Re: [9fans] a few Q's regarding cpu/auth server

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009 22:50:33 -0400
Anthony Sorace <anothy@gmail.com> wrote:

> this is silly. the philosophy has been explained. several people have
> given lots of "real world" usage where it holds up just fine. i'd go
> as far as to say the vast majority of plan9 installations are in such
> environments.

Oh God, not the everyday examples == proof argument, PLEASE. The common
case in the present time is that people EXPECT server terminals to be
password protected so they're not likely to bother looking. Suppose
it gets to be common knowlege that server terminals are rarely
password-protected. Now suppose co-lo host X is well-known for hosting
a large number of Plan 9 machines -- at the rate interest in Plan 9 is
growing this could happen in only a year or two from now. Now please
stretch your imagination to include Frank.

Frank is a contractor, called in to perform some maintenance in X's
cages. Frank is bored out of his skull. His wife hasn't left him
(yet), but there's no love left nor any real hate either; just cold
apathy. His workday has been flat-dull so far, he's had a succession
of extremely tedious jobs and now he has another one. Frank sees a lot
of Plan 9 machines next to him. Password cracking is time-consuming
and potentially very boring, but few Plan 9 machines have one. Frank
is on a schedule and already bored out of his skull, and best of all,
if he tampers no-one will ever know it wasn't a remote exploit!

Now here's the point. I and a billion other people HAVE MORE FUN THINGS TO
DO THAN FRET ABOUT SECURITY. A weak OS needs me to put in boring work...


--
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.