Looking through other users' (unprotected) files

[Bob Page]

One (academic) installation I know of has the philosophy:
   If it's not worth making public, it's not worth having on the system.

I agree in principle; in practice it's tough to enforce.  User's can
adopt their own philosophies, System Managers must adopt everyone's
philosophies.

As a (multi-)System Manager, I respect people's assumed rights (although
I do not always agree with them) of privacy, not going any further than
`grep'.

People must be re-educated to what ``Multi User System'' means.  If
you have _personal_ files you don't want people to see, put them on
a _personal_ computer.  Use your own disk space, not your organization's.

You might say, ``what about cheating on class assignments, not
everybody has an amiga/mac/ibmpc'' ... you can't stop cheating
even if you disable world read access, remove mail, printers, and
most of what makes a multi-user system usable.  Besides, cheating
can be considered information-gathering, and isn't this the
Information Age? :-)

Please note that the University of Lowell and the Massachusetts
Board of Regents may not (probably don't!) agree with me.  In fact,
there's a statewide policy of 'Electronic Data Security' or somesuch
that is in my job description to police.

And no, you can't have an account. :-)

..Bob
-- 
UUCP: wanginst!ulowell!page	Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept
VOX:  +1 617 452 5000 x2976	Lowell MA 01854 USA