[sf-lug] A command short enough to be tweeted can bring down systemd

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>         So no big Whoop1

Except that that takedown of critical system infrastructure in that
fashion _should never have been possible at all_.  Ability to sabotage
the entire system init as any regular non-root user shows starkly the
nature of systemd's fundamental design problems.  And those, unlike
implementation flaws, aren't going to be fixed.

As Ranum puts it:

  Richard Feynman's "Personal Observations on the Reliability of the
  Space Shuttle"[link] used to be required reading for the software
  engineers that I hired. It contains some profound thoughts on
  expectation of reliability and how it is achieved in complex systems.
  In a nutshell its meaning to programmers is: "Unless your system was
  supposed to be hackable then it shouldn't be hackable."

http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/