[2518] in SIPB bug reports
xscreensaver
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (honor@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Wed Feb 26 18:08:25 1992
From: honor@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 92 18:07:55 EST
This is just as much of a flame as it is a bug. In fact, some might
consider it all flame, and no bug, but i don't.
I think sipb has a moral responsibility to ensure that the software it
makes available isn't abused.
xscreensaver IS DEFINITELY abused.
Telling people that they have a right to reboot workstations that have
been screensaved for more than 20 minutes, or on which the
xscreensaver doesn't display an elapsed time, is BOGUS, for 2 reasons:
1. A user shouldn't have to wait for the workstation to reboot.
RS6000's and vaxstation 2000's take forever to reboot. Additionally,
many users don't know how to reboot workstations, and it's not their
responsibility to know how.
2. A user who reboots an "illegally saved workstation" shouldn't have
to deal with the user who was originally logged on there, but
sometimes they are forced to. The original users often are angry, and
they don't care about the policies (if they did, they wouldn't have
abused xscreensaver in the first place).
On top of all this, it's extremely easy to hack the elapsed time
displayed by xscreensaver so that it never registers > 20 minutes.
Fingering at the workstation isn't always valid (nor possible, if you
can't borrown somebody's xterm for a few moments), because the utmp
file can also be hacked. Do you expect a user to hang out at a
workstation in order to verify the accuracy of the elapsed time field?
That's my flaming. It's going to get worse if the situation isn't
rectified.
As for a solution, I'm not exactly sure what can be done. Would it be
that hard to implement a timeout function for xscreensaver? So that
after XX minutes xscreensaver automatically logged the person out...
I think just about anything is better than the status quo, including
no screensaver at all.
Andrew Cassidy
honor@Athena.MIT.EDU
