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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.followup,net.games,net.games.rogue
Subject: Re: Games on multi-user systems.
Message-ID: <712@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Sep-83 00:48:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.712
Posted: Wed Sep 14 00:48:29 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Sep-83 19:52:06 EDT
References: <450@alberta.UUCP> <140@qusavx.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 18

Around here (MIT) a fairly simple mechanism was used to restrict access
to games in various ways.  All the games had access set so only the user
"games" could execute them.  There was a small set-uid program that
would check if running a game was permitted and then exec the game.
This way you don't have the problem of people making private copies (I
don't know if we were careful enough to protect the source, too, but
that is another thing that would be necessary).  This is also better
than the crontab mechanism, since it allows fancier control than just
time.  For instance, the computer that ran this policy only had one
dial-up, which was very much in demand at night (this is a school, so
everyone hacks at night), so it would only allow you to play a game at
night if you were on a hardwired terminal; there was also a chaosnet
connection, but use of it burdened the CPU (just a little 11/23 with one
disk) so the games manager would not let you play from the network.
-- 
			Barry Margolin
			ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
			UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar