

I miss w - phil
http://notes.torrez.org/2011/12/i-miss-w.html

======
thought_alarm
I used that all the time back in school. You'd often recognize the names that
turned up, students in the same course, TAs, etc. Occasionally you'd get stuff
like this:

    
    
        jsmith - - - emacs cs350/assignment3.c 
    

and it was hard to resist the urge to take a peek at what jsmith was working
on. Practically no one bothered to set proper file permissions, leaving their
files readable to anyone who knew how to find them.

~~~
ajasmin
_no one bothered to set proper file permissions_

That's why shared hosting accounts are so bad. The Unix security model isn't
designed for hosting a bunch of unrelated websites on the same box. Why should
I even be allowed to make a file world readable or run the w command on a web
host on which the users don't even know each other?

People should really be using VPS now that they are so cheap.

Edit: After reading the answer to this comment it seems my fear of shared
hosting may not be justified. Obviously good sysadmins know how to properly
secure these systems.

Still it seems that when Unix was designed it was expected that people would
chat with the _talk_ command, see who was online with the _who_ command, and
intentionally make files readable by other. With web hosting you really don't
want that. You shouldn't even be able to see what other accounts there are on
the machine. I was probably wrong to say that shared hosting accounts are
"bad" but it doesn't seem like a perfect fit either.

~~~
soult
The Unix security model is designed for mutli-user hosts. Shared hosting works
very well under Unix, iff the admins know what they are doing. Why do you
think that before virtualization got popular people were using shell accounts,
chroots and BSD Jails for their webhosting/IRC/... needs? Why do you think we
have CGI, SuExec, ...?

I won't deny that VPS are great, but a properly set up shell server will allow
you to do many of the same things a VPS can do.

~~~
zokier
> The Unix security model is designed for mutli-user hosts.

Reminds me of the story of RMS complaing about _evil_ admins that were
restricting root level access. The views on computer users and security were
quite different in the early days of UNIX.

edit: link <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518881>

~~~
gaius
RMS' views might have been different. In a little thing we call _actual
reality_ the sysadmin is an employee hired by the same people who bought the
system (no small investment in those days) to maintain it, and I don't think
any reasonable person has ever denied that.

------
jcdreads
Oh man, bugging people in pine with talk was the worst/best. Kids, it was a
world in which someone could destroy your email session and spray characters
all over the screen just by IM-ing you. Everyone knew how to do it, and
everyone checked in on one another all the time (using who or w of course), so
the odds against your completing a long email and sending it before someone
wrecked your pine session were pretty long. The really hardcore kids figured
out how to compose emails in pico or vi and then mail them from mail.

A year or two later everyone started using gopher and Mosaic and Eudora
instead, which was obviously way more civilized.

~~~
sterwill
The easy solution is "mesg n", but chat was fun enough to leave it enabled
most of the time.

------
pyre

      >  I think AIM had and still has the ability to be
      > the ‘w’ of the modern internet
    

AIM is only really popular in the US. That's not surprising once you fully
expand the name: " _America_ On-Line Instant Messenger."

I'm curious:

* What AIM has that other IM client/networks (MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, GTalk, etc) don't?

* What is AOL doing to increase up-take of AIM outside of the US?

* How stable AIM can be going forward when AOL itself isn't exactly the paragon of stability?

~~~
davedx
AIM is also used loads in the dance music production scene to send/swap music
files.

------
rdl
I dislike people seeing my command line arguments, though.

~~~
shabble
Won't 'ps aux' show them anyway? I imagine there are some restricted userland
tools available for shared hosts to use, but having just checked on a couple
of my personal machines, it'll display arguments even for processes started by
root.

In the past I've wrapped things in a trivial shell-script to hide their args
(and messing with $0 from a perl script can probably be used for fun & games,
if desired)

~~~
rdl
Oh, absolutely.

I personally think the UNIX security model is broken for multiuser, so I
basically run systems in dedicated security mode (as does ~everyone else;
single-user laptop/desktops under OSX or Linux, and servers dedicated to a
single user/task/application, or at least VMs dedicated to a single
user/task).

UNIX local system security is still nice as a belt-and-suspenders thing, but
once someone's on a box, assume they own it. The only exception is some
special magic stuff like Hardware Security Modules.

------
pawn
I feel a little guilty that when I first read the topic, I assumed the topic
creator was talking about Bush...

~~~
JWLong
Me too. I thought it was a play on the phrase "I Miss Bill"

------
waterlesscloud
The interesting part is at the end- that the Path re-launch has made it into
something useful. I agree.

------
InclinedPlane
It's kind of crazy how open the old unix systems used to be. Even when I was
in college in the mid 90s almost everything was still on and open. w, talk,
finger, rwho, even _write_. Windows was almost as open for a while, it took a
while for the messenger service to be disabled by default.

