I understand that one way to quickly mitigate CVE-2021-4034 is to chmod 0755 /usr/bin/pkexec (ie remove the SUID bit from it).
I am unclear exactly what the real world consequence of this is. (And, looking at my Ubuntu 20.04 install this appears to happen when I updated polkit to a version witho...
Random question: does anyone have any idea how many actual successful security attacks there have been on Linux-like systems in the recent past? Or just Debian derivatives, if that makes it easier.
I don't follow any relevant forum much now. I used to read LWN regularly, but don't do that much any longer. In part because LWNs servers seem convinced I'm part of a DDOS attack or something. They keep blocking me. At least on my main broadband lines. I guess I could use my phone.
Seems to me that you could write your own "interactive" script; maybe one of those number-guessing ones, and have the Python script read the prompts and react appropriately. Or maybe just ask for your name and print it back out, to start simpler.
@JeffSchaller No, I was just trying out an example script.
Which didn't work, so it also wasn't very helpful.
I'm trying to write an expect/pexpect script to do POP operations by hand. In part for debugging services, and in part to understand better how POP works.
It's sort of working, but I'm seeing some puzzling behavior. Some of which is Python-related.
Doing stuff over the network to an unknown server is always problematic, because it's not just straight programming. One is introducing all sorts of other elements.
There is some related discussion on SO, but it seems to be mostly useless. Muddled discussion by people who clearly don't understand the issues.
This used to be the norm before SE came along. If nothing else, it's greatly improved the situation.
My best advice (since I haven't played with python or POP in a long time) is to add as much debugging output as possible and be careful of rate-limiting from the destination if you're on a quick retry cycle.
@JeffSchaller Yes, rate limiting can be an issue, but I don't think it is the case here. Yet.
Not sure what debugging output to add. There isn't that much going on here. And the behavior I'm seeing isn't supposed to happen. Possibly I'm missing something.
I'm slightly surprised that python doesn't have a (module? package?) that does what you want already, and you're forced to script it with something like expect.
@JeffSchaller pexpect is a Python library. That's what I'm using. It's also what's giving me problems.
I decided not to use expect (or at any rate, to try pexpect) because I don't really want to learn Tcl.
I might be forced back to expect at some point. Hard to say. What I'm trying to do isn't at all complicated. Some of what I'm seeing are Python 2/Python 3 compatibility issues, which is something we just get to live with.
I didn't communicate clearly; it seems that pexpect is a wrapper or replacement for expect which seems like a manual, difficult way to do POP communication. I expected there to be a Python module that would speak POP already.
@JeffSchaller If you mean, am I printing the child object, I haven't done that yet, no. I'll give that a try, because currently I don't have better ideas.
Tried it. Nothing obviously stands out as useful, but I'll leave it there anyway.
I think part of my confusion is when a call to read is required.
In some cases, the server responds, and the response is printed without any further action at the client end. But in another case, it seems a read is required.
Maybe this is based on some assumed knowledge about how the process works.
@FaheemMitha I think it's normally the other way around: POP3 downloads your emails, IMAP keeps them on the server. I think you can configure them differently but I've been using only IMAP for more than a decade for this reason and it seems to work (i.e. keep emails on the server)
My vague hunch is that it downloads a header that shows you that you got new email, and it only downloads it when you open it. But this is a very very vague and completely uneducated hunch.
@FaheemMitha well it can't not download it locally if it shows up in my email reader (even if thunderbird is mostly a webapp these days, I think). Question is how many emails are retained and for how long. I'm always connected so I never had to know. Hence I do not know.
It doesn't suggest that it could be configured in a way that removes email from the server. Other accounts online suggest that IMAP fundamentally synchronises between a server and (potentially multiple) local clients.
So I would guess that IMAP would indeed not work for you.
