Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-lcc!pyramid!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: wasted cycles
Message-ID: <2661@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 18 Nov 88 07:10:33 GMT
References: <978@hub.ucsb.edu> <16965@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1409@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <17088@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1988Nov17.165318.6268@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 25

In article <1988Nov17.165318.6268@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>Unfortunately, it's not uncommon among writers of production software,
>either.  A certain computer company whose name starts with S has a bit of a
>reputation among its customers for its, uh, nonchalance about performance
>and resource usage.  And the less said about the FSF, the better...

Something very important should be said about FSF in this regard.  The official
copies of Gnu software are mode 777, deliberately, based on RMS's opposition
to any notion of security.  Already, someone attempting to FTP GNU software
managed to destroy an important file by specifying FTP arguments in the
reverse order (he apologized profusely on one of the gnu.* lists).

It would be trivial for anyone on the Internet to install a Trojan horse
in GNU source code and have it installed everywhere, thereby destroying
the good names of those involved in FSF.  Sharing of information does not
require that every file be writable by everyone who thinks he knows how
to operate a computer; most data destruction I've seen is accidental.
But some is deliberate, so watch out.



-- 
- Joe Buck
	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, or uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck,
	or jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net for old Arpa sites