Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 13:20:11 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why I Don't Do Linux Message-ID: <4.2.2.20000213125027.03d60480@localhost> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10002131145500.53806-100000@moo.sysabend.org > References: <20000210212329.A4718@wallnet.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 12:47 PM 2/13/2000 , Jamie Bowden wrote: >:Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the >:rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to >:seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and >:keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup >:and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't >:know how to do that in Unix.) > >I don't know why the hell MIT didn't toss him out on his ass for this. >The UNI CS dept. I worked for would've tossed him so fast and hard he'd >have bounced twice. Ah. TWENEX, the predecessor of TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, succeeded ITS as the timesharing operating system used by MIT's machines when they began to use DECSystem-10's.) ITS had no passwords, and anyone could kill the entire system and mess up what others were doing. TWENEX had passwords, which Richard considered to be a travesty. What did Stallman do? People who were at MIT at the time report that Stallman decrypted password files and sent messages to users exhorting them to use a null string instead. He also hacked the system so that it would echo users' passwords to a public accessible system console as they logged in -- perhaps the first documented case of "password sniffing." Steven Levy's book "Hackers" describes other ways in which Stallman fought security measures. He writes: Stallman kept fighting, trying, he said, "to delay the fascist advances with every method I could." Though his official systems programming duties were equally divided between the computer science department and the AI Lab, he went "on strike" against the Lab for Computer Science because of their security policy. When he came out with a new version of his EMACS editor, he refused to let the computer science lab use it. This pattern survives in the GPL. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4.2.2.20000213125027.03d60480>