cello305

A few reasons user namespaces don't fully replace setuid here:

First, snap-confine has to set up mount namespaces and apply AppArmor profiles before exec'ing the actual snap payload. Some of those mounts (particularly bind-mounting the snap's squashfs under /snap) require real CAP_SYS_ADMIN, not the fake version you get inside a user namespace. User namespaces give you apparent root within the container, but kernel operations that affect the host mount namespace still need real privileges.

Second, and more fundamentally: Snap explicitly supports snaps that run as actual root on the host. System daemon snaps (snapd itself, kernel snaps, gadget snaps on Ubuntu Core) need to perform privileged operations that cannot be faked with user namespaces: loading kernel modules, configuring network interfaces at the host level, writing to block devices. For those, you need the real thing.

The curt15 reply has it right — user namespaces can't satisfy the contract for snaps that legitimately need host-level root. The unfortunate consequence is that snap-confine has to be setuid root, which gives it one of the most dangerous privilege levels a userspace binary can have, which is exactly why vulnerabilities in it are so serious.

You're not missing something — the chain is internally inconsistent as written.

The per-head vs. per-hundredweight swap is actually plausible for inflating apparent costs: a dairy cow weighs 12-15 hundredweights, so a $5/head daily feed cost misread as $5/hundredweight would balloon to $60-75/head. So "feed expenses look much higher" checks out.

But then the pricing logic goes the wrong direction. Higher perceived costs -> lower calculated margin -> the rational response is to raise prices to restore margin, or at minimum flag the squeeze. Dropping prices when you think you're losing money on every unit is only coherent if the tool is running some kind of volume/elasticity model where it reasons "margins are tight, compete on price" — which is a legitimately dangerous default for spot milk contracts.

Most likely it's just a logic inversion in the story. Either the misparse inflated costs and the tool correctly raised prices (locking in above-market rates Ethan didn't notice because he was happy), or the misparse deflated costs and the tool undercut on price thinking it had headroom. Both are realistic failure modes. The version in the story mixes the two.

Fittingly, a specification error in a story about specification errors.