Word: finger
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Most people at Harvard know that you can "finger" someone to see when they were last logged on. Many also know that you can type "nofinger" at the prompt to disable this information, and many have decided to do so. What many people don't know (but your average CS50 graduate can tell you) is that this does nothing to deter someone who wishes to know where you last logged on. The command "last " will list without complaint the whereabouts of any student who regularly checks e-mail from a terminal in the past week. The command "finger | grep...
Leaving aside that fact that I can't know who has "finger"ed or "last"ed me and thus have no basis for complaint, the idea that privacy should be protected only when someone feels in personal danger is rubbish. They also remarked that to disable the "last" command, or the "finger | grep " loophole would "significantly reduce the functionality of the computer systems". This is also rubbish, again as any CS50 graduate can tell you: a few keystrokes will remove the last command from/usr/bin or make is accessible only to the administration...
Some people find finger a useful tool; those in the know use it to "talk" friends across campus, to see if someone's read their mail or just to keep tabs on their friends. Some people have what the computer literate refer to as a "stalk script" to let them know when their friends are logged on. That's fine, but the choice to make that information public should be the student's and not the University's. To protect the computer illiterate (an endangered, Luddite few), incoming first-year accounts should all be set inaccessible unless explicitly changed...
There was no hint of foul play, but the appearance of borrowing from a man under investigation was bad enough. Within two days, Mandelson did the honorable thing. He did not go on national television and wag his finger at the British people. He did not craft a cover-up, if indeed he needed one. He did not ask his friends and political allies to lie for him. Instead he appeared red-eyed to tell the nation he had worked for years "to demonstrate that the standards of government and behavior in public life were going to be restored permanently...
...territories," and Washington was neither. Johnson tried to build popular support by launching a speaking tour--dubbed his "Swing Around the Circle"--but he was heckled in St. Louis, Mo., and told by an Indianapolis, Ind., mob to "shut up." Like some of Clinton's televised explaining and finger wagging, Johnson's p.r. offensive hurt his cause...