On Monday 26 February 2007 01:11, John Andersen wrote:
> What security expert sits a child at the console and then in the same
> breath preaches security as a reason to inconvenience the vast majority
> of users?
I'll give you another real world scenario (more relevant) that I
experienced
at a college campus library a year and a half ago.
Several of us were in the library one Thursday evening doing some late
research and finishing up on a couple of critical papers. I had requested
several journal articles via inter library loan and my laptop was in the
process of downloading the fifth of six large journal faxes. Two other
machines were in the process of the same sort of activity and one or two more
were idle. In strolls the campus clown... who thought it might be funny (as
he sailed through the library) to reach out and close the lids of all the
laptops he could reach as he progressed between the tables. Most of the
machines lost their connection and suspended... a couple of them
hibernated--- all of them except mine... which kept right on downloading the
last of the journal articles I desperately needed. Of course the other guys
were able to get their articles too... eventually... after their machines
woke up, reestablished the connection to campus... and then *restarted* their
downloads. It wasn't funny, and it was avoidable. The moral... my colleagues
*convenienced* themselves into an arbitrary highly inconvenient and
uncontrolled shutdown because they thought nobody would ever close the lid of
their highly personal computer except themselves... ooops.
And by the way... I can suspend my laptop when I want to in about, oh,
five
seconds by pressing an icon and entering a password... so what? The point is
not to preach inconvenience, the point is to encourage new folks to the *nix
OS to work within the security benefits of the system... instead of
constantly trying to circumvent them... especially because working within the
security constaints of the system is soooo easy... sudo, su -, etc.
--
Kind regards,
M Harris <><
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