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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It helps protect you because if the application in question is compromised in any way (or has a flaw, i.e. an accidental
rm -rf /*), the only access it has is limited to the user it is run as. If it is run as root, it has full administrative privilege.Isn't that a risk for anything downloaded, assuming I run transmission as my user, not root?
It's more the situation where the torrent/magnet string itself (or some peer connection) has some clever hack that exploits a bug in Transmission, allowing it to execute arbitrary code AS transmission. I'm skeptical there's a big risk of that, but the security theater kids LOVE sand boxing these days
It may be mostly "security theater" but it requires almost no extra effort and drastically increases the difficulty of compromise by adding privilege escalation as another requirement to gaining root access.