[ On Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 21:31:57 (+1100), Dmitri Nikulin wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Preventative security features?
>
> You'll have to explain further. I've never heard of a need to see that 
> someone else is running vi or emacs for doing their work, in terms of a 
> social benefit.

In a shared environment it is often critical to see what others are
doing in order to either admonish them for their abuses and/or help them
correct their mistakes (should they be adversely affecting your use of
the system or demonstrating some other failure), or to know how to keep
out of their way if what they are doing is more important.

I.e. one cannot rely on the sysadmin staff and on system resource
schedulers to do everything, especially much of the needs of the users
is far more dynamic than any algorithm could ever predict.  Your
suggestions for such work-arounds are still no more than blue-sky
dreams.

> In fact a lot of privacy issues occur because people see 
> what others are doing,

Like I said before -- if anyone expects privacy when they are using a
_shared_ unix or unix-like systems then they are either ignorant or an
idiot, or (more likely) both.  No smiley.

Those wanting privacy should either learn to use private, separate,
systems or at least restrict themselves to those few truly multi-level
secure systems that they might be able to find and use.  (Sadly there
are no more known Multics systems running, especially not "public" ones,
despite the recent appearance of "multics.mit.edu" in this thread. :-)
But even on Multics one could find out a great deal about one's fellow
users through what the system reveals of their usage.

Indeed the more you say about this particular "feature" you think you
desire, the more I begin to suspect that you don't have a lot of
experience as either a user or an admin of a shared multi-user unix
system.  :-)

The desktop world of today still has lots to learn from the timesharing
systems of days gone by, but you should be happy that now Moore's law
has run on track for a few years you can likely afford to personally buy
whatever computing hardware you need to perform in private those
computing tasks that you personally deem most sensitive.  (Now I wonder
if anyone is still seriously considering porting Multics to modern PC
hardware!  :-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>