James Knott:
If I run some malicious piece of software, the contents of my home directory may be at risk, along with other files I have write permissions for, but not much else.
There you are. Loosing /home/user/* would pretty much make any persons day except Captain Backup's. There is no widely-used mechanism in place that would prevent any application you run from opening network sockets, having rwx access to what you own including hardware etc. Not that most apps would need all these privileges. The mechanisms exist though, they're just not used widely: Various acccess control models (sandboxing, apparmor). There's a reason these exist. Randall, Sloan, James: You know all this. All of you mentioned sets of things people need to be careful about. Like strong passwords, updating, establishing trust between a user and the community he/she depends on, not being a fool etc. Right on. "I click anything because I'm on linux" just doesn't fit in. So, again, and concluding as I seem to have said my share: Don't advocate carelessness. It's inherently dangerous in the long run. That's not much to ask is it? Wolfgang -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org