Back in the day (The Year 2000), we used to joke around Ximian that to get around the “inconvenience” of having to type in the root password to install software we’d instead run through a list of known root exploits and try to get superuser privileges. It would really make things a whole lot easier. And as new holes were found, we’d just update those lists.
Unfortunately, this has become exactly what spyware software does (albeit on Windows).
I can’t tell if this makes it more funny or less funny now.