Word: husc7
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Right now, the "fas" SparcServer is the center of HASCS's Unix universe. Because fas is the physical location of the system's 14,000 user home directories, all 35 of the UNIX machines which students now use (including the workstations in the terminal room, the course machines and husc7) must be constantly connected...
What everybody should understand here is a vital point that is often glossed over--namely, that has, husc7 and the like are shared machines. Logging into fas and opening up PINE is vastly different from turning on your computer and running Microsoft Word. The latter is (assuming a non-networked version of Word) a private affair, while the former is a public event...
...believe me? Try typing "w-s" at the fas% or husc7% prompt when you're bored one day. (Just be sure to hit Control-C a few times after the list starts scrolling out of control.) You'll get juicy information about who else is logged on, how long they've been idle (that is, not typing anything) and even what program they're using...
...example, as I write this article, I am logged into husc7 and, by invoking "w-s," can see that "cmhornby" is online using PINE. Now, I happen to know that "cmhornby" is a friend in Kirkland House named Catharine, but suppose I did not know this...
...Because husc7 is a shared computer (more precisely, a UNIX machine), all I would need to do to determine cmhornby's identity is type "finger cmhornby." This is not a violation of Catharine's privacy, since by registering to have a user account she agreed to be added to the public database of users. Moreover, since address and phone information for students is part of the public record at Harvard, I could use the program "ph" (described in detail last semester in this column) to find out exactly where Catharine lives...