Years ago, a pbs documentary (coocoos egg?) interviewed Richard stallman. He was standing in front of a whiteboard with "prep.ai.mit.edu" user "rms" pw "rms".
Of course I tried it, of course it worked. There was a nice "motd" to the effect: be cool, don't break stuff.
I'm sure this breach was nowhere near as deliberate.
As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects such as TECO, Emacs for ITS, and the Lisp machine operating system (the CONS of 1974-1976 and the CADR of 1977-1979—this latter unit was commercialized by Symbolics and LMI starting around 1980). He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20% of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward.[15]
RMS has previously encouraged people to "just press enter" when asked for a password on unix systems. So I'd imagine he does this sort of thing on purpose.
Of course I tried it, of course it worked. There was a nice "motd" to the effect: be cool, don't break stuff.
I'm sure this breach was nowhere near as deliberate.