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Since we're on the topic of snap updates:

A couple weeks ago I was working away in the terminal when all of a sudden, my USB camera turned on and its light started flashing at me indicating something had just started interacting with my webcam. I immediately assumed "Oh, that's probably just some hackers watching me through my web-cam.", so I looked through /var/log a bit and noticed that it had just re-detected all USB devices and two new users had just been added to my system:

    snapd-range-12345-root:x:12345:12345::/nonexistent:/usr/bin/false

    snap_daemon:x:12345:12345::/nonexistent:/usr/bin/false
Does anyone know what these new users are for, and why they were added just now instead of at install time? I googled a bit, but couldn't find any recent news about it.


It was the hacker known as "Canonical".


Seems totally legitimate for a proprietary package manager to take control over your webcam.


>proprietary package manager

The client is foss. The store is proprietary. The store isn't required to install or/and distribute snaps.


Ubuntu system user accounts use the <1000 range of user ID numbers which you can see looking at /etc/passwd. Unlike this 12345 uid listed above.

On the other hand this username is mentioned in a snap dev forum: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/system-usernames/13386 - but there it says it should be using the 524288-589823 uid range...




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