3 ms·
The bit about security is rather telling. I can remember in the early days of the internet almost every system on the internet had its telnet ports open. I woul
by dhosek 3y ago
The bit about security is rather telling. I can remember in the early days of the internet almost every system on the internet had its telnet ports open. I would often telnet into my alma mater’s VAX systems from work to read Usenet news. I also had write access to system directories on the VAX that we used at work, which I never abused, but which in retrospect seems distressingly trusting. I have no idea how we qualified for ISO-9001 certification with that level of security.
- ddingus 3y agoWhen I got on the net in 1990, my dialup ISP sysadmin had all home directories were globally readable, "so we can learn from one another." And we did! That same admin had made cool menus and guide posts, documents that showed everyone about the net. We had many system wide chats about stuff and everyone was all about helping everyone else. Then we had the Eternal September... or was it December. In any case, for a couple years there before we got the first browser. Everyone was mentored onto the Net in the early days. I wish that would have continued, but it would never have scaled, ah well. Yes, I had a list of machines I could telnet to. Each offering some resource. Oh, one cool thing was being able to ask for a bigger disk quota, download some big stuff and swing by the office to move it onto portable storage. SCSI disk or floppy or tape. I loved those chats right there in the server room!
- myrmidon 3y ago> I also had write access to system directories on the VAX that we used at work, which I never abused, but which in retrospect seems distressingly trusting. I can totally understand that feeling, but my personal experience is honestly that "protecting the company from malicious employees" by technical means is often just window dressing. A patient malicious internal actor that is both technically and socially competent can cause much more damage than most companies would ever admit to themselves (but those actors are rare enough to keep modern workplaces running just fine). In short I think that just giving employees root access to some important company-internal system could work out surprisingly well even for decently-sized companies (not that I'm advocating for that :P).
- dhosek 3y agoIt’s less a case of worrying about maliciousness than incompetence. I remember reading a post here about some junior dev who accidentally dropped a production database. I can see an employee accidentally doing a DELETE/FORCE [...]*.*;*¹ in the wrong directory. ⸻ 1. The VMS equivalent, to the best of my recollection, of rm -rf *