🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> cd...@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Charles Daffinger) writes:
>
>THat reminds me about how we used to play rogue back in my undergrad days:
>Games were strictly forbidden on the system, so we all had a link to someone's
>copy in their private directory.  It was called -csh.
>
I did the same thing with rn - not that it was forbidden, but we had a nosey
system administrator who thought Usenet was the devil's work (although this
belief didn't keep him from running it on his own).  Some system administators
get this "control attitude" (hell, I've had it myself) that causes them to
nose into other people's intellectual property...

In my early computing days I used a system called MUSIC (McGill University
System for Interactive Computing - still exists as an IBM product, MUSIC/SP 
- but they call it Multiple User System for Interactive Computing). At one
point there was a bulletin board program called Forum written by a guy named
Rob Fritz which I used heavily.  One day, in a fit of administative
excess it was removed from the system by the powers that be - no notice, no
explanation, just gone.   

So I set out and wrote my own, which would run out of my student account.
I called it FMMS (Forum Memorial Message Service).  While the original
Forum was a "public" executable, users had to log into my student account
to use FMMS (which ran automatically).  One of the student consultants
helped me set up some public files to advertise it, which we called FORUM
and FMMS.

Although there was no written or verbal policy against such programs, none
the less I was kind of paranoid.  So the advertising programs were set up
to print the system message for a missing file "ERROR 4: File not accessable"
when run between the hours of 8:00am to 5:00pm and if run from a set of
suspect tty's (not what they were called, by the way, but you get the point).
In addition, more out of humor than anything else, I added a check for the
tty in the actual BBS program itself.  If run from one of the tty's that I
had targeted as the administrators, it would print "Chiggers, its the cops!"
and destroy itself and its database.

Well it ran for several weeks, and then an individual calling himself
IRONMAN discovered it and wiped it clean, leading a snide little message
behind.  So I had to rebuild the thing.  He wiped it again.  I finally
set up stuff in my research account so that when he wiped it all I had
to do was type one command and it was restored.  In addition, I changed the
code to do regular backups of itself.  It was a pain, but I learned alot
about programming and systems, so I guess I'm grateful, though at the time
I was pretty stressed out (and I wasn't going to run to the administrators,
because of my paranoia - which my student consultant friends did nothing to
abate).

IRONMAN, it seemed was also into other activities.  He too had student
consultants as friends (but not the same ones as mine) and had managed
to get the password of a key account from them, where upon he went on
a sort of rampage.  Actually, except for me, he apparently didn't do 
anything damaging, but he did create alot of privileged accounts and
apparently sent a certain administrator into "witch-hunt" mode.

Anyway one morning I go to log on and nada.  Not on MUSIC, or any of the
other systems that I had accounts on.  Every account I had had been removed
from the system.  

Apparently the administrator, in his hunt for IRONMAN, had stumbled across
FMMS. And apparently "Chiggers its the cops!" had put him over the edge.
Well I sweated for a day, at first worried (I am a big worrier) and then
angry.  After all, I hadn't done anything wrong.  Who was he to go rummaging
through my accounts?  So I went and confronted him and got my accounts back.
At the same time I learned of the other activities of IRONMAN, which maybe
made the administrator's action more understandable, but still not ethical.

I've since learned that this sort of administrative policy was locally 
called "who screams".  The idea is to see who complains, with the 
assumption being only the innocent will object. IMHO it's a bad policy.

Jim

--
James Purdon
pur...@cons1.mit.edu