On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 03:06:31PM +0100, Sergio Brandano wrote: <snip> > >On another note, you may wish to reconsider your choice of tone in > >future emails. > > Oh, sweet heart.. I did not mean to be rude! I ONLY have the status > of my machine BROADCASTED by a tcp/ip service!!! >
I really don't know why I'm bothering to reply to this. Get off your paranoid guilt trip and get real - you obviously didn't even bother to try and understand what I've said. Sarcasm is also very unattractive, particularly in email. It is even more unattractive when it insinuates that you admit to actually being rude (which is the reality). Let me make it quite clear: 1. Information is not broadcasted. It is available upon connection to the particular port and interface that pmud is listening on. 2. This interface and port is ONLY accessable from the LOCALHOST. This means it CANNOT be reached from any other machine, and hence only by local users. And before you say anything about local users being too broad a scope, take a look in /proc and see what other system stats they have available. > > The authors of these programs have done so without pay, benefit or > > training, and should be respected for that. > > Oh really? Let us have a nice gkrellm plugin, and may be also some > nice kernel routines and cool packages that broadcast the content of > my monitor via an "unknown" tcp/ip service. On the same principle of > pmud, why not putting the mail of the whole system on a tcp/ip > service, so that clients can connect to it and read it! And let be > all excited about it! ARE WE NUTS??? The tcp/ip service is _not_ "unknown". It is documented and the code is available. Also, the principle of pmud is to provide information on power stats to only the people who should be able to get them - which are the local users. This is exactly what the current system does. It is not providing information to people who should not have access to it. > > So much for security and control over an UNIX system!!! NO GUARANTEES of any security or control will be given to you by members of the debian project or by developers of pmud and other applications. If you need these sorts of guarantees, go buy a support contract or insurance from a company (although I can't think of any that will give you this sort of guarantee). However most of us use what skills we have learned to try and ensure that what we produce is both secure and useful. We don't always get it right, but we do the best we can. As I have already said, most of the authors, developers and maintainers of the software that comprises a GNU/Linux operating system have done so without pay, benefit or training, and _should be respected for that_. It is NOT appropriate to take this sort of approach and critisize their efforts without any help or suggestions. You have NOT authored any of this code, nor offered alternatives for how it should be done - nor have you contracted or paid any of the authors to provide you with specific services, documentation, features or service level contracts. I am telling you that the way pmud works is, in my opinion, perfectly reasonable and appears quite benign. If your opinion differs then I suggest you stop wining about it and author some code to replace it. This will be my last email on this topic. I'm sorry I've wasted my time thus far. Chris
