These are all network addresses that refer to localhost - how a computer addresses itself.

One time I introduced someone to Linux then left them to their own devices.

I returned to them hours later to find out they had gotten annoyed with permissions errors and run chown -R ${THEIRUSER}: /.

The results were not what they wanted.

I was going to mention DOS, but I looked it up in the hopes of not sounding like an idiot and it turns out the history is more complicated than I knew.

Doesn’t Firefox have reader mode with dark mode built in? Don’t get me wrong, I find that functionality indispensable, but I didn’t think it required a plugin.

That’s even more concerning!

Yeah, agreed.

Wireless for me also. Actually pretty sure I’ve never used wired.

I was recently very interested to learn that, if I run a VPN on my phone, Auto immediately calls out the VPN as a problem and refuses to connect to my car until it’s disconnected.

Per Mozilla, they’re already getting that from the car manufacturers.

If this premise entertains you, you might enjoy the American Dad! episode regarding Guy Fiere.

Personally, I love most of their episodes, but I think my favorite is the one with the rear projection TV.

Sorry if I was unclear; what you’re saying is kind of my point. A computer without networking can still have risks, but they’re a lot lower. The standards of security can change with conditions. If you have a computer on an enterprise network, it should be very secure; if on your home network, more cavalier standards can make sense. If you have a computer without any networking whatsoever, being compromised is not impossible, but it’s much less likely unless you’re storing something quite extraordinary on the system. That’s why I referenced networks while talking about the configured security of an individual system. In general, I believe I was broadly agreeing with you.

Your home network is certainly less of a security risk due to both being a smaller target and (usually) needing to have fewer services available or ports open, so I would agree with you it’s acceptable for security to be more lax. Personally, I don’t find sudo to be less convenient than su; it’s even saved me from thoughtlessly running a dangerous command a time or two. Also, I try to keep my home network setup close to my work network until doing so gets in the way. If nothing else, this prevents me from getting used to a different way of doing things.

However, it’s your network. If you find that your way works better for you, by all means, configure your system in whatever way seems best to you!

If root has a password, it’s only one password; everyone who has root access knows the password, which means that anyone can share it with no accountability. If privilege escalation rights are granted instead, it’s easy to see who did what, as well as to contain any kind of compromise (by revoking said rights).

Also, I think you originally referred to su but sudo allows much more granular control.

Having a password for root is Ill advised.

You could have gifted him some silly fun with the sl package.

Your diligence is appreciated. I’m familiar with bash-org-archive and qdb.lol; the problem is searching them. I hadn’t considered looking through them locally, but it’s a good idea.

Admittedly I am fallible, so it isn’t impossible I saw the quote elsewhere, but more likely I’m misremembering the quote referencing Gentoo. Perhaps it was about Arch or even just generally about compiling software. I’m pretty sure the quote referenced xchess, so perhaps that would be more helpful to grep.

Either way, thank you for making the effort to find it.

bash.org is gone and I can’t find a reliable way to search its replacements, but there was a quote on there that said something like “I love Gentoo. You can sit back and it’ll look like you’re a badass hacker but in reality you’re just installing xchess or something.”

I genuinely, no sarcasm, feel that this was an excellent addition to the thread. You got a guffaw out of me with the first sentence.

I misread that as “self-loathing” and the answer was obvious.

alias fucking=sudo is what I was referring to in this case.