Jeremy Bertenshaw wrote: > Unfortunately the world is probably about 95% idiots by your > definition :-).
No comment ;) > Why do you need to go through the kernel to write to a device? If you're not root it might be your only option. As far as I know, to gain access to an I/O port a program must call ioperm() which requires root privileges. You could trojan the kernel itself to get around filesystem permissions but that requires either root priviliges or physical access to the box to reboot (I wouldn't try rmmod'ing /dev support). All the publicised Linux viruses I've heard of (not many) used some exploit to gain root access first. That's the only way you can do any real damage on a properly configured system. Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (out of date)
