Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!manis From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Secure Telcom Program Message-ID: <1990Dec30.180542.3784@cs.ubc.ca> Date: 30 Dec 90 18:05:42 GMT Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca (Usenet News) Organization: Institute for Pure and Applied Eschatology Lines: 35 In-Reply-To: <37352@cup.portal.com> Someone else has pointed out that most telephone companies allow selective subscription to long-distance and similar services. I have nothing to add on that. However, I do want to respond to an implicit assumption in the original posting, namely that the solution to a potential abuse in an educational computing system is to install a program which has several features disabled. This seems to be a particularly common approach in PC/Mac type environments. Of course, the approach has an obvious flaw: students simply acquire another program which doesn't impose the limitation. Standard microcomputer LAN's simply don't have enough protection to enforce such limitations. Often, the ``protection'' in such a system is a complicated menuing system, which the teacher (in a high-school environment) may have difficulty figuring out, but which clever students can circumvent at will. That's the reason why we at the University of BC Computer Science did not go with PC LANs for our student computing systems. UNIX certainly does have security holes, but they are *much* less evident even to extremely knowledgeable computer science students. To conclude: 1) Protection mechanisms which are founded upon the ignorance of the user are not so much protection mechanisms as mild inconveniences. 2) If students can figure out how to misuse a certain system feature, at least one *will* misuse that feature. -- \ Vincent Manis "There is no law that vulgarity and \ Department of Computer Science literary excellence cannot coexist." /\ University of British Columbia -- A. Trevor Hodge / \ Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394