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Marcus thought everything was under control. It wasn’t.

While he trusted the system to behave, things were happening out of sight. By the time he decided to check, the situation had already gone off the rails.

This story isn’t about incompetence. It’s about how a tiny, almost invisible mistake can spiral into total loss of control — especially in containers.

I wrote this piece to show how easily things get out of hand, and what you can do to prevent it before you even notice something’s wrong.

The Party Marcus Didn't Know Was Happening in His Container Docker containers inherit Unix permissions, but most Dockerfiles ignore them entirely. Running as root, copying files with wrong ownership, and mounting volumes without permission checks—these aren't edge cases. They're the default. Here's how to fix it before your container becomes an attack vect...

Every developer has done it.

2 AM. Deployment broken. Nothing works.
chmod 777

Problem gone. Security sin committed. Moving on.

But here's what I learned: Unix permissions aren't complicated—they're deliberately simple. And that simplicity is the entire security model.
The same permission system designed in the 1970s still runs your containers, your Kubernetes clusters, your cloud infrastructure.
I wrote about why "boring" is the whole point.

The Most Boring Security Model—Still Running the Internet Unix permissions are not granular—they are intentionally simple. This 50-year-old security model still underpins containers, cloud systems, and Kubernetes. Learn why limiting expressiveness is the real security feature.

I can't believe I'm going to say this; I've been using computers for over 30 years now (since I was 5 years old). Because of the global reach Microsoft had at that time in my region (Bolivia/South America) most of us tech lovers there were introduced to the computer world from the Microsoft world, MS-DOS and Windows. For the first 2 decades of my exeperience I used windows and learned all I could about hardware and how computers are assembled and customized. Even though thrilling and knowledge nurturing, it was a hassle to get things done with Windows, just so much configuration, setup, knowledge about compatilibity between different vendors hardware and the different drivers available. The fact that Microsoft launched a whole ecosystem of tech that could be technically plug-and-play also opened an abysm of issues at that time which I got tired of eventually. Then around 7 years ago I switched to the Apple ecosystem and immediately fell in love with the cross-device seamless experience, every product from them just connected, worked and made life so much easier. Not only the experience was seamless and most things worked out of the box with 0 configuration, but also the amount of art, detail and spirit that the products had from what Steve Jobs built was just a whole other universe of wonder and pleasure using their products. However, eventually I realized how absurd it's to try to get run away from the Apple hardware deprecation and how they stop supporting older devices and force you into an absurd chase for the latest product for no good reason. I got sick of it as well. And then here I am, after weighing my options once again, I gave another chance to Microsoft and switched back to an all-in-one solution for leisure, development, engineering as well as creative work. The amount of improvement on the hardware and software integration on the Microsoft ecosytem is undeniable. Specially with mobile chips. AMD Ryzen processors are just insanely fast, and the NVIDIA GPUs can work wonders with games and graphic work. At such a lower cost of what Apple demands, now I'm finally leveraging the most out of Windows and its now a very stable ecosystem. I have to admit, things change so quickly over time. I'm glad I gave it another chance. New setup: Lenovo Legion 5 AMD Ryzen 7 5000 series, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, 32GB DDR4, 512 V-NAND SSD. What a beast.