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Defaulting to root? Spawning a service defaults to .. the current user.

We can argue if User= lines should be validated more carefully or cause hard errors (vs warnings), but if you do not provide a valid User= line, the process will spawn with the current uid (which is 0 for initd).

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Tempted to say it's a service, and the majority of these will want to run as root instead of any particular user. So in this sense the default makes sense.

So if someone spawns the torrent server as a restricted user to add a layer of security against problems in the server, and that user starts with a zero — like 0priviledge or 0pointer for that matter, do mind the domain of L. Pötterings blog — the service will launch as root, voiding the layer of protection?

Many of my services do not run as root for a reason.

You are erroneously conflating the default when there is no User= item with the default when there is a User= item but its value is neither a number nor a valid account in the user account database. The latter default is the item under discussion here.

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