[5015] in testers
Re: Panel fish hack
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Tue Jul 17 08:53:15 2001
Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20010717084657.02eb0df0@po11.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 08:51:15 -0400
To: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>, John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>,
testers@mit.edu, mitchb@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200107170713.DAA01816@byte-me.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Heck, guys, take advantage of it! Write an article about the fish that you
can find on an Athena workstation, and challenge people to find it. Get
people looking for that fishy Athena thingie...
Go ahead and publicize it, that way people won't think their account has
been hacked, they'll consider themselves lucky to have seen it.
mike
At 03:13 AM 7/17/2001 -0400, Mitchell E Berger wrote:
>> > 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
