🚀 go-pugleaf

From article <1992Aug13.102249.16853@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>, by flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal):
>
> These
> forgers will include system administrators and also people who break in to
> privileged accounts.

As a former sysadm, I take offense at this remark and I think many current
ones will, too.  I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are
not trying to say that sysadms are, by nature, underhanded individuals (which
is what it sounds like) but that you simply chose a poor way of trying to
say that only privileged users would be able to accomplish such a feat, but
that many people could get these privileges in different ways.

It *is* true that someone with the root password can do pretty much anything
they want.  One of the most important qualities in a good sysadm is honesty
integrity because they *do* have the power to do so much and it would be very
easy to abuse it.  They also need the intelligence to know what is reasonable
and what is not.  Most do.

But the basic point is sound.  Whoever can be root can obtain "authorization"
to look official, so from another machine, why is that enough to make you
believe?  I can become root on my machine right now simply by rebooting it.
I am not the system administrator here, I'm just one of many users.  Just
because I say I'm root, doesn't mean your machine should trust me to do
whatever I want!
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King Ables                    HAL Computer Systems, Inc.
ables@hal.com                 8920 Business Park Dr., Suite 300
+1 512 794 2855               Austin, TX  78759
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