Ubuntu Linux Help

I just visited the Ubuntu Forums and bumped into a post I found very amusing. It’s from an individual who believes he’s found a vulnerability in dev/null.

“…I first came upon it, when I was writing an email, and I saved the file at the location /dev/null. Upon logging in again, I found that the file has mysteriously vanished. This was very sensitive information, so I even encrypted it. But this seem like a vulnerability in the Linux kernel, that non root users have access to delete and modify /dev/null as it is the only possible explanation for my file disappearing…” Ha ha ha… Of course it’s gone! Maybe you’ll all think I’m a bit crazy, but I thought it funny. Maybe I am a bit nuts!

For users no familiar with /dev/null, it discards all data written to it. One common use is when running a cron job, /dev/null discards the email message you would normally get. (You don’t need to be emailed the cron job response every few minutes right?)

Learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null