On Thu, 9 Mar 2000 09:38:49 +0100 (CET), Bagnoli Franco ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Mar 2000 16:15:39 +0100 (CET), Bagnoli Franco wrote:
<snip>
>> A great advantage of using Arachne at a public kiosk is that it will run
>> very well on an inexpensive vintage PC. If someone does vandalize the kiosk,
>> then the damages incurred would not be as great as you would otherwise suffer
>> by setting up a modern pentium running the latest Windows software.
> You touched the point. At present we have some high-tech kiosks with touch
> screen, fast pentiums and specialized software (based on a combination of
> internet explorer and visual basic). Apart from the cost (which is
> also important: due to limited budget of our public university, we have to
> choose between 10 such high-tech kiosks or 100 (maybe 1000?) low-end
> arachne ones -- we have 5000 students!), they suffer alternatively from
> being out of service or hackerized (say installing irc servers).
> Arachne could solve some of these problems, but I have to avoid for
> instance exiting to dos pressing the esc key, and maybe preventing access
> to the command.com shell. I have some ideas, but I would like to know if
> anybody has already considered the question.
Hello Professor:
In my experience I have encountered some publicly-accessible computers
running some programs in some libraries at colleges and universities. When
I would try to get to the DOS prompt, or escape to the DOS shell, I would be
prompted for a password. The result was that I could not get into DOS.
I never asked anyone how this kind of setup works, because I was afraid that
I would be suspected of being the kind of person who wants to hack the
system <g>.
The systems administrator at your university probably knows of ways to
keep unauthorized persons from accessing the command line.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate Internet Client
