>>>>> "Alexander" == Alexander O Yuriev <alex@yuriev.com> writes:

    Alexander> Xterms must chown and chmod pty devices
    >>  No they don't.

    Alexander> Wrong answer - otherwise someone can grab key codes from you.

Yours is the wrong answer. xterms don't "have to chown and chmod
ptys". They work just fine even when they don't have permission to do
those operations. I've been running xterms that way for at least 7 or
8 years now. Sure, that means that it could be possible for people to
send evil control command sequences to the pty. However, this IMHO is
less of a risk than running a big, complex program as root when the
program doesn't really need that privilege and therefore may well have
unanticipated security holes in it. Writing *secure* setuid programs
is hard, even for trivial applications. Doing this for xterm must be
incredibly difficult.