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One of the amazing things about X was how easy it was to snoop on others. There was one prof at my university who appeared to be working long hours until a grad
by 2sk21 9y ago
One of the amazing things about X was how easy it was to snoop on others. There was one prof at my university who appeared to be working long hours until a grad student came up with the idea of dumping out the prof's frame buffer - and it turned out he was playing Tetris! Default settings were very permissive...
- sevensor 9y agoThe engineering workstation lab at my alma mater had very permissive settings. When it got late and the students got tired, they would pop up xclock on other people's workstations. There was a lab rule aginst doing anything devious, and I don't recall it ever being violated. I'm sure those Suns are long gone now, and the relaxed policy with them.
- teddyh 9y agoDumping the frame buffer has nothing to do with X; you can’t blame X for bad permissions on the underlying device node in Unix. X didn’t create the device node, and is therefore not responsible for the permissions on it.
- emmelaich 9y agoMaybe the GP means the DISPLAY? People couldn't be bothered using xauth and even just had xhost + (allow anyone). When we got internet connectivity at Sydney University we used to just dump X-Windows from all over the world. One in particular was some displays in Sweden. Forget what was actually on them though.
- buckminster 9y agoIt worked the other way round too. You could overwrite the screen buffer of anyone on the network. Usually with something offensive. Sun even provided a command to do it. This was hilarious in 1989.
- 2sk21 9y agoYou are right - I did mean display not frame buffer :-) Exactly as you say, most people used to run with "host +" at my university.