[5013] in testers
Re: Panel fish hack
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Tue Jul 17 03:13:51 2001
Message-Id: <200107170713.DAA01816@byte-me.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
cc: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>, testers@MIT.EDU, mitchb@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 17 Jul 2001 00:18:42 EDT."
<200107170418.AAA16561@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
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Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 03:13:48 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
> > Is Bill asking for the easter egg to come out?
> > It seems like a "kind of neat" thing that we shouldn't
> > just disable without cause...
>
> The cause (for me, anyway) is that users might think their account has
> been hacked.
I agree with jhawk... it's cute and it's rare. I've been logged into many 9.0
machines for more hours than I care to remember, and I assume the easter egg
was there the whole time I was using the AUI xsession, which was all of last
year. I've never once seen the fish (though I'd like to). Looking at the
code, it looks like it will only happen approximately once every 4000 times
that timeout happens, and the timeout doesn't seem to be often either. In
fact, this is the first I've heard of the fish from anyone.
I understand Greg's reason, and won't fight if nobody wants to reconsider, but
I wouldn't think my account was hacked if I saw it... I might think there was
a bug in Athena (as Bill essentially did). If a few people a year mention it
to accounts, they'll know how to answer the question. If anyone asks olc, I'd
be happy to answer the question if I see it, or we could write a stock answer.
If it causes someone paranoid to change their password, that seems like a
positive effect.
(On the other hand, responding to a claim that something is fishy with Athena
by literally removing a fish from Athena is amusing)
Mitch
