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Private Home Directories for Ubuntu 21.04
- infogulch 6y agoEven ubuntu can't keep themselves from smacking you in the face with a full-page cookie acceptance pop-up that illegally fails to provide an opt-out. Sad.
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoInstall the “I don’t care about cookies” extension and stop suffering :)
- hk1337 6y agoYou shouldn’t have to, especially if you’re in the EU.
- kgwxd 6y agoonly extension I have i uBO, I didn't see anything.
- anyfoo 6y agoDoes that opt you in or out?
- loloquwowndueo 6y agoDon’t know, don’t care. The extension is called “I don’t care about cookies” not “automatic opt in/out” :)
- anyfoo 6y agoOP indicated relatively strongly that they do care about being opted out, so I don't think anything that does not "stops them from suffering".
- dang 6y ago"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anyfoo 6y agoI respectfully disagree this time. This is neither "website formatting", nor "back-button breakage", i.e. generally not a presentation issue. This is the Ubuntu website being deliberately annoying about their tracking choices in the hopes that you just click "Accept all" and be done with it. And I really don't know why Ubuntu specifically needs tracking when you just want to read an article on their blog, and personally think it's worthy of discussion.
- tomhoward 6y agoThe issue is that it's "shouting into the void". Nobody who can do anything about it is here to read it and heed the feedback, so it's just rage in the HN thread, making it a less pleasant place for everyone here, but without any benefit. The whole reason for having the exception to that rule, being that the author is active in the thread, is that you can address the feedback to them and they can possibly do something about it. Outside of that, you're better off sending an email or tweet to the company, rather than venting here.
- anyfoo 6y agoBut the same applies to many, many other discussions on HN. They may seem like shouting into the void, and then they may either stay that way, or garner enough of a critical mass to reach someone relevant--at a minimum they create discourse in our society. So why single this one out? I understand why the cited rule exists: Broken website formatting or back-button breakage is indeed not interesting to discuss, mainly also because it's a nuisance problem with one specific site, and therefore indeed rather futile to discuss without the maintainer of the site actually present. But this issue here is not just a nuisance problem of a broken website, it's an intentional choice by Ubuntu to apply unnecessary tracking to readers of their blog articles, and top it up with some dark patterns to coax their reads into accepting that. It's both something with much more intent than a broken website, and a systemic issue in our industry.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoDid you try disabling Javascript? The page looks fine in text-only browser I use. Does need Javascript to convey the information. As users, we cannot control what web developers choose to do with websites, but we can control what software we use to make HTTP requests and read HTML.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agos/Does need/Does not need/
- ScenicHypnotism 6y agoIt's worse than that. There is an opt-out, but you have to scroll down on the full page modal, even though there's no indication that you can scroll. It's not incompetence; it's malice.
- tzs 6y agoI get a scroll bar on the modal on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Are you sure there isn't something wrong with your browser, or with a plugin you are using?
- ScenicHypnotism 6y agoThe modal was perfectly sized to not show the opt out in a mobile browser. Mobile browsers tend not to show scrollbars, instead relying on context clues to indicate there's more content. To me, it seems like the modal was specifically designed to not have any context clues indicating more content, such as by having what seems to be a uniform margin of whitespace visible in the default scroll position. And remember, most traffic is mobile. It sounds like you're saying it's sized to not show the opt out without scrolling even on desktop, which makes it seem even more like the sizing is completely intentional.
- bombcar 6y agoThis is just changing the default permissions on a home directory -not a more complicated encrypted/systemd setup I thought it would be.
- donatj 6y agoWay more background than I expected for such a seemingly minor change.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoEven if it's minor, this is an excellent article because it accompanies the change with clear instructions on how to fix suspected issues or to revert the change, in a manner that even a relative layperson on a Linux system could follow.
- pkulak 6y agoI totally thought they were turning on homed with encryption by default, and was _super_ excited. I've been toying with doing that myself and having someone go first would be great.
- krick 6y agoIf this encryption is still the same as it used to be a couple of years ago (encfs, IIRC), it's good they aren't. I stumbled on that multiple times before I learned not to turn this shit on. Every time on a new installation (which doesn't happen that often, so it's natural I was forgetting) I chose "do encrypt" option (because why not?), it was working perfectly fine long enough for me to settle in, and then one day I would be downloading some books via torrents, and torrent wouldn't proceed because of "filepath too long" (which was very confusing, because how could that be on Ext4, given it's perfectly fine for other peers, who must be on NTFS, most likely), and I had to spend time disabling encfs (I guess it wasn't that easy either: creating a new user was the quickest option) in order for things to start working. So, finally I learned just not to use file-based encryption, except for minor stuff like dropbox directory.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoIsn’t this what Windows has done by default for a while now? Every user’s home directory is private to that user.
- dfox 6y agoIt is in fact an simple change to UMASK in /etc/login.defs. The default value is different between various Linux distributions and in fact Unix systems as a whole depending on the "pedigree". On the multiuser systems the default tends to be 022 (ie. 755 permission bits => read and execute to everyone), on "internet server" systems 033 (ie. execute to everyone, such that finger and http://foo.bar/~quux/ http://foo.bar/~quux/ works) and 077 on workstation unix systems (ie. $HOME is completely private). And I have strong feeling that the whole story about "systems shared by family" is just PR spin as that setting is simply default in upstream Debian...
- yrro 6y agoWell that supposition can be checked easily... $ dpkg -S /etc/login.defs login: /etc/login.defs https://packages.ubuntu.com/login https://packages.ubuntu.com/login -> hirsuite -> changelog gets you to https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/s/shadow/shadow_4.8.1-1ubuntu8/changelog https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/s/shadow/... where you can see this is an ubuntu-specific patch introduced in version 1:4.8.1-1ubuntu8
- totetsu 6y agoEven Ubuntu's calling Linux home desktop 'quaint' now..
- dTal 6y agoWell to be more precise they're saying that "use-cases like multiple family members sharing a single PC" are quaint - by contrast with "the modern era of cloud computing and IoT". A charitable reading would perhaps count it a fair observation that an increase in computing ubiquity has led to most machines, even workstations, being single-user.
- intricatedetail 6y agoUbuntu should develop shadow accounts - the user will log in to a completely different account of the same login depending on password. That is if someone forces you to log in you could use different password and pretend it is your stuff.
- lightgreen 6y agoJust create second account. This feature you describe is needed like to one in a million users.
- zaphirplane 6y agoTrue, Not many actually need it. A 2nd account with all the disk space would raise some questions Then again checks foil hat, that’s what you want us to believe ;)
- intricatedetail 6y agoYou dont need it now but in the future it could be crucial to have some enclave of freedom. Also when the drive is encrypted it is not possible to tell how much data it really contains.
- intricatedetail 6y agoSecond account will have a different login so when referenced with other metadata it may tell that it is not in fact your main account. Not sure why people are opposed to measures that increase privacy?
- lightgreen 6y ago> Not sure why people are opposed to measures that increase privacy? Because small increased of privacy should not result in huge usability decrease.
- alamortsubite 6y agoMakes sense to me, but I'd be much more excited to go back to not having the snap directory shoved in my face.
- Guest42 6y agoI’ve heard good things about pop os. Have you tried and liked any of the others? It was a bit unnerving to have my Firefox windows change all of a sudden due to upgrade.
- pkulak 6y agoPop OS is great. I've used it when I need a laptop to Just Work quickly, and I have a non-technical family member who has been using it for about 2 years now with zero issues.
- hojjat12000 6y agoPop OS is great. Of course I had some issues with UEFI stuff (since they don't use GRUB) but their website had great tutorials for NVMe SSDs. And you have flatpak instead of snap (so no snap folder in your case). But most importantly, they have a killer tiling extension for Gnome. It is superb.
- iudqnolq 6y agoPop OS also has a great WIP tiling wm if you want something that doesn't require you to replace all the other creature comforts like sway or i3.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pkaye 6y agoIts not perfect but there are some ways to hide it during normal use. 1. Create a file in your home called .hidden with one line "snap" to hide it in the file browser. 2. You can add --hide=snap to your ls alias to hide folders by that name.
- akvadrako 6y ago
- mperham 6y agoTl;dr home directories now default to 750.
- towergratis 6y ago> This change now means that in the future if an attacker were to exploit some previously unknown vulnerability in a given system service that is running as a separate user, they would then not be able to access the data of any other user (both human or system service) on the system. If the attacker can already access arbitrary files on your box, I don't think simple unix permissions will save you
- deadbunny 6y agoSo let's just set everything to 777? /s
- towergratis 6y agoAll I am saying is that security is like onion layers, and unix permissions are the last layer probably. If the attacker penetrated through all the other layers, chances are that unix permissions will not save you.
- asah 6y agogoogle.com/search?q=defense+in+depth
- sillysaurusx 6y agoFormer pentester here. It was often the case that we were able to penetrate a box as a low-level user account, and the way we escalated was to search ~/.bash_history of an admin account. chmod'ing the homedir would've prevented that. Unix happens to be pretty good about directory permissions.
- boring_twenties 6y agoThe .bash_history file is mode 0600, regardless of directory permissions. Was this not always the case?
- 6y ago
- xgdgsc 6y agoThis could be simplified to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adduser/+bug/48734 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adduser/+bug/48734 is fixed.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoI remember a while ago, Ubuntu used encryptfs for home directories, but it was removed. Weird, because I thought it was a great idea
- G3rn0ti 6y agoI’ve been using fscrypt to encrypt my home directory for over a year now and it seems to work fine: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fscrypt https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fscrypt
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoThanks for that... I’ll check it out
- G3rn0ti 6y agoBTW: The only issue I‘ve come across was that the pulseaudio user daemon couldn’t initialize during login (because it started before fscrypt unlocked home dir). There is an easy workaround for Ubuntu 20: https://github.com/google/fscrypt/issues/270 https://github.com/google/fscrypt/issues/270
- MikeHalcrow 6y agoHi! Author of fs-crypt dropping in from the interwebs. I also created eCryptfs, which was Ubuntu's original home directory encryption technology, with lots of additional distro integration work by Dustin Kirkland. Unfortunately I had to make some compromises when going with the stackable model, and that caused some problems. I took the lessons I learned from that first attempt and created fs-crypt as a sort of atonement. I think I got a lot more right on my second attempt at file-base encryption in Linux. At least, it's good enough to be the technology that now encrypts Android storage. The problem with Linux supporting stuff forever is that some things really need to be retired once a better solution has come along. However so long as there are eCryptfs users out there, I don't think it's going to ever go away at this point.
- 6y ago
- ohazi 6y agoTo me, user accounts have always seemed like the more reasonable approach to sandboxing vs. cloning the universe to run a single program in a container. Most of my systems have a user for myself, and one or two other users like `sketchy` or `test` or something for programs that I trust enough to run, but don't trust enough to not fuck up my home directory in some way (including modifying startup scripts, which IMHO should probably require sudo to edit, even for a normal user). If the program is really sketchy and you're worried about it doing something like exfiltrating ~/Documents/taxes, then private home directories would definitely seem like a good default. You can always have an explicitly shared area like /home/shared/$user that defaults to public.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _trampeltier 6y agoMe too, I have on each system at least 6 users just for myself. I'm also an Ubuntu user at moment, and I change also the access rights for the home directory just for the user each time. I used SuSE before and they allways had just user access for the user.
- knorker 6y agoI run such less trusted programs on other machines. The privilege elevation attack surface is just too big on a normal Linux system. That's why I think intra-user isolation is better. I would feel so much better if my browser could just access its settings, the download directory, and read access outside my home directory (for libs and such).
- still_grokking 6y agoIsn't SELinux supposed to provide exactly this functionality? The tricky part are the profiles afaik. But this could be solved with some concentrated community effort I guess. I think AppArmor does something similar (I don't know the differences to SELinux in detail, so if someone like to clarify please go ahead). I remember I've seen some AppArmor related stuff regarding Firefox (and LibreOffice I think) in Ubuntu. So seems not much is missing to have at least an sandboxed web browser out-of-the-box on a Linux desktop.
- paxys 6y agoWhile the change makes sense, it's going to be a massive headache to fix all existing software that runs as its own user when upgrading.
- danieldevries 6y agoThis is already the case with systemd-homed.
- yrro 6y agoI wish such announcements would include a reference to the bug tracker where the change was discussed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adduser/+bug/48734 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adduser/+bug/48734
- markstos 6y agoToo bad Red Hat is going the opposite direction with their Toolbox container management project, sharing your entire home dir with every container but not explicitly documenting this: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/183 https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/183