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Comment by crazydoggers | Hacker News Reader

Bingo... pretty trivial to stick an `rm -rf /*` shell call somewhere in your code. Not sure what difference it makes whether it's in a package manager file, or the code. Lesson... read the code before running it.

Title of the post should be "Running code you haven't read can be dangerous"

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A lot of people using package managers, though, might think that someone else has read the code that's about to be installed (so they don't have to read it before installing it). I've installed five or six things for development work using pip recently and I would have been shocked if they were malicious (or if I had to read thousands of lines of Python to make sure they weren't malicious).

It is interesting the contrast in cultures between developers and "hackers" it was not uncommon to hear about script kiddies picking up code and realizing later that a rm rf line was contained in the file. The common reaction to a scenario like that would be well the script kid got what he deserved. However, there is a fringe within that group that is more interested in testing these thing in VMs (so the damage would be minimal in that case). However when a security issue is brought to light like this and the only difference is the intentions of the user the arguments are so completely different. Script Kid downloads rm rf script and runs HAHA! Javascript Developer downloads package and runs blindly "well who let that happen and how do we stop it from happening again" hopefully some HN reader can respond to this to succinctly convey the philosophical mechanism going on here as I cannot quite place it.

Maybe the script kids think that they're playing One-Shot Prisoner's Dilemma (or occasionally Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma) and the developers think they're playing some other game?

Thanks for the reference schoen this is why I love HN. I sometimes have difficulty organizing thoughts into neatly categorized theories like this, best I can usually do is realize i'm sure somebody has thought about this before and explained better than I can.

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