The web was built on shaky foundations which cannot support the weight of its teeming millions. For instance, a 51% (I cannot seem to find the study, perhaps s

The web was built on shaky foundations which cannot support the weight of its teeming millions. For instance, a 51% (I cannot seem to find the study, perhaps someone else has it bookmarked) of compromises result from attacks on passwords; many of those passwords were simply guessed, because humans are neither skilled at producing random output nor remembering long, complex strings. Passwords are a poor solution, and it is the wildest dream of the information security industry to replace them, but it is a slow venture. Security is also quite fickle. What is safe in one environment can be dangerous in another. tar has pretty solid defenses against directory traversal; you have to invoke it with options that explicitly allow files to be placed outside of your current directory, if that behavior is desired. Except wait, is there a symlink to / in that directory? Nevermind then, you can place files where you'd like. Raise your hand if you knew that.