phone surreptitiously.

No, we can't protect against vendors doing stupid things, but we very
much also shouldn't make the kernel have interfaces that basically
encourage people to do stupid things because they make irrelevant and
wrongheaded data available.

Linus