The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Found on The Register on Thursday, 26 September 2019
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Systemd inventor Lennart Poettering told the crowds at the All Systems Go Linux user-space event in Berlin he intends to reinvent home directories to fix issues with the current model that are otherwise insoluble.

He is also much concerned with a security issue, which is that even when full-disk encryption is in use, when the system is suspended the decryption key is held in memory, so that if a laptop is stolen while suspended it would be possible to access the data.

A person at the session asked what should be done by a university student, for example, who wanted to log in to a Linux machine that was rebooted overnight from 200 miles away. The answer: "If you really want that this system can come up on its own, don't use this stuff. This is about security."

It's not about security, it's about Poettering stroking his little ego. If he seriously believes that the risk of accessing an in-memory in a suspended laptop justified messing up the entire /home ecosystem, then someone should tell him that anybody who really wants his decryption key will just beat him up hard until he tells them. It's just more and more of this cancer that is spreading through the system, going against Unix philosophy. Lennart really has to fork and create the "Poettering Operating System" or "POS" for short.