Ah fingerd. In the early 90s, Cal Poly decided to put the entire campus on a cluster of AIX machines (a dozen PS/2s surrounding a 3090 mainframe). Fingering a

Ah fingerd. In the early 90s, Cal Poly decided to put the entire campus on a cluster of AIX machines (a dozen PS/2s surrounding a 3090 mainframe). Fingering a user would display the contents of the .plan file in their home directory. Fingerd on AIX ran as root, and would follow symlinks. Replace your .plan with a symlink, finger yourself, and you could read any file on the system... the home directories, email mailboxes, everything of ten thousand students and instructors. I didn't abuse this, but I'm sure others did. I kept everything "personal" on the CSc department machines.