Usually, a filesystem is fully synced only when it is unmounted, and that cannot happen while a process still holds a reference to a file on it.

Instead of "sync" or "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" you can start some memory-hungry program, which will quickly eat up all your memory and force all buffers to disk (either in swap or in the filesystem). Problem solved ;-)

Try it without the "sync".

What's your point? Are you assuming that putting random users in the "disk" group is safe?

If you are using a persistent /tmp, 'root' is anybody who mounts the HDD...

And in other news, the contents of memory may persist through reboots. It's not like the BIOS or the OS fill it with zeros on each reboot. You'll have to also unplug the power cord, yank the battery, etc.

Having your terminal session stored on disk mean that everything you see is suddenly on your filesystem, and staying on it if your /tmp is backed by the harddrive.

No. If you open(O_CREAT) a file than immediately unlink it, and use the opened handle to store temporary data, that data has no more chance to hit the disk than regular memory being swapped out.

Try to learn a bit about buffer cache and such stuff.

This "bug" is about someone ignorant about security and how an OS works having his naive assumptions contradicted by reality.

There are dozens of ways to transfer files between computers. NTFS-formatted flash drives happen to be a stupid one, as that filesystem is only 100% safe to write to on windows

Besides, flash drives are "optimized" for FAT and will be much slower when used with another fs -- their firmware makes assumptions about the position of the FAT table, and treats writes to those addresses specially.

You can even break them badly by repartitioning them with some general purpose tool, eg start the first partition at 63*512 as usual on hds.

It's pretty depressing.

but am unsure how I would properly connect the 32-bit system to the 64-bit one for X apps

That's trivial -- you just have to mount /home and /tmp (either as normal partitions or with --bind) inside the chroot, and they will find the X11 socket and the .Xauthority file just fine.

But you don't really need a chroot for that. You can install the 32bit libraries and ld-linux.so somewhere and then starting them with a script like LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/32libs /32libs/ld-linux.so "$@".

Since there is no rail link between Alaska and the rest of North America (see here), this seems like an incredibly unwise project.

On the Russian side, there isn't even a damn road going there.

The only way to get to Chukotka, Kamchatka, Magadan Region, etc is via boat or plane.

This is the reason why children begin communicating at an earlier age in the west than their equivalent Chinese counterparts

[citation needed]