🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug13.151514.14735@hal.com>, ables@hal.com (King Ables) writes:
>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.

I don't see why you're so offended.  He's not saying that you're
immoral, or that all sysadmins are immoral.  I think you're correct that
he didn't mean that sysadmins are, by nature, underhanded inviduals.  I
think he meant that some individuals who are underhanded somehow end up
as sysadmins and would use the position for their personal gain.  I have
to agree that the possibility exists.

>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.

Yeah, well, implication is that some don't, right?  Idealism is nice,
but reality is better.

IMHO the point the original poster had in mind is that even if you went
through with the privileged port idea (ignoring for the moment the 3
points against it raised in another article), that it wouldn't eliminate
the problem of mail forging, it would just restrict potential culprits to
a smaller pool of individuals.

----------- The opinions expressed in this article are solely mine. -----------
<Insert lame attempt at disclaimer humor>
sss/PU'94 Dept of CS (spencer@phoenix.princeton.edu)/JvNCnet (spencer@jvnc.net)
"Was it a dream where you're standing in sort of sun-god robes, on a
pyramid, and a thousand naked women are screaming and throwing little
pickles at you?"  "No."  "Why am I the only one that has that dream?"