On Monday 26 February 2007 01:11, John Andersen wrote:
What security expert sits a child at the console and then in the same breath preaches security as a reason to inconvenience the vast majority of users? I'll give you another real world scenario (more relevant) that I experienced at a college campus library a year and a half ago.
Several of us were in the library one Thursday evening doing some late research and finishing up on a couple of critical papers. I had requested several journal articles via inter library loan and my laptop was in the process of downloading the fifth of six large journal faxes. Two other machines were in the process of the same sort of activity and one or two more were idle. In strolls the campus clown... who thought it might be funny (as he sailed through the library) to reach out and close the lids of all the laptops he could reach as he progressed between the tables. Most of the machines lost their connection and suspended... a couple of them hibernated--- all of them except mine... which kept right on downloading the last of the journal articles I desperately needed. Of course the other guys were able to get their articles too... eventually... after their machines woke up, reestablished the connection to campus... and then *restarted* their downloads. It wasn't funny, and it was avoidable. The moral... my colleagues *convenienced* themselves into an arbitrary highly inconvenient and uncontrolled shutdown because they thought nobody would ever close the lid of their highly personal computer except themselves... ooops. And by the way... I can suspend my laptop when I want to in about, oh, five seconds by pressing an icon and entering a password... so what? The point is not to preach inconvenience, the point is to encourage new folks to the *nix OS to work within the security benefits of the system... instead of constantly trying to circumvent them... especially because working within the security constaints of the system is soooo easy... sudo, su -, etc. -- Kind regards, M Harris <>< -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org