Super user is super user. It can always access anyone's files. Allowing unrestricted access to super user essentially destroys any sense of security.
You can very much allow only access to certain commands under super user, e.g. only allow users to run pacman. Of course now you are trusting that said commands won't leak the permissions.
I agree that it's a mess.
My personal and biggest issue is not even across user boundaries, but inside a single user.
What do you mean my Firefox client can read my .ssh files???
I almost linked that in my ggp comment, but really I’m making the opposite argument as the comic.
Either way you slice it, though, it’s clearly a huge disconnect between what is important to the human using a system vs what is important to the system itself, and the relative lengths gone to to protect those two sets of things.
Super user is super user. It can always access anyone's files. Allowing unrestricted access to super user essentially destroys any sense of security.
You can very much allow only access to certain commands under super user, e.g. only allow users to run pacman. Of course now you are trusting that said commands won't leak the permissions.
I agree that it's a mess.
My personal and biggest issue is not even across user boundaries, but inside a single user.
What do you mean my Firefox client can read my .ssh files???