Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

The early computing era (I'd say until early '90s) was definitely had something special in the way so much relied on trust, both trusting the user and trusting the wider community. Today everything is so locked down, paranoid and anxiety inducing that computing has become increasingly stressful and unfun.

I'm also reminded by a RMS writing (I think it was letter of some sort) campaigning that denying computer lab users root access was oppressive. Bit sad that I can't actually find it now.

And of course the classic (if misused like I'm doing here) Franklin quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

View on HN

It's easy to trust the user and the wider community when your typical user is "another student in UCLA" and the worst they can steal from you is yesterday's experiment log.

Put another way, it's easy to trust a user if you and they both know that they can be tracked down and face disciplinary action if their behavior was deemed unacceptable.

Moreover: it's easy to trust each other if all you're doing is scientific research, games and pranks. But one day we woke up and found half of the world relying on computing in everything, from business to healthcare to national security. With regular people and regular day-to-day stuff comes regular crime.

Perhaps it's the difference between the experimentation and commercialization phases of some technology.

Having a culture of trust replaced by one of distrust.

> I'm also reminded by a RMS writing (I think it was letter of some sort) campaigning that denying computer lab users root access was oppressive.

There's a reference that may be related to this in the book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" that talks about how Stallman despised passwords and worked to promote more open access to the systems.

https://imgur.com/a/SZuNc

Hmm... I am slightly surprised by this.. can anyone reconcile this with his stance on privacy / surveillance?

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/right-to-read/

2047? I wish. thanks to apple and google everyone have a computer they can't have the root password today!

World's ungrateful. Apple made root password just blank in High Sierra, and everyone started to scream about a terrible security bug ;)

At the time, computers were not something everyone used in their daily lives. They were something that was shared. In that context, an administrator denying users of the computer access to pretty important functionality (imagine you couldn't run a debugger on your laptop, or couldn't get root) is anti-user behaviour. Passwords were (at the time) a way to restrict users from being able to access the machine without the administrators permission (since an administrator could remove your login entry -- even if you were physically present at the computer you couldn't do anything).

RMS has said multiple times that technology doesn't change our values, because our values are far too ingrained in order to be changed as something as trivial technology. But different technologies change the outcomes that we judge using our values. The proliferation of the internet and data sharing changes whether or not passwords are a good thing (since they are now used to protect user data from other people, rather than block users from accessing a system they should have the rights to access).

Back in the 1980s everyone had root access in the Minix lab at school. It was kind of necessary to do the assignments for operating systems class.

I think you're thinking of this https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-... (see last answser). And yes I see the irony of going through stackoverflow for this.

That sounds correct. Although I feel like there might have been expanded version of this story somewhere, but this is definitely where I remember it from.

For posterity, this is bit more canonical source for the piece:

https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...

> Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group

> (This section is by Richard Stallman.)

> Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

> However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

> I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

> Today everything is so locked down, paranoid and anxiety inducing

because computing is now globally connected, not limited to small computer labs

Knowing "why" doesn't make it feel any better. If anything, it makes it worse, knowing both that all the paranoia is justified and that our systems are not really yet anywhere near something you could comfortably call "secure".

I'm seeing more and more people these days reference the Franklin quote in the context of computing. I've used it myself, and I believe it started gaining in popularity shortly after the rise of Secure Boot. A sign of the times indeed.

That said, I'm all for preventing remote attacks; it's when people start thinking about locking the actual user out of the computer he/she owns that makes me offended.

This bums me out, too. Back in the day, you didn't have to treat all programs and data as hostile, because they weren't. Nowadays the GNU linker whines about calling gets(), but that wasn't a problem, because you knew that a 32-character stack-allocated buffer was big enough to answer a yes-or-no question.

Because the world was a nicer place back then, or because the computers were far less useful and thus mirrored the world far less?

The latter. As long as it was bunch of nerds doing nerdy things, nobody cared. As soon as computers started processing things relevant to regular people, the regular people happened, and with them all the incentives for hostile behaviour.

Indeed. I was being overly rhetorical :)

Yes, but "Back in the day" ended with the Morris Worm at the latest, and that's coming up on its 30th anniversary today.

That's fair -- the Morris Worm was an early demonstration that user-hostile software could easily make everyone's life worse. It still sucks that, as modern coders, most of our lives will be spent either producing or defending against hostile software.

Ironic considering he writes from an offline PC these days and does not own a mobile phone AFAIK

His reasons for doing that aren't related to security, but rather wanting Free Software purity.

Also I don't think his PC is "offline," but rather he does weird things like reading web pages via a script that scrapes the text and emails it to him.

That's not that weird. In fact, I remember there use to be a service called rss2email or something like that.

I've actually emailed him about the topic of free software mobile phones. He is against them entirely, even if one was completely free software, because by design they track you using cell towers. He said that if he needs to use a phone he uses land-lines.

I can pull up the email if you like. He's a pretty reasonable guy if you ask him a question, and is surprisingly responsive.

"By 1982, Stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the ARPAnet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet.

...

"[When] passwords first appeared at the MIT AI Lab I [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," Stallman would later say. "Because I don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime.""

Source:

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html

@zokier "Today everything is so locked down"

I highly dought that. Most users use Windows and don't even have Anti-Virus/Firewall installed on there computers. Networking hardware is set to defualts. I would argue more computers and servers are unprotected because we have more computers and users online.

Windows comes with an antivirus and a firewall preinstalled these days. The antivirus re-enables itself after a few hours if you disable it too.

It won't help you, here is one example; http://www.hackingarticles.in/set-bypass-outbound-rule-windo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com