response 26 of 90:

Apr 9 20:34 UTC 1996

 #23...yes, excellent....being able to personalize tel prompts is
a terrific idea

response 28 of 90:

Apr 9 23:58 UTC 1996

Scenarios that have ocured to me (names changed):
(1)  I'm friends with George, and George is friends with Pete.  Pete
hates me and has no desire whatsoever to talk to me.  Pete and George
are in a private (locked) channel.  George has their tels off because
Phil has been sending him annoying messages.  What's more cliquish,
George and I not being able to talk because (in effect) Pete and Phil's
hostility is conspiring against us, or George and I being able to
maintain a friendship despite the other twits?  I'd really rather not
make George choose between Pete and I just because Pete is being a twit.

(2)  Janet and I are having a private conversation.  Frank, an ex-BF
of Janet's, wants to talk to her, but he's clearly not welcome in the
channel, since the nature of the conversation he's having involves
their (failed) relationship, and I'm not involved in that.  Janet starts
getting chatted by strangers seeking netsex, so she turns off her tels.
Frank takes it personally and starts attacking me for poisoning his 
Janet against him.

In short, it's only possible to have conversations privately with
one group of people currently, whoever you can get into a private
channel with.  If, for whatever reason, you need to turn your tels
off, you're SOL, unless you log on multiple times (*whic* I've 
seen people do, specificcaly to be in multiple conversations at
once while having the tels of at least one handle off).  The status
quo seems, to me, to be just as cliquish, if not moreso.  (I should
say that not only did I change the names above, I also slightly 
changed the scenarios above to make the examples clearer... those of
you who are guessing at the parties involved should just stop it now.)

response 30 of 90:

Apr 10 06:17 UTC 1996

True, Scott.  It does sound like real life, the same real life
that's chock full of cliques, eh?
,

response 32 of 90:

Apr 10 09:22 UTC 1996

Re 6: STeve!  What do you think item 38 was for?

Re WayBackThere: I don't think I'd be comfortable using a .friends or .foes
list.  I'd still leave my perms off.

Re 0: Actually, I'd like to see Grex smaller.  Or at least not any bigger.

response 34 of 90:

Apr 13 15:25 UTC 1996

...and now for something completely different.

I'd like to see grex use, or at least have available, Kerberos.  For
those who are unfamiliar with it, it is a security system created at
MIT, that is designed for distributed systems.  It would allow me (and
anyone else who has a machine with kerberos, or could install it, to
do things like log into grex without typing their password over the
net in the clear.  (This really isn't the right place to discuss all
of the details of the security issues tho.)  It would also facilitate
making grex more of a distributed system, which could move some of the
load off of grex itself onto other machines.  (Although grex is much
better on the new CPU.)

response 36 of 90:

Apr 13 20:30 UTC 1996

There is general agreement that we want to have kerberos. We have an extra
machine which could probably be the kerberos server. I believe that bringing
up a kerberos server is the easy part. The hard part is making the changes to 
all of the critical software that handles security (login, ftpd, newuser,
and many others).

We have a number of staffers capable of managing this software, but Marcus 
knows more about big kerberos systems than anyone we know. So we tend to
let its installation be controlled by his schedule. Unfortunately, he has a 
few crises to deal right now. The good news is that he's interested in 
getting this done.

response 38 of 90:

Apr 17 04:41 UTC 1996

I'd like the ability to leave my write/chat/tel perms on while turning my talk
perms off -- or do I already have that ability?

response 40 of 90:

Apr 17 19:14 UTC 1996

Personally, I'd like that ability too.  I really don't like talk, and wouldnt
use it at all, if it weren't the only cross-system realtime communication
program that I know about.

response 42 of 90:

Apr 20 12:35 UTC 1996

re #40: IRC.

response 44 of 90:

Apr 23 03:08 UTC 1996

(Welcome back, Chris!)

Jan, the real-time communications God.  8^)

response 46 of 90:

Apr 27 14:51 UTC 1996

Thank you, nephi, albeit my involvement will be limited enough..

response 48 of 90:

Apr 28 16:44 UTC 1996

Good suggestion, Aaron. When we discussed this at the last staff meeting, the
conclusion was that we had to cut over to the terminal server to do that. I'm
not sure why, exactly. The terminal server has a reliability problem. So it's
holding up that project, and it doesn't make me happy, either.

(short answer: We want this but technical things keep getting in the way.)