WARNING: GEEK RANT AHEAD

And today's rant is about "security". I'm fucking *PISSED* about all the fucking "security" bull fucking shit that Red Hat Software (in particular, but most other Linux vendors too) have put into their latest Linux. It just fucking REEKS of acne-cheeked cheeto-stained legends in their own mind who, like, have fucking never held a real job (one where they had to actually GET SHIT DONE IN REAL LIFE IT ENVIRONMENTS instead of masturbating bytes into a computer in an edit-compile-test loop) who come up with "well, doing things the way they have to be done in real-life IT environments isn't secure, so we're going to put all this shit into our distribution to make it fucking impossible for you to do your job because that's the only way to secure the system."

Well excuuuuuuse me, Mr. Legend In Your Own Mind. Yes, I administer my systems remotely. What, you think I fucking walk to the motherfucking data center and personally walk into a machine room full of thousands of servers in order to administer my system? And yes, I use VNC to do this. No big deal -- well, until you fucking assholes decided to put this PolicyKit and ConsoleKit bullshit into your software that WON'T AUTHORIZE ME TO DO ADMIN TASKS IF I AM DOING THEM REMOTELY!

Like.... uhm... hellooooo? Clue, you stupid-ass motherfuckers? Like, uhm, this makes all this fancy GUI admin toolkit bullshit you've put together like, fucking USELESS for your biggest customers? Like, uhm, you've had this motherfucking bug in your system for, like, years, and all you motherfuckers will say is that it's a goddamned feature because, well, a VNC session isn't local so it's a security risk so it shouldn't register itself with PolicyKit for doing security dialogues? Well excuuuuuse me for not living in your goddamned ivory tower and needing to, like, get shit done!

Which, of course, this bullshit doesn't keep me from getting shit done. It just means I have to do some *really* insecure shit to get around it while not driving myself motherfucking insane in the process -- like, running VNC as *ROOT*. You think prompting me for a password is insecure? Honey-chile, compared to running Xvnc as root, prompting me for a password is as secure as fucking Fort Knox, yo.

Note that I use the above as just one example of the many, many attempts to "secure" my systems by cheeto-stained geeks who haven't, like, got a clue. In the meantime, every time I look at my motherfucking update log these legends in their own minds have released yet another stream of security update bug fixes because they're such fucking legends they can't even check their own goddamned code for buffer overruns and memory leaks, but what the hey, if my security gets compromised because their motherfucking software is a piece of crap, which is the only time it's *ever* happened (not because of VNC sessions, not because of anything else they're trying to protect me from, but, rather, because they're a bunch of clueless geeks who are legends in their own mind but haven't a clue), it's *MY* fault as the sysadmin?!

And thus ends today's indecipherable rant. If you don't understand anything I said above, just summarize it like this: Linux geeks might know their awk and sed and bash, but they haven't a fucking *clue* as to even the basics of how to make a system usable by mere mortals. What a buncha hopeless geeks... no wonder Apple had to dump every single bit of user interface code ever written for Unix in order to create Mac OS X, the world's one and only Unix system usable by mere mortals... and why why Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth is thinking about the same damned thing. Because these geeks are just fucking hopeless once you get beyond serving up bits and bytes to the Internets... when it comes to UI shit, they're fucking legends without a clue.

-- Badtux the Ranting Geeky Penguin