🚀 go-pugleaf

In <90043.092940LRL@PSUVM.BITNET Linda Littleton <LRL@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:

   People answered the expected stuff of warning the user, then taking away
   their privileges, etc.  What I'd like to know is:

I'd be hard pressed to recommend revocation of privilege for first or
even second offenders.  It really doesn't matter how I feel about it
though because Rensselaer has a rather complete Campus Computer Use
Policy which outlines what is not considered acceptable behaviour.  I
don't think it gets put into play much but mention of it and the
consequences is usually enough to calm someone down.

I saw a recent message that one of the people who recently reposted
one of the pyramid schemes got his account yanked.  Without knowing
anything else about the user and his environment my gut reaction is
that this was wrong; he could likely have posted it out of sincere
naivety, not realising that it was really a wrong thing to do.

   2a. Who issues the warnings and deals the user's appeals?  Does this
       generally befall the news administrator?

"Not my job."  I think this varies a lot though because of the
different capacities people can serve in.  When I started as news
admin for Rensselaer I was an assistant systems programmer for the
campus public access workstations.  Now I am a software engineer for
the Computer Science department and a part-timer for the FSF.  While
some of my responsibilities do step into the domain of system
administration, and I have been given root privileges on many
machines to facilitate this, I am not really a system administrator.
Most user problems aren't my problems; I don't worry about accounts
and dumps and restores and screwed up home directories and how much
diskspace people are using and so on and so forth.

The network around here then is not only the machines but also the
admins.  If there is some sort of problem coming out of domain.rpi.edu
it isn't my job to put the user on disciplinary action.  What I will
have to do is talk with both the user and his system administrator and
get it all straightened out.

   2b. Do you wait for users to call bad stuff to your attention, or does
       someone go looking for it?

If someone goes looking for it around here he's on his own little 
vendetta.  No one here is commissioned to be the Mary Whitehouse(*) of
Rensselaer.

   I should clarify that it way a high level professor who rot13'd the
   message and then complained to my boss's boss's boss, who told me to
   cancel the article.  I did (just from our local system) and am wondering
   how others would have handled this.

I almost certainly wouldn't have cancelled it except under direct
threat from my superiors.  My immediate superior tends to site with me
on most issues regarding freedom/restriction though so I'm not too
extremely concerned that I'm often treading on his toes.  Cancelling
it from your own system is technically fine though.  You didn't send
out any search-and-destroy missiles all over the net and no one else
can really tell you what must exist on your machine.

Dave

(*) Benefits of C News #102 -- expands cultural and political horizons
through knowledge of the source code.
-- 
   (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))
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