19 Feb
2021
19 Feb
'21
7:31 p.m.
On Friday 19 Feb 2021 09:13:04 Mike Bird via tde-users wrote:
Unlike a drama club we're not worried about fires,
falling lights, and
people tripping and breaking their legs in the aisles. But if some
corporation accuses TDE software of losing data, or letting a hacker
in, we can't afford to defend TDE. Doesn't matter if the accusation
is valid or not.
When I read that, I suddenly remembered that back in the days when I used to
log in to Debian GNU/Linux as root, then start kdm manually, you always got
the following message after logging in to Debian GNU/Linux:
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
I was able to display that message again in my netbook just now, without
logging out of TDE, by doing ctrl + alt + f1 to get a full screen console with
a debian login prompt, then logging in. That message seems to be the same,
whether I log in as a normal user, or as root. I could get straight back to
my TDE session, by doing ctrl + alt + f7.
It occurred to me after reading Mike Bird's point above, that you don't seem
to see any "NO WARRANTY" message like the one above, when TDM starts
automatically, at the end of the boot up process.
If there are concerns that a corporation that uses TDE might try to claim
legal damages from TDE if something goes wrong, perhaps a helpful precaution
could be to put a "NO WARRANTY" message like the one above, somewhere on the
TDM login dialogue. And if a user logs in to TDE using e.g. KDM instead of
TDM, perhaps a similar message could appear in a message box in front of all
other windows when the user has just logged in, with an OK button to dismiss
the message, and a checkbox to be checked for "Acknowledge and don't display
again".
-- Chris Austin