mdw
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response 107 of 110:
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Sep 23 08:26 UTC 2003 |
There's actually two things here; our normal response to routine
problems, and our response to exceptions. Our normal response to
routine matters is highly oriented around what usually seems to resolve
the problem 99% of the time. These are generally pretty boring, even to
the most anal of staff. They aren't always the things we'd like to do,
but well, that's life. For the exceptions, our policy has always been
that we don't want any more rules to constrain what we do than
necessary. Our goal here, after all, is to keep grex running as a
useful service, and it would be irresponsible of us to follow rules that
do not serve that purpose. Privacy here is something of a red herring.
Pretty much anything people do on grex is at least potentially visible
to staff, if only by accident. ECPA makes this an explicit right in the
case of problems, with various safeguards and limitations. People who
attempt to hack the problem resolution process pretty much at one stroke
define themselves to be an exception to both the normal rules process we
follow here on grex and to the normal expectation of privacy defined
under ECPA. The surprising thing here is that the normal rules were
still such a reasonable and useful response to a non-normal situation.
I'm sure polytarp already knows this, but I may as well state this for
the record: staff people on grex already have the ability to see
anything on grex without a user's password. That's just the way root
works on Unix. Material stored on grex is also at least potentially
vulnerable to inspection by various other bodies, using various legal
and illegal methods. Generally you shouldn't store it on grex, if you
don't mean to publish it. There are all sorts of other reasons why you
shouldn't store such data here anyways. When you use grex for private
data, you are trusting grex staff not to abuse your trust and generally
to do the best job possible of securing your data, but there is no such
thing as absolute security, and a free timesharing service is very far
from most computer people's notion of security these days.
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