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From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Should we let students run COPS to get each other's passwords?
Message-ID: <1991Jun12.141657.29238@athena.cs.uga.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 91 14:16:57 GMT
References: <1991Jun12.042513.20870@athena.cs.uga.edu> <1991Jun12.055211.24457@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1991Jun12.140419.28896@athena.cs.uga.edu>
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens
Lines: 23

A few people here have been advocating the strange idea that UNIX users
have a moral right to obtain each other's passwords using COPS. I have a few
responses...

(1) Why is this any different from obtaining passwords by other forms of
snooping?  

(2) Are you saying "People with easy-to-guess passwords deserve to have their
accounts broken into"?  Blame the victim, of course, folks!  Do you say
the same thing about rape victims?

(3) Do users of our computer have a basic civil right to run any software
they want to?  Like maybe a program that writes to the disk until the disk
is full, deliberately crashing the machine?  Or does the administration have
some right to control what the computer is used for?

Come back to earth, folks.  Obtaining other users' passwords is an obvious
breach of security, regardless of how you do it.
-- 
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Michael A. Covington | Artificial Intelligence Programs
The University of Georgia  |  Athens, GA 30602   U.S.A.
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