5 ms·

I'm not sure I understand Stallman's comment. He is against letting "a few of the users ... hold total power over the rest". Isn't that the whole point of a sys

by qntm 15y ago

I'm not sure I understand Stallman's comment. He is against letting "a few of the users ... hold total power over the rest". Isn't that the whole point of a system administrator? He seems to be explicitly in favour of making it so that a leaked root password will allow any user to run riot over the system. Is he an anarchist? Or did they not have malicious users or idiots in 1984? I admittedly know almost nothing about system administration.

hvs 15y ago
From "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software": --- "The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it." Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message came back something like: I see you chose the password "starfish." I suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.
- qntm 15y ago
  I can't conceive of a world where "there should be no passwords" or "keep these machines security-free" were ever serious positions held by software engineers. It's Garden of Eden thinking.
  - sp332 15y ago
    It wasn't a rationally-considered position, it was a reaction against the strict hierarchy and batch processing mentality of the time. (Disclaimer: everything I know about this I learned from Stephen Levy's book Hackers.) The admins of these machines would flaunt their power over the users, and were very antagonistic toward the hackers who wanted to do "cool" stuff on the computers. So, keeping the machines security-free and not allowing passwords was actually necessary to promote the idea that anyone could run a program on the computer, because that was not the status quo. The fear that someone would take control and abuse power in that way was not an unfounded one.
    - illumin8 15y ago
      Right, perhaps it was a different time, but you need to limit the power of most users, especially in a school setting, or you cannot maintain the uptime of the system for everyone. I know in our computer lab in high school, which was a series of x86 PCs donated by Novell and sharing files from a Netware file server (this was 1989-1990), we used to try to get superuser privileges on the Netware server. Once or twice, the 20 year old kid they hired as a sysadmin would walk away from his desk and forget to logout of his workstation, and we would give ourselves superuser privileges on the network. We would use this privilege to play "Snipes," one of the first network based multiplayer text shooter games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes This fun lasted for a few hours until the 20 year old sysadmin determined we had superuser privs that we shouldn't have and promptly revoked our rights.
      - bruce511 15y ago
        ha ha - that's funny. We had a very similar setup at the same time - the workstations were "diskless" and the only way to get software onto the machine was to write it (in Turbo Pascal). The workstations were 8086's while the file server was a 286, and the other server was a (then very expensive) 386. But the admins had installed "NetWork Eye" - sort of like a VNC for text monitors. So one guy in the class wrote an assembler (in TP) then got a NetBios book and wrote some low-level NetBios stuff in assembler. That allowed us to NetWork-Eye the servers to get some other funky stuff done. One thing we did was to login on all 50 workstations (except one), and run the network eye in a cascaded chain. Then sit back and watch the first person come in. They're log in (on all 50 monitors simultaneously) and everything they did would come up on all 50. Usually took a few minutes before they noticed... Ahh - good times.... <g>

by qntm 15y ago

hvs 15y ago

From "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software": --- "The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," Stallman would later explain. "They didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it." Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab's machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered "starfish," for example, the message came back something like: I see you chose the password "starfish." I suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.

qntm 15y ago
I can't conceive of a world where "there should be no passwords" or "keep these machines security-free" were ever serious positions held by software engineers. It's Garden of Eden thinking.
- sp332 15y ago
  It wasn't a rationally-considered position, it was a reaction against the strict hierarchy and batch processing mentality of the time. (Disclaimer: everything I know about this I learned from Stephen Levy's book Hackers.) The admins of these machines would flaunt their power over the users, and were very antagonistic toward the hackers who wanted to do "cool" stuff on the computers. So, keeping the machines security-free and not allowing passwords was actually necessary to promote the idea that anyone could run a program on the computer, because that was not the status quo. The fear that someone would take control and abuse power in that way was not an unfounded one.
  - illumin8 15y ago
    Right, perhaps it was a different time, but you need to limit the power of most users, especially in a school setting, or you cannot maintain the uptime of the system for everyone. I know in our computer lab in high school, which was a series of x86 PCs donated by Novell and sharing files from a Netware file server (this was 1989-1990), we used to try to get superuser privileges on the Netware server. Once or twice, the 20 year old kid they hired as a sysadmin would walk away from his desk and forget to logout of his workstation, and we would give ourselves superuser privileges on the network. We would use this privilege to play "Snipes," one of the first network based multiplayer text shooter games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes This fun lasted for a few hours until the 20 year old sysadmin determined we had superuser privs that we shouldn't have and promptly revoked our rights.
    - bruce511 15y ago
      ha ha - that's funny. We had a very similar setup at the same time - the workstations were "diskless" and the only way to get software onto the machine was to write it (in Turbo Pascal). The workstations were 8086's while the file server was a 286, and the other server was a (then very expensive) 386. But the admins had installed "NetWork Eye" - sort of like a VNC for text monitors. So one guy in the class wrote an assembler (in TP) then got a NetBios book and wrote some low-level NetBios stuff in assembler. That allowed us to NetWork-Eye the servers to get some other funky stuff done. One thing we did was to login on all 50 workstations (except one), and run the network eye in a cascaded chain. Then sit back and watch the first person come in. They're log in (on all 50 monitors simultaneously) and everything they did would come up on all 50. Usually took a few minutes before they noticed... Ahh - good times.... <g>