The sysadmin's response to the most dangerous request
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Mike Pound (@_mikepound). The tweet reads: 'Email from student: please can I have sudo so I can run this script I downloaded off the Internet. Thats a hard no.' This meme captures a classic scenario that horrifies any experienced tech professional. A student, representing a novice user, is asking for 'sudo' (superuser/root) privileges, which would grant absolute control over a system, to run an untrusted script from the internet. This is a massive security vulnerability that could lead to malware, data theft, or complete system compromise. The blunt response, 'Thats a hard no,' is the only appropriate answer from a system administrator, professor, or senior engineer responsible for security. The humor lies in the student's dangerous naivety, a relatable experience for anyone who has had to enforce the principle of least privilege
Comments
11Comment deleted
`curl some-random-url.sh | sudo bash` is the junior developer's version of a trust fall, except you're not falling into the arms of your team, you're falling into a rootkit
Granting sudo for a random internet script is just curl | sudo bash | incident_postmortem >> ruined-weekend.md
After 20 years in tech, you realize the most dangerous vulnerability isn't in your code - it's the user who thinks 'curl | sudo bash' is a perfectly reasonable installation method because 'the README said so.'
A student asking for sudo to run a random internet script is the digital equivalent of asking for the master key to run with scissors in the server room. Every sysadmin's nightmare distilled into one innocent email - because nothing says 'I understand security' quite like 'I found this on the internet and need root to run it.' The 'hard no' is the sound of every security policy simultaneously activating their defense mechanisms
The only thing worse than piping curl to bash is doing it with sudo - welcome to incident zero
Requesting sudo for a curl | bash isn’t “least privilege” - it’s converting RBAC into YOLO with a fleet‑wide blast radius
curl | sudo bash isn’t a deployment strategy - it’s the preface to the postmortem
Kids... Comment deleted
alias sudo=‘cowsay’ Comment deleted
это же постоялец computerphile it's the guy from computerphile Comment deleted
Damn, you got an good eye Comment deleted