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Comment by Hovertruck | Hacker News Reader

What alarms me is that on both of my computers with Lion, about half of the time just clicking on a name on the login screen works without entering the password. Happens on my friend's Lion install as well.

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I have authentication on after every screensaver and I've never been able to bypass the password. Weird.

Likewise. We're an all-Mac shop, we do semiregular audits of everyone's machines, and I've never seen this happen.

I have never had that happen to me on all 3 of my Lion machines. Could you elaborate some more about your circumstances with this glitch?

I'm going to guess that this is very simple; he probably just has the option for requiring a password at login turned off, or is using Fast User Switching enabled (i.e., the user is question was not really logged out, so logging in and entering a password is not required), or something like this.

There is an option "Require password <time period> after sleep or screen saver begins" in the Security preferences, general tab. I'll bet yours is set to something other than "immediately".

This happens after I explicitly log out of my user account, though.

Is the mentioned option set to something else than "immediately"? If it allows you to log back in that certain period of time after explicitly logging out, which it shouldn't (it should only work that way after sleep or screen saver begins, from its description) it might be a bug in OS X itself. You should try testing it a bit more and submit a bug report on http://bugreport.apple.com/ if it indeed looks like a bug. :)

Apologies, I totally missed the phrase "login screen" in your post.

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