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From: de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy
Subject: Re: RFC on my "abuse"
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.192914.23335@cs.utk.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 91 19:29:14 GMT
References: <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun25.173013.3784@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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Reply-To: Dave Sill <de5@ornl.gov>
Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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In article <1991Jun25.173013.3784@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>
>  Do you ever walk down the street, and as you do so, walk up to each house
>and test the front door to see if they left it open?

Aaarrgghh!  If I *never* see another use of analogy in computer
security it'll bee too soon.  It's very, very rare that one discovers
an analogy that's truly appropriate and complete.  This one certainly
isn't.

Attempting to anonymous ftp to random sites is, in my opinion, rude at
worst.  But any site admin that freaks out over the occasional attempt
hasn't got a firm grasp on reality.

>  Yet, in effect, this is exactly what you did on the net.  Only, worse still
>you didn't walk down the street to do this.  You drove down the street in
>a car that had been provided to you for totally different purposes, thereby
>making the owner of the car (that is, the computer center and the university)
>unwitting accomplices in your activity.

What he did wasn't illegal, and wasn't "totally different" from the
expected usage of the net: communicating and sharing information.

-- 
Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov)	  Tug on anything in nature and you will find
Martin Marietta Energy Systems    it connected to everything else.
Workstation Support                                             --John Muir