🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Sanders stated to the world at large..
: ptcaffin@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Peter T. Caffin) writes:

: > The only problem with this approach is that it only guarantees the 
: > student's rights to _read_, rather than _contribute_ discussion to net 
: > news.

: > All a sysadmin has to do with this in mind is to change the ~\.article 
: > (and whichever files control this function) ownership to root, so that the 
: > owner of the account cannot post.

: And all the user has to do in response is:

: cp ~/.article ~/.article.bak
: rm -f ~/.article               # the user can do this because they have
:                                  write permission on their own home
:                                  directory.
: mv ~/.article.bak ~/.article

I had the impression that with UNIX as with most OS's, directories are 
simply files that contain a list of files and address locations.  You can 
change the ownership of a directory, therefore, you can change the 
ownership of a file.

I'm not a sysadmin myself, tho, so I guess I'll admit defeat on this one..

BTW, there _should_ be methods to do the same thing, even if mine wasn't 
it ;-)

: (btw, which news system uses a ~/.article file to control posting
: access?  I don't know of any, but I don't have total knowledge of every
: news software)

Well, the message every time I post from tin is:

Saving to: ~\.article

I also found that unless I saved my work to this file, the message didn't 
get posted.  I think it's a transitory file between the editor and the 
newsreader..

: > What's the net if you can't write to it?

: not much use.

Apologies if the method was flawed; I hope my general point got across, 
though.

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