SELinux Alert Browser New Alerts since F32 Upgrade

Thanks, but rather than just say “update to latest”, without actually explaining what the error means or why it’s happening, or whether I should allow it to pass, means I now have little confidence in any of the SELinux default policies or understanding future warnings. I wish that Fedora would make them warnings a little more understandable, like the old Windows ZoneAlarm…this program wants access to this resource or zone. If we need another layer on top of SELinux just to explain what it means then its obviously not meant for general use. I’ll persist, even though I’m still getting these type of warnings.

Well, it means that the smart card daemon (pcscd) wanted to alter a nice value and was not allowed to do so. The process itself was not blocked from running, just this particular kind of “activity”. One possible explanation for this might be that pcscd gained this capability after an update and the system policy didn’t know about it yet. By the way, you asked what to do about the error, not for an explanation.

ZoneAlarm was a firewall, so it had a narrower scope, but still, it didn’t provide links to man pages or wikipedia or whatever to help the user understand the message, it took for granted that people had a level of understanding of their system. Most users got annoyed by the constant nagging and either kept clicking on “Allow” or completely disabled the firewall. That’s the reason why the Workstation SIG wanted the alert browser removed from the default package selection.

I have no experience in UX, but if you feel that such messages could be written in a more user-friendly way, by all means, take your ideas upstream.