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From: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Spy X Window
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.102813.338@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 16 Jul 90 10:28:13 GMT
References: <194@melpar.UUCP> <9070003@hpavla.AVO.HP.COM>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
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In article <9070003@hpavla.AVO.HP.COM> almquist@hpavla.AVO.HP.COM (Mike Almquist) writes:
>> I need some X help.
>> 
>> I want to "monitor" a window on another machine from my machine.
>> I have source for all software running but would rather not modify any of it.
>> I have full control of unix permissions etc.
[...]

>Is this ethical?
If the watcher wants to be watched, yes.  Otherwise it gets complicated.

>Is there a good reason for doing this?
If you are teaching a class you may want the students to be able to see what
you are doing.

If you are a support-person you may want to watch a user show you how "the
system looses it's cookies".

>I'd be majorly pissed
>off if someone was watching me - even more so if I didn't even know I was being
>watched.
Learn how to use xauth, and netstat, and ps...

>What is the reason for the Big Brother attitude?  Did you see the
>articles about the situation at PSU between some users and their system
>administrators?  If not, you should take a look at it.  How is this tool going
>to be useful to you?  Why don't you ASK the students about their progress and
>work habits?  X is a good program, don't make people paranoid so that next
>versions of X will be more restrictive but secure.  Use tools, don't abuse them
Take a valium!

I have hacked up a R3 window spying program to place a warning box on the
watchee's screen.  ("Warning You are being watched! By user@display (site)")
It won't take any work to remove the call to the warning function, so I am a
bit leery of giving it out, lest it fall into the hands of crackers that are
too stupid to write their own   :-)
-- 
           stripes@eng.umd.edu          "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Mutitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
"Don't try to change C into some nice, safe, portable programming language
 with all sharp edges removed, pick another language."  - John Limpert