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Old June 30th, 2008, 04:59 PM
Rodnolinux Rodnolinux is offline
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is this a major Linux security gaffe?

I dabble with Mandriva, not a Linux fan at all, and am not a computer expert.

Yet I found what looks like a major, major security flaw not in programming but in basic functionality that may apply to other distros.

Please advise, here are the facts.

I had pix saved on my desktop, and then trashed them. Sometime later, while looking for something else well down my pathfiles, I found the same pix in a folder named "thumbnails" in subfolders labeled "Large" and "Small."

So I trash them too thinking it had to do with them being on the desktop.

Well, I eventually purged the trash after picking thru it; bad news. While picking thru trash to make sure everything going is supposed to be there, and even though I purge all the trash, the pix jump back to thumbnails folders where they were originally trashed from. I don't know this is happening, and don't find out about for months until I browse my paths again.

Later, I find out that putting pix on the desktop isn't the only thing that copies them also in "thumbnails" -- anytime that a pic appears in Konquerer as a thumbnail in any dialog, for example, while picking thru trash or doing routine file reorganizing or picking one to open within a program, a copy of the pic gets saved in "thumbnails," once for each time the pic is viewed as a thumbnail. I found perhaps 20 or 30 copies of any given pic there. So unless you know about these folders, there the pix are for a boss or the gov't to find out about in two seconds, without you ever knowing the computer leaves breadcrumbs. And it fills up plenty of storage room to boot with copies of each pic shown for each time it was encountered.

So the problems are (i) that it is extra hard to trash pix; they have to be trashed from where they are; trashed again from thumbnails in multiple copies, and then purged from trash without giving the user the option of picking thru trash to avoid a mistake, and, necessarily, in that order; (ii) no newbie is going to know this; and (iii) it loads a user up with junk that doesn't go away.

In this era where we are so bothered by hacks and viruses and unreformatting programs that allows malicious data recovery, the multiple step Mandriva dance needed to really trash stuff, and the inability for a beginner to put stuff in trash and keep it there seems like a huge design flaw, especially if it exists in other distros.
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Old June 30th, 2008, 10:23 PM
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kage kage is offline
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Your inability to use a simple program does not constitute a security flaw. Some picture viewing programs will create smaller thumbnails to easily display without hogging a lot of memory. This is a feature designed to make viewing many pictures at a time easier.

You've been here before and to date, every post you have ever made has been a flame. I'm closing this now.
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