> -PuTTY pscp allows raw passwords on the command line, or from a file. OpenSSH is unreasonable in refusing to do this.
You can use `sshpass` to force it through a command line argument. However, arguments can be viewed by any process through `/proc`, `ps`, etc. It's pretty reasonable to not support exposure of the password like that, especially since you can force it through using another tool if you really, really need to.
It's completely crazy to use passwords when you needn't. Passwords are a human readable shared secret, they were already obsolete when SSHv1 was invented last century.
From the outset SecSH (SSHv2, the thing you actually use today and if you're younger, likely the only thing you ever have used) has public key authentication as a Mandatory To Implement feature. Implementations where that doesn't work aren't even SSH, they're garbage.
SCP protocol is fine and convenient as long as people understand that the remote file arguments are server-side shell code, and the consequences that implies.
You get the benefit of being able to e.g. get your last download off your desktop to your laptop like this:
scp -TO desktop:'downloads/*(oc[1])' .
or this if you're on bash:
scp -TO desktop:'$(ls -t downloads/* | head -1)' .
or pull a file from a very nested project dir for which you have setup dynamic directories (or shell variables if you're on bash):
Just don't pull files from an SCP server that may be malicious. Use on trusted servers. If you do the following on your home dir:
scp -TOr malicious:foo/ .
That may overwrite .ssh/authorized_keys, .zshrc, etc. because `foo/` is server-side shell code. The client can't say that `.zshrc` resulting from the evaluation of `foo/` doesn't make sense, because it might in the remote shell language.
> If you need something that SFTP cannot do, then use tar on both sides.
No reason to make things inconvenient between personal, trusted computers, just because there may be malicious servers out there where one has no reason to SCP.
Something else to note is that your suggestion of using `tar` like `ssh malicious 'tar c foo/' | tar x` faces basically the exact same problem. The server can be malicious and return .ssh/authorized_keys, .zshrc, etc. in the archive for `tar x` to overwrite locally basically exactly the same way. This goes with the point of this SE answer:
> I'd say a lot of Unix commands become unsafe if you consider a MITM on SSH possible. A malicious sudo could steal your password, a malicious communication client could read your mails/instant messages, etc. Saying that replacing scp with sftp when talking to a compromised server will somehow rectify the situation is very optimistic to say the least. [...] In short, if you don't pay attention to which servers you SSH into, there's a high risk for you to be screwed no matter which tools you use, and using sftp instead of scp will be only marginally safer. --- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/571293/is-scp-unsaf...
I think this whole problem with SCP just stems from not having properly documented this aspect in the manpage, so people expected it to just take filepaths.
> I'm not sure where the line between "hobby" and "professional" lies when it comes to linux distributions. Many of them are nonprofit but not really hobbyist at this point. Debian sure feels like a professional product to me (I daily drive it).
"Professional" means you're being paid for the work. Debian is free (gratis), contributors are volunteers, and that makes it not professional.
What about Ubuntu? Its a combination of work by volunteers and paid employees, it is distributed by a commercial company, and said company sells support contracts, but the OS itself is free.
And there are developers who are paid to work on various components of linux from the kernel, to Gnome, does that make it professional?
Is Android not professional, because you don't pay for the OS itself, and it is primarily supported by ad revenue?
I would argue they're not, because they're not fully under the responsibility of a commercial entity, because they're open source. Companies can volunteer employees to the project, even a project they started themselves, but the companies and employees can come and go. Open source projects exist independently as public goods. Ultimately, it just takes anyone in the world to fork a project to exclude everybody else from its development.
Mint started off as Ubuntu. Same project, with none of the support contracts, no involvement from Canonical needed at the end of the day, etc.
On a practical level, it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers whatever the case may be with regards to the employment of other contributors.
At some point it seems to devolve from a meaningful discussion about how things should be done into a semantic argument (which are almost always pointless).
> it doesn't make sense to put thousands of dollars per user in liabilities to non-compensated volunteers
I agree when it comes to individuals. But it probably does make sense to hold formally recognized groups (such as nonprofits) accountable to various consumer laws. I think the idea odd that Windows, RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian should all be regulated differently within a single jurisdiction given that they seem to me largely equivalent in purpose.
> Though, understanding it this way makes the direction of the angled bracket a little odd; at least for me it's more natural to understand dup2(2, 1) as 2<1, as in make fd 2 a duplicate of fd 1, but in terms of abstract I/O semantics that would be misleading.
Since they're both just `dup2(1, 2)`, `2>&1` and `2<&1` are the same. However, yes, `2<&1` would be misleading because it looks like you're treating stderr like an input.
(IANAL) It's not about how it's stated, but whether it can be objectively proven to be true or false. "unsafe" refers to the likelihood of something bad happening in the future. You can't prove that something bad will happen in the future, so it's opinion.
Also not a lawyer, but that makes intuitive sense. If I say "that food tastes bad", it's phrased as a fact, but a "reasonable person" (which is in fact a legal test used for some things, although I admit I'm not sure about libel) knows that there's an implicit "...to me" qualifier because the concept of taste itself is inherently subjective. My instinct is that while there are some things everyone would agree on as unsafe, it pretty quickly turns into a judgment call, and it probably makes sense to allow even ill-informed opinions that are made in good faith rather than malice or negligence. The question then becomes whether there's sufficient evidence to conclude something like that, and while the bar is lower for a libel claim than something criminal, it's still not obvious this would be provable here.
"Unsafe" is just a terribly vague word, too. As a layman, I wouldn't even know what that means with respect to a web site. What's "unsafe" about it? Is it going to shoot my dog? Is it going to drain my bank account? Is it going to give my computer a virus? Saying a web site is "unsafe" really isn't providing any interesting information, and it shouldn't be acted upon by pretty much anyone.
That seems low...
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