response 25 of 123:

Jul 30 06:34 UTC 1995

I wouldn't expect an old mail folder to be readable by anyone but the
owner unless it were explicitly permitted. Regardless of where it was.

response 27 of 123:

Jul 30 21:57 UTC 1995

  From what this user was saying, someone was using their unix files like
you would folders in pine, thus had lots of mail files like "joemail" or
"suemail" for instance based on however they grouped their old saved mail.  And
while the saved messages in "mbox" were not readable, the sorted mail in
these other files apparently was.
  I would think a way to solve this would be to disable the unix mailer and
force people to use pine or elm, which I think most people do anyway.

response 31 of 123:

Jul 31 06:14 UTC 1995

At some point I'd like to have more discussion of my suggestion to make
the default home directory perms be "user only", as a means to give users
better control over their files - while they are learning the ropes - and
also as a means to make users' files less inadvertently public.

response 33 of 123:

Jul 31 10:58 UTC 1995

How hard would it be to make mail set the umask properly?

response 37 of 123:

Aug 1 00:09 UTC 1995

I like to see an open user file system.  I can not begin to measure how much
I have learned by looking at other people's script files, .logins, etc.
this works especially well if you already know someone is doing something
similar to what you want to do, like say setting up .mailrc options or
something like that.
 
on the other hand I do understand the concerns of people's privacy, especially
when it comes to mail.

response 39 of 123:

Aug 1 07:22 UTC 1995

I didn't give much thought to the open home directory until this matter
of smut files came up. I think grex is protected better from random
searches and accusations of promoting smut if it is not stored in
the "store window". Making the default perm on home directories 711
takes care of this for ll new users - it could then be up to users
how open they want their directory and files to be. I'm pushing this
as a *substitute* for even thinking about censorship.

response 41 of 123:

Aug 2 04:28 UTC 1995

If the Exon bill becomes law, and holds up in Court I'll start thinking about
this differently.  For now, it seems to me that if people go looking around
in other peoples' home directories, they should expect to see other people's
stuff.  If they don't want to look at smut, they shouldn't go looking for smut
files.

response 43 of 123:

Aug 2 08:01 UTC 1995

I'm sure mail can be changed without *too* much trouble; the source is,
after all, readily available.  It might be a smidgeon harder to make
sure it does the locking right and doesn't (for example) lose mail sent
right when it starts up.

response 45 of 123:

Aug 2 17:01 UTC 1995

  I did a "locate gif," and it turned up about 450 images, none
of which had obviously smut-like names.  Most were in "www"
subdirectories (one person had about 100 of 'em), which I gather
is misguided, as Grex's httpd doesn't transmit such images (is
that true?).  Last I checked, locate found files regardless of
their directory's permissions, so even if people hid files or
directories from "ls" lists, locate would list them (names only,
not contents).

response 47 of 123:

Aug 2 21:11 UTC 1995

If you've got a program that searches dirs you don't have permission to
read or search, I think we've got a program.  I'm not familiar with
locate unless it's an alias of find.

response 49 of 123:

Aug 2 22:17 UTC 1995

Re 45 - Yep, the picture-sending capabilities of our httpd have
been turned off.  A *lot* of users were annoyed about this,
then again none of them offered to help pay for more bandwidth...