[769] in SIPB bug reports
Re: xscreensaver
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Nov 30 21:24:21 1989
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 89 21:25:11 -0500
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: djconnel@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Dan Connelly's message of Thu, 30 Nov 89 20:37:59 EST,
Reply-To: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
From: djconnel@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 89 20:37:59 EST
I would recommend that xscreensaver be recompiled to have a default
autologout time of perhaps an hour or so, since often it seems people
accidently leave their terminals locked for many hours at a time.
This sort of thing has been attempted to before, but it isn't a good
idea. First of all, MIT students are intelligent, and trying to lock
out things like this is generally fruitless. All it does is challenge
them, and when have you seen a MIT student refuse a challenge? For
example, people just got their own copies of xscreensaver and removed
the restriction. This was still biting us months later, since they
continued to use their own (or their friends') private workstations,
which had bugs which had been since fixed. Second of all, there are
many people who use xscreensaver on workstations in private
workstations, where they might be justified to lock their screens for
long periods of time, and they shouldn't be penalized.
Standard Athena policy is that if a public workstation is unattended for
more than twenty minutes, you have every right to reboot it. If the
luser loses some data because of the reboot, tough --- they were being
anti-social for keeping the workstation locked for greater than 20
minutes.
- Ted
