Grex Oldcoop Conference

Item 74: Scribbling issue

Entered by richard on Fri Jan 9 18:59:17 2004:

In item #71, Valerie wrote:

"I've written a command that people can use to remove all of the responses
 they have ever made, from an item, from a conference, or from all of
Grex.
 It's running now to remove all of the responses I entered as "valerie".
 It takes a long time to run."

Something occurs to me that is a strong argument that users using such a
program as this should be disallowed by staff.

If user "abc" is a longtime user with a lot of posts and then leaves, or
simply goes away for a while, login "abc" could get reaped and recycled.
Somebody troublemaker then could run newuser and get the login "abc" and
then run Valerie's program and scribble hundreds of posts they never made.

For instance, I just noticed that my old login Kerouac is reaped. I don't
care, I don't particularly want it anymore.  But I have many posts on here
under that login. Could someone else now run newuser, get Kerouac, and
then user Valerie's program to remove my posts.  My posts, not theirs?  It
seems to me that staff needs to ensure that only the person who made the
post can scribble it, and if four users in ten users have had login "abc"
and made posts, how does a program like Valerie's tell which user had the
login when a particular old post was made?
58 responses total.
#1 of 58 by jp2 on Fri Jan 9 19:01:45 2004:

This response has been erased.


#2 of 58 by keesan on Fri Jan 9 19:22:59 2004:

What I don't like about this is 'it takes a long time to run', which slows
grex down. Then everyone else has to do fixseen on every conference where the
responses were scribbled, which slows grex down even more.  I am in favor of
removing this script so that people cannot do this sort of global scribble.

#3 of 58 by jep on Fri Jan 9 19:36:12 2004:

Anyone could write a script like the one valerie left.  Valerie was not 
the first person who ever left Grex (or M-Net) but deleted all of their 
postings first, though she is the highest profile person to do so.

#4 of 58 by keesan on Fri Jan 9 19:57:40 2004:

I couldn't write a script like that and I bet most other users also do not
know how to do so.

#5 of 58 by aruba on Fri Jan 9 20:08:11 2004:

Richard - Jamie is correct in #1.  If I created a new account called
"kerouac", it would almost surely have a different UID than your old
account.  And because of that, Picospan wouldn't allow me to remove your
posts.

I suggest trying it to make sure that's true.

#6 of 58 by gull on Fri Jan 9 20:17:34 2004:

If valerie had used 'nice' to run it, it probably wouldn't have bogged 
down the system.

Do I think it's a polite thing to do?  No.  But I don't think it's 
reasonable to stop people from scribbling their responses, and I don't 
given that I don't think we can prohibit them from automating the 
process.

#7 of 58 by gull on Fri Jan 9 20:18:23 2004:

This response has been erased.


#8 of 58 by gull on Fri Jan 9 20:18:57 2004:

I meant that last sentence to read 'But I don't think it's reasonable to 
stop people from scribbling their responses, and given that I don't 
think we can prohibit them from automating the process.'

#9 of 58 by tod on Fri Jan 9 23:51:34 2004:

This response has been erased.


#10 of 58 by naftee on Fri Jan 9 23:51:53 2004:

This response has been erased.


#11 of 58 by gull on Sat Jan 10 01:06:57 2004:

Re resp:9: She voluntarily gave up her root privilages.  Read her 'I'm 
leaving' item in this conference for details.

#12 of 58 by scott on Sat Jan 10 02:17:36 2004:

I don't think #1 is true.  I don't recall any place that Picospan uses UID.

#13 of 58 by cross on Sat Jan 10 02:28:42 2004:

It is true.  Picospan stores the uid along with login name in the
response text of each response.

#14 of 58 by bhoward on Sat Jan 10 05:26:50 2004:

Here is a typical header for a response in a picospan item:
    ,E
    ,R0000
    ,U1017,bhoward
    ,Abruce howard
    ,D2887870b
    ,T

extracted from one of the conferences.  Note the ,U line which encodes
uid and login.  As others have pointed out, it is the combination of
both these things that uniquely identify the owner of a response (or
for that matter, item) when picospan needs to determine ownership to
decide whether you are allowed to do something.

#15 of 58 by willcome on Sat Jan 10 08:43:47 2004:

MOSTLY uniquely.

#16 of 58 by remmers on Sat Jan 10 15:32:39 2004:

Re #14:  Right, Picospan response headers contain both the uid and
the login id.  To verify that Picospan actually uses them both, I
created an account with the same login id as a long-deleted user
who had posted in the test conference and tried to retire and freeze
the user's items.  Picospan wouldn't let me do it, as expected.

#17 of 58 by sholmes on Sat Jan 10 16:04:28 2004:

I once got my old account (not sholmes) reaped and then when I got it back
, I wsn;t able to open my mailbox. Was it due to the same thing ?.

#18 of 58 by remmers on Sat Jan 10 16:18:36 2004:

If you used newuser to create a new account with the same login id
as your old  one, then the answer is yes.  Your new account got a
different uid than the old one, and Unix uses uid's to determine
file access rights.

#19 of 58 by naftee on Sat Jan 10 17:08:18 2004:

AHAHAHA scott got TOLD>

#20 of 58 by janc on Sat Jan 10 20:19:33 2004:

Picospan and Backtalk require both login and UID to match before you can
scribble an response.  Unfortunately it isn't as careful about
fairwitnesses.  If a fairwitness is reaped and you capture the old login
id, it will work for you.  Yapp fixes this defect.

Valerie wrote her reap program in quite a hurry.  If one were to spend a
bit of time at it, one could write one that runs much faster with less
impact on the system.  I could write a backtalk script that would do
pretty well.  I have no plans to do so, but if the system load were the
only objection to such "blitzcraig" scripts, then it would be a
surmountable problem.

#21 of 58 by gull on Sat Jan 10 21:18:29 2004:

Not to mention that if it can be done via backtalk, someone could write 
a script on their local machine to do it if running a script like that 
directly on Grex were banned.

#22 of 58 by naftee on Sat Jan 10 22:13:07 2004:

>Yapp fixes this defect.

Uhh, the YAPP that runs on m-net sure doesn't.  OR maybe you're talking about
a newer version.
Plus, valerie's reap program is too user-friendly to be a quick hacked-up job.
Plus, there's also the 'nice' command.

#23 of 58 by willcome on Sat Jan 10 22:37:58 2004:

Yeah, YAPP definetly doesn't fix it.  I used to have occasional fun by taking
over M-Net conferences when their FWs got reaped.

#24 of 58 by tod on Sat Jan 10 23:47:49 2004:

This response has been erased.


#25 of 58 by jep on Sun Jan 11 04:32:18 2004:

re resp:22: Valerie is a professional programmer, and her script 
reflects that.

#26 of 58 by tod on Sun Jan 11 14:56:54 2004:

This response has been erased.


#27 of 58 by jep on Sun Jan 11 17:30:01 2004:

Uh huh.

#28 of 58 by janc on Sun Jan 11 17:42:19 2004:

Re: yapp.  Fairwitnesses in Yapp can be given in either of two formats.
 Login ID alone, as in Picospan, or login plus uid number.  The former
is for backward compatibility.  The latter option has existed in the
code since almost the first release.  It's possible that the cfadms on
M-Net don't know it are are entering fairwitnesses in the old format.

Valerie wrote her script in an evening.  She's a good programmer and
though I haven't looked at it, I'm sure it's pretty well done.  But
something could be written that would run much faster, even on the
stunningly slow Grex computer.  It would take much more than an evening
to really do it well.  I could do a pretty good job in an evening
because I have the backtalk code base to work off of.

#29 of 58 by naftee on Sun Jan 11 20:38:38 2004:

re 25 I've seen tonnes of scripts written by "professionals" which were TRUE
hacked-up jobs and not user friendly at all.

#30 of 58 by janc on Mon Jan 12 01:26:26 2004:

The world is well supplied with bad programmers.  Valerie is not one of
them.

#31 of 58 by ryan on Mon Jan 12 02:27:24 2004:

This response has been erased.


#32 of 58 by naftee on Mon Jan 12 05:55:13 2004:

Guys, user-friendly is not the same as documenting your code.
Incidentally, valerie's script has practically no documentation!
Unless of course your idea of a good programmer is one who puts lots of
instructions but practically no comments.

#33 of 58 by gelinas on Mon Jan 12 05:58:25 2004:

"Good programmers debug code, not comments."

#34 of 58 by naftee on Mon Jan 12 06:04:55 2004:

valerie may be a good programmer, but it sure takes a kick in the ass to get
her going.

#35 of 58 by gull on Mon Jan 12 16:07:30 2004:

Comments are there for maintainability.  I don't think valerie plans on
maintaining this script.

#36 of 58 by naftee on Mon Jan 12 16:20:18 2004:

She should, since it's been her first project in several years.

#37 of 58 by janc on Mon Jan 12 20:17:25 2004:

Valerie writes programs every day.

#38 of 58 by naftee on Mon Jan 12 23:27:55 2004:

Yes sir, programs, but not "projects", as in the Borland sense.

#39 of 58 by gelinas on Tue Jan 13 03:37:53 2004:

naftee, you've not idea what Valerie does for a living.  Stop displaying your
ignorance.

#40 of 58 by naftee on Tue Jan 13 04:31:14 2004:

If you're saying that what Valerie does for a living is completely unrelated
to what it says on her website, then I'd have to agree.

#41 of 58 by remmers on Tue Jan 13 12:23:53 2004:

I have no idea what naftee is talking about.  In any case, I looked at
Valerie's scribble script.  It's a nice piece of Perl code, clear and
well-written, with about the right amount of comments.  If it's decided
to restore the divorce items sans jep's responses, the script will make
the process a whole lot easier than it otherwise would be.

#42 of 58 by remmers on Tue Jan 13 12:36:48 2004:

(Assuming that they're still available somewhere in raw Picospan format,
that is.  If not, restoration gets a little more complicated.)

#43 of 58 by jp2 on Tue Jan 13 13:46:40 2004:

This response has been erased.


#44 of 58 by remmers on Tue Jan 13 18:13:51 2004:

It's not the WHOLE idea, but you're probably correct.

#45 of 58 by tod on Tue Jan 13 20:58:59 2004:

This response has been erased.


#46 of 58 by naftee on Tue Jan 13 22:14:41 2004:

Valerie actually makes PERL look not ugly.  But I'd say beautification is art,
not realy programming.

#47 of 58 by tod on Tue Jan 13 23:47:03 2004:

This response has been erased.


#48 of 58 by naftee on Wed Jan 14 14:29:27 2004:

it's.

#49 of 58 by styles on Sat Jan 17 01:15:17 2004:

you're

#50 of 58 by willcome on Sat Jan 17 02:09:15 2004:

fat

#51 of 58 by styles on Sat Jan 17 02:56:39 2004:

ter

#52 of 58 by naftee on Sun Jan 18 05:50:53 2004:

than

#53 of 58 by styles on Sun Jan 18 22:28:39 2004:

aboogeronsteroids.

#54 of 58 by naftee on Mon Jan 19 04:05:58 2004:

Lose

#55 of 58 by styles on Wed Jan 21 03:39:26 2004:

glad this isn't new because of tard-fucks masterbascribbling.

#56 of 58 by naftee on Wed Jan 21 04:24:06 2004:

metascirble.

#57 of 58 by naftee on Sun Feb 22 23:15:48 2004:

#10 of 56: by Jim Daloonik (naftee) on Fri, Jan  9, 2004 (18:51):
 re 6 She's too selfish to run her processes nice.

#58 of 58 by jesuit on Wed May 17 02:14:34 2006:

TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE

There are no more items selected.

You have several choices: