FC3 called me stupid!!

[JCaserta]

FC3 called me stupid for trying to connect to irc when looged in as root, can anyone tell me why thats stupid?

****edit I did mean IRC sorry****

[budman7]

It really said the word "stupid"?
Pardon my ignorance, did you mean "irc"?
I am not familiar with irf.

[jsonder]

I can't speak for the distro, but I can tell you why I never go online, etc. as root.

I don't do it because, as root, there aren't many bars to worms, etc. that I might encounter.

In my opinion, being connected to the outside as root is DAMN stupid.

[budman7]

I can't speak for the distro, but I can tell you why I never go online, etc. as root.

I don't do it because, as root, there aren't many bars to worms, etc. that I might encounter.

In my opinion, being connected to the outside as root is DAMN stupid.

It may be stupid to go online as root, but that should be up to the user.
If I want to go online as root, not that I would. If I wanted to do that, and my distro told me I was stupid.
My next decision is to reboot the computer with a different distro in the cd drive.

[JCaserta]

well what i am trying to figure out is why it is stupid

[a thing]

It's not the distro. XChat doesn't let you. I've tried it.

[Richard_The_Lionhearted]

Okay question...............


The distro called you stupid?

[budman7]

To use root for such a thing as going on irc is a risk.
As was stated above, if you encounter spyware, you left the door open for them to come in. Because they have all of the rights that the root user does.
That is one of the things that makes Linux a more secure OS.
If you surf the net as regular user, spyware that you encounter can't infect your machine, because it doesn't have the rights to write to your machine.

When I used to use Windows, I surfed the net with a limited user, and when I did my spyware checks, they either came up clean, or I had just a few harmless cookies.

[JCaserta]

apparently it only says it once, it said it was very stupid to log onto irc as root, and that i should creat another user to do that.

[jens]

apparently it only says it once, it said it was very stupid to log onto irc as root, and that i should creat another user to do that.

And Fedora is right
Via IRC one can access your full system (remember it is used for file sharing as well). Never use such software as root (you shoudn't use anything as root if you don't have to...).

PS: I always liked those funny distro comments...