Reminds me of when I was younger and my mom and my brother were using a windows computer. They got the message “an illegal error has occurred” and my mom called me to ask if they had broken the law.

When I was young I had messed with the computer and it showed an english message with the word "atom" in it. My mom not being a native speaker freaked out as if a nuclear explosion was about to take place.

I almost shit myself the first time I saw X Screensaver..

It has to take the prize for worst UX ever.

do you mean the bsod screensaver

sometimes people also complain about xscreensaver's lock screen because it doesn't use a widget library, but the alternative lock screens can often be crashed through bugs in the widget libraries they use

The one with the flaming screen and countdown timer. I had just installed the distro and though I had some malware installed.

oh, that's just the lock screen

the flaming screen is just the xscreensaver logo (it's supposed to save your screen from burnin, originally)

i hadn't ever heard of anyone thinking it was malware, that's pretty funny

jwz is a more brilliant troll than i gave him credit for

1. All Unix systems are multi-user. Hence sudo.

2. Who are these scared people? Do they think the Unix police are going to kick in their door? A guy with gray ear hair and suspenders that will be out of breath from walking up their front steps?

3. I'm referring to tailoring an error message based on security configuration. That's the dumb bit.

I don't really think this is a security issue. If an attacker is able to try executing sudo on your system, you have much bigger problems (for example, data exfil can be done by non-sudo users in many cases, or if your system is sufficiently old there's known priviledge escalation exploits). I don't think an attacker gains much knowledge from knowing whether or not they're on the naughty list.

If the attacker can execute sudo they can probably just alias it to a sudo that sends them the password and wait. The number of users on multiuser systems who don't have sudo access is just vanishingly small. Universities perhaps. But in most companies, if they trust you with access to the machine in the first place they'll trust you with sudo access.

>the only effect of the warning is to scare people

Good. If you're not familiar with what sudo does, then you shouldn't be using it in the first place.

If you shouldn't be using sudo, then you shouldn't be listed as a sudoer on that system. If you're listed as a sudoer, then you should become familiar with what sudo does.

It's an abstraction. You shouldn't need to be familiar with every aspect of what it does.

If it’s your own computer you should be able to break it until you learn how not to.

i'd argue in a different direction: if sudo barks a scary unknown message at me, i'd avoid using it altogether and just use su, which is the opposite of what people should be nudged to do.

Are you familiar with every part of the stack you are working on, down to the hardware?

Yes. Largely through torturing my system and reducing it to non-bootable state and having to read up on what symbols I mangled this time and how. Why do you ask?