On Saturday, 29 June 2002, at 16:38:03 (-0700), Nick Lange wrote: > Which once again leads us back to a point that perhaps more people > would agree with, the option should *not* be enabled by default > precisely for the annoyance/information loss factor. First off, any > user can kill off any other user's session (provided they have > access to the hardware running the session) which can lead to > potential data loss for any running applications. This could be > done out of malice, etc. If we're talking about Ctrl-Alt-Backspace killing an X session on XFree86 started by startx or the like, then we're talking about an X session running on the main console of a system. Given that fact, said malicious user could just as easily power off the system. Or unplug it. Or any number of other actions allowed by physical access to a workstation/server. This all gets back to the "security of a system to which an attacker has physical access" thread that has been hashed out many times before. I suggest dropping this silliness and consulting a mailing list archive near you. If a user starts X using startx and fails to employ the "exec" technique mentioned earlier, this user should not walk away from his/her terminal. If this user does so, this user is an idiot. The Zap key sequence is a good feature, and the rest of us should not be made to suffer on account of the idiocy of the few. Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <mejat_private> n+1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/ Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have gotten into the habit of recording important meetings. One never knows when an inconvenient truth will fall between the cracks and vanish." -- Ambassador Londo Mollari, Babylon Five
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