Vince Hoang wrote:
With SUID, the application runs as root anyway. You merely avoid the process of having to su or sudo. I look at cd writing utilities in similar light to dd and mkfs.
Hi Vince-
Since I expect the majority of our readers don't have UNIX background, I believe your statement needs to be qualified to some extent.
When running as root, you leave your "entire computer" open for security attacks. Whereas, with SUID, you only allow a specific program to invoke process(es) that would otherwise require something equivalent to a root privilege. In other words, with SUID, instead of blanket privileges, only very limited extent of privileges are granted. SUID is an ingenious way to provide compromised convience and security.
Most end users, however, do not notice the security issue. What happens in the real world if you run grip (or any other Linux CD ripping program) as root is that, instead of being in your home directory, the ripped/encoded files will be stored in the root directory. After you spend hours thinking you've copied your favorite CDs into your hard but could find them, then you will really hear someone cursing.
Anyway, if there is anything that desperately needs to be improved in Linux, it is the audio copying capability.
