pondering security (and related matters)

[Mike Taylor]

In article <15836 at vail.ICO.ISC.COM> rcd at ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
> I'd think it would have a chilling effect on my use of a machine to
> know that I couldn't keep anything private.

S'funny, I'da though that as well, but a while back, a number of us
found a lot of holes in the machines here, and the result was that so
many people had ways to crack them that (for a while at least)
security was almost non-existant ...  I'm glad to say that things have
tightened up a bit now, but when it came down to it, I realised that
even if people *did* have root acess, they had better things to do
that plough through huge wodges of other people's mail.  So I didn't
really mind that much, after the first shock.

'Course, if you have *real* sensitive data, (death-star blueprints and
so on :-), then it's another matter altogether.
______________________________________________________________________________
Mike Taylor - {Christ,M{athemat,us}ic}ian ...  Email to: mirk at uk.ac.warwick.cs