My point was, it flopped as a standard. It's not that it's good or bad, it's just not used any more, there are no new devices with FireWire. USB killed it essentially. The same will happen with Thunderbolt, USB 3.x will kill it.
I seriously doubt there will be something that will replace USB. It's backwards compatible to oblivion and just supports newer and newer things. It's very hard to beat that.
If by maliciously you mean a virus might take advantage of the system in those 5 minute, the answer is, yes, it is possible... not likely, but possible.
If the question was, can the shell by itself escalate a command that does not have sudo in front of the command, the answer is no. If it did that, than there are some serious bugs in the code... or some malicious code planted in it. By definition, it's not supposed to do what you don't tell it to do.
So that is why I always have to install sudo manually π€¦.
And I think older versions also left you at root, you had to define a user account manually. I think that's not the case now as I recall (I haven't installed Debian in a while).
Sorry (again π, this happens quite a lot with you, lol), it's early in the morning here, didn't have my coffee yet.
If the question is can privileges be escalate later on while a command or a script is executing, the answer is yes. You can also deescalate them once the root creds stuff is done executing. You just have to make it clear in the script or the command that "you do this with root creds, but then you continue with user creds".
The point I was trying to make with my previous comment was that, if a process (command, script, whatever) is ran with root privileges, every program, command, script it invokes later on is ran with root privileges, unless it's specifically noted to run this or that part with some other privileges.
There just isn't enough content. Yes, some interesting info and shared links, but I like my social media mixed up, as in, some serious thread, then a few jokes/shitposts, then some more serious threads. There isn't enough of that any more.
And the rules in most funny/shitpost comms are kinda strict when it comes to comedy. So I just stopped posting stuff all together on most comms, except a few.
Credentials are inherited by every child process that the parent process invokes. Thus, if you give root credentials to a command, every subsequent command that the original one invokes will have root credentials.
There might be some exceptions, but these are special case scenarios and are literally only a few.
And this is why I never get bonuses. I just can't be bothered with kissing upper management ass... tried it once... I walked out of the meeting with me telling them "less talking, more doing"... no one from upper management called me ever again. Even if they did have a computer problem, they just told the secretary to call me.
Ubuntu uses Snaps for a lot of the software, thus, when you write sudo apt install firefox that is actually an alias for "install firefox from snap". Snaps get installed locally, not on the system (globally, for all users), but as a user, so you really can't do much damage when you actually didn't do anything to the system in the first place.
Do sudo shit on any other distro that doesn't have a company behind it, see what happens.
My point was, it flopped as a standard. It's not that it's good or bad, it's just not used any more, there are no new devices with FireWire. USB killed it essentially. The same will happen with Thunderbolt, USB 3.x will kill it.
I seriously doubt there will be something that will replace USB. It's backwards compatible to oblivion and just supports newer and newer things. It's very hard to beat that.